Mother’s Fears Fueled AIDS Novel

There is an air of tranquillity here in Michael Dukakis’ hometown. Small merchants thrive; large trees flourish. The red-and-white streetcar still hums up the center of Beacon Street. Houses built a century ago cling to hills of solid rock. Playgrounds abound, as do gardens of petunias.

It seems an unlikely place to speculate about danger.

Yet risk, peril, jeopardy are what Alice Hoffman ruminates about. She worries about desultory danger, about how, from moment to moment, life can leap from utter calm to complete chaos. She covets her comforts: two children, a husband, all secure in a big house with rich woodwork and dainty lace curtains. But nothing is permanent, Hoffman realizes. There are no guarantees. Serenity shatters.

Aware of World’s Dangers

“I am someone who is very aware of how dangerous the world is,” Hoffman said. “I think in my writing, that is kind of my main thing.”

She looked up from changing the baby, Zack, born 3 months ago: happy, healthy, with a dusting of carrot-colored hair and the grip of a python.

“It is dangerous to be alive, isn’t it?” Hoffman asked.

It is that kind of danger that Hoffman ponders in her writing: “That is what this book is about.”

This book, Hoffman’s seventh novel, is “At Risk” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $17.95). So certain is her publisher of the potential commercial success of this story about pediatric AIDS in a white, middle-class family that Putnam’s has ordered an enormous 100,000-copy, first-run printing. The book is the object of a $100,000 publicity and advertising campaign. Months ago, the Book-of-the-Month Club snapped up “At Risk” as a main selection for July. Screen rights were sold almost as soon as Hoffman, a writer whose earlier works were widely praised, if less widely purchased, pulled the manuscript out of her printer.

“Everyone here was sort of knocked out by reading it,” said Al Silverman, chairman of the board of the Book-of-the-Month Club. As an example, he pulled out the report of one BOMC editor. It began, “Imagine a hard-bitten veteran of the game, sitting on a commuter train and weeping over a manuscript.”

“What happened in ‘At Risk’ is that she applied all her sort of magical notions and terrors to people we can identify with,” said Putnam’s vice president and senior editor, Faith Sale. “These are people who are so grounded, and every day, and real. Something happens to them that indeed can happen to all of us. You can’t say ‘This could happen to someone else.’ ”

Amanda Contracts AIDS

In Hoffman’s story, 11-year-old Amanda Farrell contracts AIDS from a contaminated blood transfusion many years earlier. The child is a gymnast, bent on perfection. Her parents and younger brother must struggle with themselves and each other as they come to grips with Amanda’s impending death. Around them, their safe suburban community splinters into camps who pull away from the Farrells, fearful of this plague called AIDS, and who support them.

A partner in what is seemingly the steadiest of marriages, Hoffman, 36, had had no direct experience with AIDS when she found herself writing about it. Still, she called the topic “purely personal. I mean, I was thinking about it all the time.”

Every time Hoffman picked up a newspaper, there was something about AIDS. Television blared the tiny virus’ omnipresence; it shouted the scary statistics. In conversation after conversation, with the dry cleaner, with anybody, Hoffman heard the word AIDS creeping in.

At Hoffman’s writers group--10 women writers who have met weekly for nine years--she became aware of the recurring preoccupation with a disease that entered the national vocabulary less than a decade ago. The group leaves their families for a month each summer to share a house by the sea; they are poets, biographers, novelists, short story writers, playwrights.

“Every week we talk about AIDS,” Hoffman said. “It just seems to come up. Especially the single women. They think about it all the time.”

Living With Her Fears

What startled Hoffman was the way she began to feel paranoid, uneasy about AIDS. A recovered agoraphobic, Hoffman describes herself as “actually, a very paranoid person,” albeit one who lives relatively comfortably with her fears. But she also sees herself as “this very liberal person,” someone who tolerates other people’s differences, even respects them.

Thinking about AIDS, Hoffman began to worry: Was that glass in the restaurant really clean? What would happen if a child in her 5-year-old’s preschool were diagnosed with AIDS? Would she pull Jake out of school if a gay teacher were put on staff?

“Emotionally, I shocked myself with these feelings,” Hoffman said, feelings that soon poured out on paper. “At Risk” was written “kind of in a fever, as fast as I could,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman did not consciously seek to address her own ambivalence about AIDS when she started “At Risk.” But in writing the book, she found herself coming to terms with the disease.

“Having written it, I don’t feel the same way,” Hoffman said.

There was real enlightenment: “Part of what I realized is that it’s OK to feel that way, to feel frightened and paranoid,” she said. “But it isn’t OK to act on those feelings.”

Meaning? “Meaning to act without decency. It is not OK,” Hoffman said, drinking decaffeinated coffee at her kitchen table, “to carry those feelings into prejudice.

“The thing I am saying in this book is that the most important thing is to act humanely.”

‘People Deny AIDS’

Hoffman wrote about AIDS and children because, as a mother, “that is where my fear is.” But by setting her story in white, middle-class America, Hoffman sought to allow each reader access to fears he or she may not openly have acknowledged.

“People deny AIDS. They say it is mostly in the gay community, or among drug users,” Hoffman said. “I don’t believe that any more. It’s too dangerous to think that. That kind of denial allows you not to feel it.”

No social crusader, Hoffman realized, upon completing “At Risk,” that she had once again used fiction to take on a compelling social issue. “Illumination Night,” published last summer, dealt with infidelity and relationships. “White Horses” (1982) dealt with incest.

“You know, I don’t really think about it that way,” she said. “But when I look at my books, I guess I do write about issues--gangs, incest, nuclear power plants.”

Marked always by one mystic character or quality, Hoffman’s stories have sometimes been dismissed as “women’s novels,” books that bring grocery-store-magazine resolution to the problems of the planet. Already, Hoffman worries that the same will happen to “At Risk,” or that cynics will accuse her of exploiting the subject of AIDS.

“It is kind of a slur to be considered a women’s writer,” Hoffman said, as if “the things that women are interested in are not that important.”

Alienated by Men Writers

But “I do think of myself as a women’s writer,” she said. “A lot of the time when I read fiction by men, I feel like I’m just not that interested, like they’re writing mostly about themselves and their own kind of alienation.”

For Hoffman, “the whole thing about writing is to kind of escape from that. It’s a lot like dreaming, like in your dreams you are every character.”

Raised on Long Island, Hoffman dreamed of becoming a writer long before she knew what being a writer really meant. “As a way to get to California,” she applied to the Stanford graduate program in writing and returned to the East after earning her master’s degree two years later. Under the tutelage of her writing mentor at Stanford, Albert Guerard, her first short story was published when she was 21.

Fifteen years later, Hoffman and her husband, teacher-turned-author Tom Martin, support themselves by writing screenplays and increasingly, by the success of Hoffman’s fiction.

All the attention over “At Risk” leaves Hoffman somewhat jelly-tongued.

“It makes me very nervous and upset,” she said, brushing a clump of dark brown hair out of her eyes. “It is not something that I enjoy.”

Until now, Hoffman has enjoyed a following as small and quiet as it is loyal.

“I’ve never met anyone outside my own friends who has read anything I wrote. And that’s so weird. I’ve been writing for 15 years.”

There are other ideas dancing in her brain. But Hoffman has decided to take some time off, time to take a deep breath and play with Jake and Zack. Time to burrow in. Time to feel, for an hour or a moment, safe.