Fiction: The prolific and popular American author Alice Hoffman has done well out of optimism, but her latest novel indicates that the living has now really become too easy, writes Giles Newington
In The Probable Future, she revisits her favourite territory, small-town Massachusetts, and once again populates it with magical women, unreliable men and a compliant natural world in which the only possible conclusions can be harmonious and wholesome ones.
This is a book in which the pathetic fallacy is out of control, and nature follows the moods of the human protagonists with alarming devotion: flowers refuse to grow on the path where Rebecca Sparrow walked to a witch's death; blue roses bloom because Elinor Sparrow's green fingers will them to; an ancient oak tree falls on a fleeing baddie during one of the thunderstorms that accompany each of the story's climactic events. Ultimately, though, the weather forecast is good, and the loving descriptions of Elinor's well-tended garden in the grounds of her home, Cake House, assure us that all will end in redemption, renewal and true love.
At the centre of the story are the 13 generations of Sparrow women, each of whom wake up on their 13th birthdays to discover they have magical powers. Rebecca, the first of the line, has arrows shot into her and is then drowned in the bottomless Hourglass Lake by her unreconstructed 17th-century neighbours because of her inability to feel physical pain. Three hundred years later, Elinor can see when people are lying, her daughter Jenny can experience other people's dreams, and granddaughter Stella can foresee how others are going to die. It is Stella's gift that sets the plot of The Probable Future in motion: in the midst of a birthday supper in a restaurant with her feckless dad, Will, she has a vision that one of their fellow diners is going to get her throat cut. Will is sent off to the police to inform them of this prediction, and then becomes a murder suspect when the vision becomes reality.
Once the initial premise of Stella's special powers is accepted (not easy), this is a promising storyline, but Hoffman is not that interested in pursuing it. Will's murder case is used mainly as a device for bringing the harassed Sparrow family back together in Cake House, where they can get back in touch with their witchy heritage and cast their beneficent spell over the strangely insulated local citizenry.
That nothing surprising is going to happen in terms of story or character development is signalled early by the increasing wordiness of the prose, the over-description of every feeling, the piling up of symbols to give weight to the lightweight actuality. There are also plenty of clichés ("Opposites attract, honey pie. Each makes up what the other lacks," Stella is informed by her best friend Juliet), moments of embarrassment (Will getting down on his knees to ask forgiveness of the same venerable oak tree that later turns vigilante during a thunderstorm), and a general feeling of implausibility. Hoffman's loose, seemingly unedited style, which in some of her other books adds a sense of immediacy (especially when she writes in the present tense), here merely looks slapdash.
There has always been a fairytale element in Hoffman's fiction for adults (she is also a popular children's writer) but in the past its credibility has been enhanced by themes that chimed with the times. Even fairytales, though, rely on dark forces for their heroines to do battle with. In The Probable Future, everything is set up so nicely for the cosy coven of Cake House that nothing can interfere with their smug consensus. The sunny complacency of this safe world, untouched by recent history, simply makes it seem dated.
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist
The Probable Future. By Alice Hoffman, Chatto & Windus, 322pp. £10.99