A Feminist Folk Tale
HASKELL, MOLLY
A Feminist Folk Tale The Probable Future By Alice Hoffman Doubleday. 336 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Molly Haskell Film critic and author We are drawn to certain writers over others by the...
...Although Elinor, Jenny's mother, instantly recognized Will Avery as a pathological liar, her warnings only infuriated her daughter, already estranged from this woman who had long ago withdrawn into neglectful widowhood...
...Suzan-Lori Parks' Getting Mother's Body offers real pleasures, and I would be curmudgeonly if I pretended I did not enjoy its lively tumult of voices...
...It's a world whose characters are unsullied by everyday ugliness and complexities, whose lives are not doomed to quiet desperation but open to expiations and transformations, and where soulful animals have as much importance as human beings—a world, in short, for young adults...
...Each Sparrow woman awakens at age 13 with a supernatural blessing—or curse...
...Ntozake Shange is responsible for a few pieces of estimable fiction, but nothing so strong or influential as her theatrical work...
...The resolution may smack of wish fulfillment, but as feminist folk tale, you could do a lot worse...
...She has a reputation, however, as a writer who has challenged stage conventions and cast some long shadows across the racial divide: She won a Mac Arthur "genius grant" in 2001, followed by a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her Top Dog/Underdog...
...Chekhov is a category of one...
...Above all there is Stella the bold and unflinching, who will face down ghosts and retrieve the repressed past, and finally turn her clairvoyance into helping the sick and dying...
...If for Hoffman's characters change is not quite as difficult and hard-won and intermittent as it is inmost of our lives, if happiness is a more frequent visitor and love more all-resolving, still, the author does not cheat on human pain and suffering...
...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Half a Heart," "Street Games" IT IS a matter of little dispute that novelists rarely have managed to write good plays...
...Instead of in-depth characterization and paradox, we're given instant epiphanies—enlightenment arrives like a lightning bolt...
...Will, at his daughter's urging and in a sudden act of contrition for his miserable life, reports the prediction to the police—only to become the prime suspect when the young woman is murdered...
...Even without its supernatural elements, this is a magical place, touched by evil but not by cell phones, alert to sex but not to popular culture...
...A post-therapy template lurks within the enchantments, addressing issues like identity (Who am I and where do I belong...
...A reader therefore has reason to expect her fiction to be emotionally, thematically and structurally demanding—or at least as original as her plays...
...It surely is not...
...If the book's ideal audience is young people, I nevertheless found myself caught up in Hoffman's fluid storytelling...
...As someone who would rather curl up in an urban setting than admire the birds and the trees, however rapturously observed, and who retreats into militant rationalism at any hint of the supernatural, I am not Alice Hoffman's ideal reader...
...Rebecca, the original ancestor, simply materialized "many years ago" like a figure in a dream, and her ability to walk over broken glass without feeling pain spooked the town...
...Stumbling from Stage to Page Getting Mother's Body By Suzan-Lori Parks Random...
...Diverting as it is, in a blind reading I would have guessed it to be someone else's book...
...She understands the ongoing trauma of broken families, and is especially eloquent on the subject of illness and death...
...Billy is irresistible: agile-tongued, smart, fierce, quick to lie, willful, and pregnant herself by a man who has neglected to tell her he is married and the father of many...
...Doctorow has acquitted himself honorably, and Joyce Carol Oates, by dint of sheer intelligence and verbal energy, has turned out stage-worthy scripts—though none so indispensable that it has been widely produced...
...A book appears every other year or so and receives more than respectable reviews...
...Her new book, The Probable Future, with its matrilinear characters all bearing the name Sparrow and living, until a recent defection, in the rural Boston exurb of Unity, is very much in this line...
...Insight into racial hostility, for example, is as straightforward and unsubtle as "It's 1963 and a Negro life is cheap...
...Hence the importance of vampire-slaying Stella...
...The village of Unity itself will come to the fore as a kind of Our Town, at first seemingly indistinguishable from all other small Massachusetts communities, eventually alive with its own flora and fauna and idiosyncratic types, defined as boldly, graphically and one-dimensionally as cartoon characters or Homeric warriors: There is the ancient one-horse taxi driver, the wise country doctor, the delinquent heartbreaker, Will the Bad and his brother Matt the Good, and the tarty teenager (Stella's best friend, who comes to visit and falls in love with her opposite, Hap Stewart the honorable...
...And its women, spurned, neglected, leaving no record other than their good works, are finally being heard...
...The fairly simple plot is built around the most fundamental directive every writer learns: Make your characters want something badly...
...I could appreciate the novel's very real virtues—a supple, even musical prose, likably high-concept characters, genuine suspense, and a kind of gentle indoctrination into the harsher realities of life—once I recognized and accepted it as a work pitched to the adolescent reader in all of us...
...There is a world-class bakery, too, that has not yet branched into mail-order or on-line...
...The couple moved to Boston, where Jenny gave birth to Stella, while Elinor remained in the family's grand but crumbling Cake House, stubbornly unloving, consoled only by her gardening...
...At a birthday celebration with her father (they have purposely excluded Jenny), Stella glances at a young woman at a nearby table and foresees her brutal murder...
...Mischievous boys were provoked into attacking her so that she drowned "with a hundredblack stones sewn into the seams ofher clothes," leaving a curse (or so it is thought) on the lake, and casting a malignant shadow over all of Unity, despite magnanimous contributions from generations of civicminded Sparrows...
...257 pp...
...This violence sets the stage for a concatenation of moves and retreats, conflicts and realignments, events worldly and otherworldly, deaths and awakenings, in which all the story's ample plotlines and forcefields—themes psychological, parapsychological and metaphysical—will come into play...
...Maybe the price'll rise to reach the value of the cost we brought in slavery times...
...23.95...
...Sixteen-year-old Billy Beede (named after Billie Holiday by a shaky speller) is the precocious daughter of wild Willa Mae Beede, who wore a tight red dress and flashed her stuff up and down the back roads of Texas right into an early grave, courtesy ofabent coat hanger...
...And now it is Stella's 13th birthday, and the teenager awakens to discover her own ghastly form of insight: She can see through perfectly healthy people to their diseased organs and eventual fatalities...
...The novel reaches a kind of crescendo as she confronts death head on, more than once, in some of her most limpid and lyrical prose...
...Her seducer seems cheerfully unconcerned about consequences: He invites her to his real town with the promise of marriage, and when she shows up at his house with a wedding gown she has cajoled out of a shopkeeper who couldn't resist how pretty she...
...Even if the "vampire" is repression, the long-buried family secrets, her battle is no less teen-generic than Buffy's or any of the myriad teen heroes and heroines who flatter young people with their ability to soar over and through the obstacles created by clueless and fumbling adults...
...Henry James and Thomas Wolfe tried hard and, famously, failed...
...Her mixture of homegrown magic realism and archetypal characters in whose fates nature busily intervenes has won her a large following...
...In a book within the book, Matt has written a thesis of the Sparrow women, which is first stolen and read by Stella, the legatee, then turned over to the university, a permanent resting place...
...the ways each of us creates our own versions of reality, and—central to this quasi-mythic world —the idea that we are doomed to repeat history, contravened by a no less powerful belief in change...
...It is 1963...
...Sam Shepard has published some very good short stories...
...But the accompanying descriptive phrases and code words—such as "feeling for myth," "magic spells" and "curses," the "sorcery of nature," "folktales," "mysterious strangers on white horses"—always alerted and deflected me from further exploration...
...Most surprisingly, for a writer who has used her inventiveness to explore the ways in which history has cast both blacks and whites in interchangeable roles that can be turned inside out, its characters are astoundingly conventional...
...The most frozen hearts can thaw in spring, a character in its own right...
...bad boys turn good through a woman's love...
...Jenny, the middle woman in the present trio of grandmother, mother and daughter, dreams other people's dreams, and one of them led her into a disastrous marriage with the charming but feckless Will...
...No one is irredeemable...
...Two potent and consoling—and intertwining—themes are the power of women and ofhome...
...There are probably others, yet they are relatively few and hardly leap to mind...
...Now another playwright with a vivid profile and a small body of highly acclaimed work has vaulted that fence...
...Reviewed by Molly Haskell Film critic and author We are drawn to certain writers over others by the attractions of the worlds they create, a taste as pronounced and distinctive in each of us as the sexual fantasies that turn us on...
...Maybe by the year 2000, but surely, the world will end by then...
...Not this year, though...
...The novel is essentially a series of monologues, "opened up" the way films are opened up (that is to say, enacted by too many characters in too many places to be staged...
...Relations between Stella and the perpetually anguished Jenny, separated but still entangled with the unregenerate Will, are even more actively hostile...
...Does the reverse work better, the migration from stage to page, or are prose writers stuck fast in their genres...
...Where other authors, and most teenagers, flee small towns and parental bonds at the first opportunity, never to return, Unity, as one might expect, is the place, mythic or not, that calls us back...
...But like the large majority of dramatists before her, she has failed to make a real incursion into the distinctive territory of fiction...
...There is no authorial voice or binding narrative thread, no conceptual complexity...
...Elinor, dying but surrounded by her loved ones, has become unclenched and at peace, and, like birds who "come home to roost," both Jenny and Stella have returned to live in Unity...
...Hoffman in fact counters the many featherbrained and girly-chick images of teenage girls with her fierce and intelligent young women, whose gifts got them into trouble, whose wills clashed with men, but who refuse to be silenced anymore...
...Or rather, someone else's play...
...But we can see these as shorthand for more complex processes...
...There are exceptions: In recent years E.L...
...offstage people are gathering to march on Washington...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
