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It is often comforting when your favorite author comes out with a new book every year
or so --- it gives you something to look forward to reading-wise, something you can count
on if nothing else you are reading moves you very well. That's why it's almost a national
holiday when Alice Hoffman puts out a new book --- well, at least in my house. BLUE DIARY
finds our only American magic realist tramping rosebushes in order to get a closer look at
the destruction of a marriage.
Secrets are the real key to BLUE DIARY, Hoffman's latest plunge into the darker mysteries
of seemingly blissful love in a small New England town. Like the transcendentalists before
her, Hoffman sees the connections between all things --- animals, plants, and especially
people. The town of Monroe is small, and the people are gossipy. Ethan Ford's secret,
which is the thing that splits the novel apart, is that he has reinvented himself, from a
crime-doer to a good-doer, and yet that means nothing in the wake of the crime he
committed when he was "someone else." Jorie, his previously envied wife, the
stuck-up girl with the perfect blond hair and beautiful face, becomes the subject of
derision and a personal breakdown that forever changes her life and that of her melancholy
young son, aptly named Collie. These characters are joined by a woman overcoming cancer
and finding true love with a long-suffering schoolmate, the brother of a dead girl who has
never forgotten that pain, and a young girl who understands all too clearly the
consequences of first love.
I have to say that the turns this novel takes truly surprised me --- I expected a better
reception for Ethan, greater forgiveness from certain members of his inner circle; and it
is surprising to read about a place where forgiveness does not come easily. It is just one
of the stark and honest things that happen in fictional Monroe, which, like all Hoffman
small towns, is a place that exists in a timeless world, unfettered by the properties of
present-day popular culture. It is a cautionary fable, a fairy tale with a true-life Grimm
ending, although it has shoots of possible redemption at the end. BLUE DIARY is the most
emotionally complicated novel Alice Hoffman has ever produced, and that is saying
something. Once you're inside her ageless world, you may find yourself questioning things
in your own most timely one.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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