Bleak house

WHEN Alice Hoffman published her gritty first novel, “Property Of,” she had the backing of literary heavyweights -- writers Albert J. Guerard and Maclin Bocock Guerard on the West Coast and editor Ted Solataroff on the East Coast. The year was 1977; Hoffman was in her mid-20s. “Property Of” told the story of a 17-year-old loner who sets her sights on a gang leader and ends up trying to kick heroin as well as her love jones. From the first page, it was clear that Hoffman was a talented quick-sketch artist, a natural storyteller and a romantic at heart: “Snow was falling and the moon was howling light onto the Avenue. It was a night for skidding tires and orphans on the street.”

Since then, Hoffman has written 16 novels, two short-story collections and eight books for children and young adults, plus many screenplays. Her books are magnets for movie options; four have made it to the screen so far, including “Practical Magic” with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as perky witches and “Aquamarine” about a teenage mermaid.

Hoffman draws many of her themes from fairy tales and much of her lyrical vocabulary from nature, especially the spare coastal landscapes of the Atlantic Northeast. Full moons rise and fall in her work as regularly as heaving bosoms in a bodice-ripper. In “The Probable Future,” the Sparrow girls, descendants of a woman burned as a witch in Colonial times, are always born in March, “once the leaves began to bud, once the Blue Star crocus unfolded.... “ “Second Nature” posits a “Beauty and the Beast”-type of romance between a man raised by wolves and the woman who hides him in her home. And the masterful “The River King,” set along the muddy, often flooded Haddan River, opens with an image of a monstrous storm, “with winds so strong that dozens of fish were drawn up from the reedy shallows, then lifted above the village in a shining cloud of scales.” Images of roses are scattered throughout the book as a fragile counterpoint to all that water.

“Skylight Confessions,” Hoffman’s new novel, takes us down familiar paths. It is a fairy tale imbued with the intense emotional undercurrents of adolescence and haunted by loss and failures of love. The novel opens on the day 17-year-old Arlyn Singer, a Long Island ferryboat captain’s daughter, buries her father. During his last, long illness, the usually silent captain told her the tale of a tribe that lived across the water in Connecticut and could sprout wings and fly away in the face of disaster. People in the tribe seemed normal, but when a ship went down or a fire raged, they revealed their special nature, he said.

Arlie is fetching, with red hair that reaches to her waist and 74 freckles on her face. On the day of her father’s funeral, she promises herself that the first man who walks down the street will be her one love and that she will be true to him as long as he is true to her. Enter John Moody, a Yale architecture student, who shows up on her doorstep within hours of her pact and declares, “I’m lost.” She invites him to stay the night and he is ever after in her thrall.

John proves to be a cold, withdrawn husband. Arlie gives birth to a son, Sam, who becomes a troubled boy. Arlie is convinced that she and Sam are in the wrong place with the wrong man. But in Hoffman’s universe, she cannot escape her fate. The young couple moves into a home that John’s father designed, a glass house set in the Connecticut woods known as the Glass Slipper. It is impractical: “Glass needed constant care.... Rain splatters, sticky sap, falling leaves, pollen.” At 24, distanced from her husband, Arlie begins an affair with the window cleaner, George Snow, while Sam begins showing further signs of imbalance. He puts soot and glue in his father’s good shoes; collects dead things, including birds that have crashed into the windows; and stabs his fingers with a pin to stop having scary thoughts.

Committed to her son, Arlie breaks off with George, who leaves a strand of pearls under the boxwood. John finds them and presents them to Arlie as his own birthday gift, but she knows the truth: “It was as though the pearls had grown outside their house, seeds planted in the earth, to arise milky as onionskin. Arlie looped them around her neck. Let that fool John think they’d appeared like magic, growing out of the earth or dropped from the sky by a red-winged hawk.”

The pearls are a supernatural touchstone, turning a pale oyster yellow during the early days of Arlie’s pregnancy with Blanca, a daughter she names with George Snow in mind, and a strange black tone after she undergoes radiation for breast cancer diagnosed at an advanced stage. Unable to cope, John begins an affair with the next-door neighbor, Cynthia. Just before her death, Arlie asks 6-year-old Sam to hide the pearls for his baby sister. She also takes Sam to the roof of the glass house and tells him her father’s story about the tribe that can sprout wings and fly. Arlie is dead at 25, but continues to haunt her family.

Married to Cynthia, John is troubled by guilt and by glimpses of Arlie’s ghost. He visits a psychic in hopes of ridding himself of her spectral aspects -- broken dishes, soot, birds flocking around the house. Meredith, a young woman at the psychic’s shop, notices a red-haired woman trailing behind John and then disappearing. Impelled by her vision, Meredith drives to the glass house and sees Sam, perched on the rooftop like a stork. “I’m lost,” she explains when Sam asks why she is there. (Yes, Hoffman likes symmetry.)

As nanny to Sam and Blanca, Meredith understands their private grief and seeks ways to heal them. While exploring the nature of the spectral, Meredith also finds her own love interest, a physicist whose view of ghosts seems hardly unreasonable: If love could tie you to a place from which you never wished to roam, he asks, then wouldn’t it be sensible to suppose that after death, love might also tie the atoms that made you to that very same place?

In the novel’s final section, Blanca is grown up and living in London, running a bookstore called Happily Ever After. Not surprisingly, Blanca is partial to fairy tales; her senior thesis was titled: “The Lost and the Found, a study of those who managed to find a way out of the woods, and those who were never seen again.” As her losses mount, Blanca gradually discovers the secrets that help her to make sense of her childhood.

Thirty years into Hoffman’s literary career, one question remains appropriate: Is Hoffman still a writer to pay close attention to? Her work has the gothic appeal of some of her obvious influences, including Hawthorne, Poe and Washington Irving, as well as Emily Bronte (Hoffman’s “Here on Earth” is an updated version of “Wuthering Heights”). And there is no doubt that Hoffman has mastered her characteristic approach to the supernatural, a mix of magical elements and the mundane developed over time and nurtured by the late legendary editor Faith Sale.

I suspect that Hoffman always will find readers attracted by her storytelling skills alone. In a novel like “Skylight Confessions,” which is sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes sappy, she gives us the heartbreak of a dying young mother and her love for her son, the solace of the green days of May, and the possibilities of art and of love winning out. And there is something else at work. Sam finds solace in creating fevered drawings that he signs “Icarus.” The images bear a ghostly resemblance to Sept. 11: “dead bodies, skeleton men carrying two-bladed axes, winged figures without faces flying above burning buildings.” Every culture needs fairy tales, and in the subconscious depths of this novel is an image of people leaping from the twin towers like flaming birds, transformed by magic, able to fly away. *