Alice Hoffman's novels occasionally nudge the melodramatic. Her fiction can seem overpowered by fairy-tale touches.
But Hoffman's latest work of fiction, "The Red Garden," works. A collection of 14 linked narratives, it tells the story of Blackwell, deep in the Massachusetts Berkshires, from its rugged beginning in 1750 until the present.
This tale of a town and its denizens is stuffed with local lore. Occurrences that might otherwise seem overdone - an apple tree blossoming in the middle of winter, a blizzard in June, an apparition of a drowned girl who appears regularly on the banks of a river - are the stuff of legend, grown larger over 250 years of retelling. Like all legends, these express poetic truth.
If "The Red Garden" isn't tethered to the conventions of domestic realism, the characters are tied to Blackwell. Throughout the book, people are desperate to leave the place they call home. But place has a way of keeping you in place, at once limiting and enlarging. Some characters escape Blackwell, but most settle there after sampling the world beyond.
One who escapes the town's confines is its founder, Hallie Brady, one of a long line of female characters, headstrong and strong, period.
A young Englishwoman who has married the pioneering group's leader, Hallie has more grit and native wit than her husband or the rest of her party. When the group is stopped in its tracks by a snowstorm, they settle in an area where "there are bears in every tree." They initially call the place Bearsville. Hallie is unafraid of bears or hardship. In England, she was exploited in every way by her milliner employer.
The ancestors of the founding party struggle and strive against the historical backdrop of the Civil War, the 1918 flu epidemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, as well as the scrim of their own personal lives.
The red garden of the book's title is red from the blood of Hallie Brady's dead son, as well as of her beloved bear companion. Bears appear in many narratives but are far less beastly than Blackwell's darkest human characters. Hoffman evokes the beauty and the wonder of the natural world, whether wildlife or wildflowers, as a renewing force.
