Second Nature
By Alice Hoffman
Putnam, 256 pages, $22.95
Before drifting inexorably toward disaster, Alice Hoffman’s new novel, “Second Nature,” begins like a fairy tale. A young boy named Stephen, the sole survivor of an airplane crash, grows to maturity among a pack of wolves on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an uncharted territory inhabited by weeping deer and the occasional ghost. Captured by hunters and shipped to a Manhattan hospital, this mute Wolf Man (as he’s dubbed) is slated for lifelong confinement in a mental institution. But, almost magically, he’s rescued by a beautiful woman and transported to an isle off Long Island, a realm guarded by ancient, anthropomorphic willows and inhabited by a few phantoms of its own.
Having established this fabulous premise, in what direction does Hoffman send her Wolf Man? Considering the long history of the wild child-what the 18th Century Swedish botanist Linnaeus designated as Homo ferus or “feral man”-there would seem to be three avenues open to her. Recalling Romulus-Rome’s traditional founder, who was suckled by a she-wolf-Hoffman might adopt a mythological approach. Or she could opt for the purely fanciful, as did Kipling in his “Jungle Book” tales of the Indian boy Mowgli. Finally, there is the strategy chosen by the French director Francois Truffaut in his 1969 film “L’Enfant Sauvage,” a sociological study (based on a true story) that examines the age-old question of nature versus nurture.
Surprisingly, Hoffman chooses none of these. Instead, she virtually abandons her feral fable and abruptly launches into a more realistic mystery cum romance. Readers will enjoy Hoffman’s usual fluid storytelling, which combines compact narration with solid characterizations and enchanting lyrical passages, but somehow the tale of the Michigan Wolf Man never quite meshes with the macabre suburban drama that unfolds off Long Island.
Shortly after Stephen’s arrival on the isle, someone starts to slaughter the resident pets, pampered creatures with comically heroic names who (much like their owners) have surrendered their primal natures for the comforts of civilization. Typical of these is Marco Polo, a plump basset hound who enjoys a daily breakfast of cereal and cream until he’s found one morning with his throat slit. While readers are meant to suspect Stephen, the real villain, once introduced, is fairly obvious, as is the person doomed to become this villain’s final, terrible victim.
Just as predictable is the romance that ensues between Stephen and the woman who ended his Manhattan confinement. Robin Moore is a talented gardener and landscape artist who fears her green thumb may have departed with her philandering husband. It takes a long time for Robin and Stephen to acknowledge their mutual attraction. Only after they find Robin’s murdered white cat (splayed beneath a pear tree “like a pool of spilled milk, as if a piece of the moon had fallen to earth”) does the pair plunge recklessly into an animalistic love affair.
This romance proceeds initially at a glacier’s pace, but Stephen’s transformation from Wolf Man to chess-playing savant occurs almost overnight, an unlikely metamorphosis given that he was only 3 years old when orphaned. Were Hoffman still relating a fairy tale, readers might suspend their disbelief. Unfortunately, rather than mimicking the intellectual growth of another fictional Stephen-James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, like the hero of “Second Nature,” commences his journey of self-discovery with nursery rhymes-Hoffman inadvertently calls to mind another improbable autodidact, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan.
Stephen is aided in his educational pursuits by Robin’s 16-year-old son Christopher, who, like the former Wolf Man himself, is beginning to learn about the nature of love. Naturally, neither generation can understand the other’s passion: His elders dismiss Christopher’s first encounter with eros as “puppy love,” while the boy feels betrayed by his mother’s sexual longing for Stephen, a man he’d come to trust completely, “as he would the family dog.”
For help in answering life’s more important questions, Stephen looks to an older mentor, Robin’s acerbic, bedridden grandfather, Richard Aaron-who as a young man discovered and settled the little island that is the novel’s principal setting. Now an infirm 91, his fortune squandered by a profligate son, the old man finds solace only in his dreams, the one component of Hoffman’s story that consistently echoes “Second Nature’s” fantastic opening pages.
When awake, Aaron refuses to engage in the usual social niceties; instead, he bluntly speaks his mind, not caring whom or how he offends. In Stephen he finds a kindred spirit, a man who doesn’t care to indulge in the usual prevarications and half-truths that are a common part of day-to-day human interaction.
“Was it progress to learn to pretend to be something that he wasn’t,” wonders Stephen, “because that’s what he’d have to do to be a man.” Ultimately Stephen is compelled to recognize his true nature, an awareness illuminated more by instinct and intuition than by human reason.
“Second Nature” touches on other topics: the roles of mothers and fathers, the importance of home, the function of language. These are familiar themes for Aice Hoffman, as is her desire here to blend the magical with the mundane. But in this instance she fails to perform her usual alchemy.
