People in a Glass House Who Threw Stones
Friday, January 19, 2007; Page C03
SKYLIGHT CONFESSIONS
A Novel
  (2001 Snowbound, All Rights Reser) |
By Alice Hoffman
Little, Brown.
262 pp. $24.99
Because of the arduous demands of our so-called real lives, every society needs fairy tales, and Alice Hoffman, over the years, has excelled at producing them for us. This novel, for instance, features a glass house fancifully called the Glass Slipper, a ghost who can be seen by more than one person, flocks of birds that gather at the time and place of human death, magic stones with the power to save the shipwrecked and pearls that change color. There's also "a tribe who lived on the other side of the water, in far-off Connecticut, who could sprout wings in the face of disaster. They looked like normal people until the ship went down, or the fire raged, and then they suddenly revealed themselves. Only then did they manage their escape."
But the real magical thinking in "Skylight Confessions" comes from two dearly held and not-often-spoken-of female fantasies: the first, that men who spend their lives being mean and emotionally withholding to their wives and children will sooner or later see the error of their ways, go through a karmuppance of some kind and experience an overwhelming feeling of contrition. (This could happen. Actually, I've seen it occur twice in my own life.) The second belief, somewhat antithetical to the first, is that men are so incompetent and lazy that, when their wives come down with cancer, the guys seek company no farther than the woman next door. She tends to comply with the plan, endures the countdown to the wife's death, then marries the man in question before the wife's body cools. (Again, not necessarily unusual behavior. I've seen it happen.)
The real yearning, the wishful thinking here, is that good and pure women should possess enough moral power to melt the hard hearts of men who don't care about anything or anybody. A fantasy for our time, if you're a woman, and this is how it plays out in Hoffman's novel.
Seventeen-year-old Arlyn lives in humble circumstances in a workman's cottage out on Long Island with her father, a ferryboat captain, who has told her about those Connecticut people who can fly. When he dies, she vows, "The first man who walks down the street will be my one love and I will be true to him as long as he's true to me." Sure enough, John Moody, a tall, handsome fellow, stops his car in front of her house and utters the fateful words, "I'm lost."
But he leaves out some unspoken fine print, as in, "I'm lost, and I'm a mindless, selfish, unthinking dork, and as long as you live I'll do my darndest to make your life a living hell," but that happens often enough in real life, too, now that I think about it.
Arlyn promptly takes off her clothes and they jump into bed for a few days. Moody tries to weasel out of the relationship, but she pursues him. They get married and have a little boy named Sam, whom Moody can't stand. Their dreadful marriage proceeds apace. Every mean thing Moody can think of to do, short of bopping poor Arlyn over the head with a two-by-four, he does: He's absent for Sam's birth. When Sam gets chickenpox, he checks into a motel. He never talks to Arlyn. He scorns her.
Arlyn may be young and innocent, but she's not stupid. She soon turns to the affections of George Snow, who washes the windows of the hard-to-live-in glass house the Moodys call home. George is a simple, honest man who loves Arlyn beyond measure. She gets pregnant by him, has a girl named Blanca and turns up with breast cancer. Moody, ever the clueless clod, trots over next door and starts up an affair with the neighbor, Cynthia.
I haven't given away the plot, just the back story. Arlyn dies and Moody's troubles begin. If only he hadn't been such an unloving jerk! But it's too late now. His bad karma begins. Sam can't stand his father or stepmother. What's more, Sam may be one of that strange breed of Connecticut men who know how to fly when the going gets rough. He takes to standing on the glass house's roof and doing dangerous drugs. Will he jump? Fall? Fly? Arlyn, so utterly passive when she was alive, turns into a vigorous ghost, haunting her husband, ruining Cynthia's housekeeping with scattered soot and broken dishes. As soon as Blanca grows up -- she can't stand her dad and stepmother either -- she flees the country and goes to London, where she runs a bookstore that deals only in fairy tales, called Happily Ever After. Some well-kept secrets eventually come to light.
Hoffman stacks the fictional deck in every way. Poor Arlyn is an old-fashioned hard-luck heroine when she takes up with Moody. He has no incentive to be kind; he's awful to her just because he can be. Arlyn's only weapon is herself, her sweet soul. She works off the childlike logic of "you'll be sorry when I'm dead," the way kids feel when they run away from home with nothing but a peanut butter sandwich. But Arlyn is haunting, in every sense of the word. And, oh my!
Don't all women want to be haunting? Don't we wish that our husbands and lovers and children and friends would be obsessed with us and only us, not because of what we do, but because of what we are? Real life doesn't work that way very often. Men from Connecticut scarcely ever fly, except on commuter planes. The truth is hard to take sometimes. That's why we need fairy tales. While many sensible people will dismiss this story as sentimental slush, the emotionally oppressed might find some tenuous consolation here.
Sunday in Book World
? Norman Mailer imagines Hitler's childhood.
? Robert Kagan examines our history with the Middle East.
? Claire Tomalin revives Thomas Hardy.
? A British general makes new rules for war.
? And our monthly page for kids.
