HERE ON EARTH
By Alice Hoffman
Putnam, 293 pages, $23.95
Imagine this story: A man brings home a sullen young orphan to raise with his own son and daughter. The son is overcome with jealousy and hates the boy; the girl and the newcomer become ever closer, an intimacy that swells into romance as they reach adolescence. The brother, meanwhile, torments and humiliates the boy whenever he can, engendering a lifelong enemy and the loss of his sister’s affection.
Aha! the reader thinks, this is Emily Bronte’s classic novel “Wuthering Heights.” Well, yes, partly. It is also the plot of
Alice Hoffman’s new novel, “Here on Earth.” Sadly, “Here on Earth” does not do justice to Bronte’s transcendent work.
Hoffman, known for a dreamy style and the use of magical elements in her 11 other novels (including “Practical Magic,” “Seventh Heaven” and “Turtle Moon”), seems completely stymied by her questionable decision to transplant Bronte’s plot and singular vision of a tempestuous, enduring love into a contemporary novel. The fierceness of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love–inseparable from its evocative setting on the Yorkshire moors–is but faintly echoed in the obsessive love between March and Hollis in a small Massachusetts town.
When the adult March Murray journeys–with rebellious 15-year-old daughter Gwen in tow–to Jenkintown for the funeral of the housekeeper who raised her and her estranged brother, memories of her turbulent love affair (begun when she was a precocious 14) with the inscrutable orphan Hollis haunt her. Nineteen years earlier, a foolish argument drove them apart; impulsive marriages (to a neighboring brother and sister standing in for Bronte’s Lintons) have kept them apart ever since. March cleans house and broods over the past, leaving Gwen free to discover the thrills of horseback riding and first love (with her cousin, Hank) without supervision. Although Hollis and March are too proud to make the first move, a meeting is inevitable. In anticipation, March lingers in town: her five-day visit becomes a few weeks, and then a semi-separation from her husband back in California. The longed-for meeting (at the local dive) is anticlimactic; a touch of the Hoffman magic would have enlivened its simultaneously pedestrian and snippy tone:
” `You went to California,’ Hollis reminds her. `You were the one who got married.’
” `You got married too,’ March reminds him right back.”
But Hollis still exerts his hold on March: Soon after their reunion, she and Gwen move in with him and Hank (who is his ward), on Hollis’ farm. March tries, unsuccessfully, to convince her daughter and friends that Hollis is a considerate, loving man despite evidence to the contrary–“those cold, blue marks Hollis left on her skin where he grabbed her and held on too tightly.”
Hollis systematically isolates March from family, work and friends so he can have her all to himself, yet seems to take no joy in her presence. He wants March only so others cannot claim her, so she can’t claim herself–a selfishness the blissed-out March never seems to comprehend (nor does she catch on that he’s still sleeping with other women). Except for mind-altering sex that makes for tiresome reading, what brings these two people to the pitch of love they’ve supposedly been in for 19 years is a mystery; they never even have a conversation.
Hoffman is good at evoking the atmosphere of Jenkintown and the ironically named Guardian Farm, but she hasn’t created believable characters to inhabit these places of mood and memory. Her usual talent for mixing magic and reality has gone seriously off course here. If March were a richer character perhaps the novel might jell, but she loses her identity so quickly in Hollis (“He’ll tell her what to do and what to think . . . what to dream as well”) that the reader loses interest in her. As for Hollis, Hoffman wants to render him darkly charismatic, but he comes off as violent, unreasonable, lacking even the veneer of seductive charm that Heathcliff exuded. It’s impossible to believe that Hollis is worth all this agony and heat.
Surprisingly, it’s Gwen, initially the most mundane character, who, struggling with love and family secrets, turns into the most sympathetic and clearheaded character. It’s more interesting to read about her transformation (“Maybe it’s the way (Hollis) walks away, as though she were worthless, which makes her grab the teacup and throw it at him. . . . Gwen can tell he wants her to give up, and maybe, if she were smarter, she would.”) than to read yet another passage detailing Hollis’ sexual prowess or March’s rationalizations of his nasty behavior. As March fades into an appendage of Hollis, Gwen grows into a determined young woman whose love for Hank doesn’t overshadow her sense of self-preservation. This balanced theme–one woman’s strength waxing while the other’s wanes–may have worked out neatly in the author’s mind, but it is dispiriting on the page.
Hoffman’s other novels, particularly “Second Nature” and “Turtle Moon,” shone with a luminescence and sweetness that is missing from “Here on Earth.” The heroines in those works had more sense and substance than March; their motives worked as plot elements and as themes. Hoffman’s portrait of a woman in thrall to a long-ago love, and her unraveling at the hands of a brute, meant as a tribute to Emily Bronte, is an unconvincing and needlessly disturbing book.
