Go Ask Alice.....

There are only a few writers whose latest book I anticipate and read as soon as I can get it. Alice Hoffman is one of them. I didn’t discover her until I moved to New England and picked up a copy of Illumination Night while visiting Nantucket. I read it in two days and went back to the bookstore to buy her other books. She has a lovely way of balancing magical imagery with a spare style that absolutely stuns and baffles me. I don’t know how she does it. But even years after reading her first books certain images stay with me.

One of the things I love about Hoffman is her male characters. She has a way of making these flawed, foolish, but beautiful men that you just can’t help but love. It’s been years since I read Turtle Moon but Julian Cash has a way of showing up in the daydreams that precede my stories. I still think about Stephen, the mysterious, vulnerable wolf man in Second Nature.

But even more interesting than the beauty of these flawed men is the way her heroines find these men and become fascinated by them — often against their better judgement — and how their lives transform because of this. She has a way of infusing a kind of fully believable magic into her work that makes you realize that magic is just another dimension of life.

In this month’s Writer’s Digest Hoffman is interviewed about her latest book, a young adult novel titled The Fortelling about a girl raised in the ancient Amazon culture. It’s interesting that two of my favorite novelists, Hoffman and Isabel Allende, have both turned to YA writing at this point in their careers. But in this interview Hoffman stated was asked about the popular term “magical realism” and gave an interesting response.

“I think it’s nonsense, honestly. Magic has always been a part of literature and I guess I come from the older tradition of folk tales, not realism,” she is quoted as saying. This is a response that I can genuinely appreciate. Years ago, when I was in college, I became fascinated by folk tales and took a few courses in the folk tale traditions of Europe and of the American mountain people. What you realize after reading these stories, in all their variations and from all parts of the world, is that there really are only a handful of story lines but each of those has endless variations depending on the personalities and characters of the people who are involved in them.

There is a folk tale from China that I have always loved. In it a young woman is married to a man she loves very, very much but they are only together a little while before he must leave her and go off to war. Years go by and when he finally returns he is a cold, hard, distant man, battle-scarred and brutal, whom she cannot get close to. She goes to a magician for help and the magician tells her he can make her a potion to cure her husband but he is lacking one ingredient that she must obtain for him — the eyelash of a ferocious tiger who lives far up in the mountains. The woman is terrified but determined. So she goes about her quest slowly taking food and special delicacies every day to the tiger. She approaches him respectfully and cautiously going no closer to him than the tiger will allow but letting him slowly trust her. Finally the tiger asks her what she wants. She tells him and he allows her to pluck a single eyelash which she swiftly takes to the magician. When she returns in triumph and presents the eyelash to the magician, the magician horrifies her by tossing it in the fire. When she objects, the magician says, “Now go back to your husband and approach him the same way you did the tiger.”

That’s a story Hoffman tells often, switching the genders of the tiger, but always keeping to the magic of the story — people get wounded, people get hurt, this makes them frightening until someone is brave enough to see the wound and approach with care. It is a magical story that makes for very fine reading.

Thanks for reading.