Practical Magic
By Alice Hoffman
Putnam, 244 pages, $22.95
In a quaint and nameless New England town, generations of women of the Owens family have lived in a gloomy house set in a vast, tangled garden of herbs medicinal and more uncannily potent. Strong-willed and gray-eyed, these heroines of Alice Hoffman’s eleventh novel, “Practical Magic,” are endowed with low grade but serviceable magical powers. If witches were civil servants they’d be GS-10, incapable of rendering themselves invisible or saving a life but able to keep their woodwork lustrous without polishing and always ready to influence the course of a romance.
In this setting, which is more or less modern America (people drive school car pools and follow recipes from “The Jov of Cooking”) , there is something both wonderful and annoying about the sudden irruption of the supernatural. As Freud wrote in “Civilization and its Discontents,” “The satisfactions are obtained through illusions which are recognized as such, without the discrepancy between them and reality being allowed to interfere with the pleasure they give.” But here, despite the book’s charm and the author’s engaging mixture of shrewdness and imagination, the discrepancy can interfere with the pleasure.
In reading for escape we want a comparatively short list of big ticket items: love requited, enemies vanquished, obstacles overcome. It helps if a character with whom we identify possesses wealth, talent, looks and luck. But if we’re given these things too crudely, we can’t quite swallow them whole. Something of this kind happens early in the story, when a female Owens child, Sally, goes to school accompanied by her cat, which a fellow student torments. “I hope something awful happens to you,” Sally shouts. The children in the classroom overhead “began to stomp their feet–out of joy since it had been revealed their spelling tests had been eaten by their teacher’s English bull dog–and an acoustic tile fell onto the horrid boy’s head.” The perfunctory neatness of it–to say nothing of the feeble variation on the old dog-ate-my-homework wheeze–is jarring.
Something similar–a too-easy gratification of our fantasies–is true of the way the Owens women are characterized physically. The novel deals with three generations, two elderly maiden aunts who raise their sister’s orphaned daughters, Gillian and Sally. Gillian, footloose and sexually free, has a string of affairs. Sally has a brief marriage and two daughters, Kylie and Antonia. Sally is “terrific looking,” Gillian turns up looking “as beautiful as ever,” Antonia is so “stunning” that boys “freeze up completely, simply because they’re so close to her.” For a while Kylie is refreshingly gawky and boyish, but all too soon she is transformed: “this person is a knockout . . . they’re all staring at her open-mouthed, like goldfish whose bowl she’s just been dropped into.”
Hoffman’s characters, beneath their monotonously alluring exteriors, are vivid and charismatic. Consider Gillian, a woman of worldly experience, as seen through the eyes of her 13-year-old niece. “Gillian has very particular likes and dislikes and an opinion about everything. She sleeps a lot, she borrows things without asking, and she makes great brownies with M & M’s stirred into the batter. She’s beautiful and laughs about a thousand times more than Kylie’s mother does and Kylie wants to be exactly like her.” It is the boast of the Owens women that they know how to have fun even when doing ordinary things, and the book is valuable for giving us the satisfactions of daily life, beautifully described. As an adult, Sally awakes after a long bout of depression and sees “how tender each leaf was, how absolutely new, so the green was nearly yellow and the yellow rich as butter.” Elsewhere rain is described as falling “in sheets, like a river of glass. It will fall until the whole world seems silver and upside down.”
The book also expresses the glee of breaking the thousand petty rules of conventional life. Visiting the aunts’ house, Sally’s young daughters let the bathtub overflow with bubbles, live on candy bars and tipsy cake, “dance through the herb garden, play softball on the front lawn, and stay up past midnight.” But the book’s deepest appeal is perhaps sex-specific. Although ostensibly chronicling passions, boyfriends, marriages, this is fundamentally a novel about women whose lives are given value by their relations to other women. The characters’ sense of self-worth is derived from the emotional transactions between mothers and daughters, sisters, nieces and aunts. Men are described almost perfunctorily by comparison and are of two types, handsome scoundrels (Gillian buries a handsome scoundrel) and handsome decent guys (Sally buries a decent guy). In the context of the story, both types are wampum, a symbol chiefly valuable as an indicator of a female character’s worth and nature. The exception is Kylie’s teen-aged friend Gideon, a homely boy whose shaved head, annoying mannerisms, and thrift shop clothes make him a godsend in the too-beautiful world of the novel.
Ultimately, though, one yields to the author’s exact and luminous sense of description, and to the allure of magic when it is used well–not to gratify our most blatant wishes but as a kind of metaphor or shorthand. The passion of a man in love is so great that it singes his shirt cuffs. A hurricane damages every other house but leaves the house of the self-possessed, competent Owens’ intact. An Owens ancestor running distraught through the town at night “enters people’s dreams.” Hoffman adds, “The next morning most people awoke out of breath, with their legs shaking.”
In these instances, the means of expression may be outside the realm of the normal, but Hoffman is demonstrating a “magic” both humane and reassuring. No longer is Nature indifferent, nor are we individuals isolated in a mass society. What Alice Hoffman gives us, under a thin veil of illusion, is a small town, familial world in which everything responds to the characters’ moods, and everyone knows and cares about each other.
