A Map of the World. - book reviews

Christian Century, May 24, 1995 by Trudy Bush

By Jane Hamilton. Doubleday, 389 pp., $22.00.

The midwest seems to be challenging the South as America's most fertile region for fiction. Both A. Manette Ansay's Vinegar Hill and Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World are about families in small Wisconsin towns. Jane Smiley's hilarious Moo treats a large midwestern university as a microcosm of American society.

In Vinegar Hill, Ellen and James Greer move back to their midwestern hometown to live with her husband's parents after he loses his job. It is 1972, and Ellen is not a liberated woman. She and James have been raised in a narrow, repressive Catholicism which demands than women be self-sacrificing and loyal family members, no matter what. In living with her in-laws Ellen finds more than narrowness; she encounters a pathology, a poison that undermines her relationship with her husband and threatens her children.

The elder Greers are grandparents from hell. The grandfather is a brutal tyrant who tells his granddaughter that women are devils. The grandmother is a peevish woman whose flesh has "the softness of rot." Their sons have been brutalized as children; back in his parents' home, James disintegrates. And a dark secret lies at the heart of the family, a secret that Ellen only gradually discovers. Elements of this American gothic horror tale are overly simple. Yet Ansay's book is partially rescued by its lyrical prose and unforgettable imagery. As a picture of a woman trapped in demeaning social and religious systems, it has a grim power.

More balanced and richer is Jane Hamilton's novel, though the series of shattering misfortunes that befall her main character may strain credulity. At times Alice Goodwin compares herself to Job, and there is indeed a Job-like quality to her suffering. Alice, her husband, Howard, and their two young daughters are city people fulfilling Howard's lifelong dream of owning a dairy farm. They have lived contentedly in Prairie Junction, Wisconsin, for six years, though they have made friends with only one family and know that the community regards them as "that hippie couple" who are trying to fit in where they don't belong.

One summer morning, Alice is momentarily distracted while watching her best friend's children. As Alice searches for her bathing suit, two-year-old Lizzie wanders into the farm's pond and drowns. While Alice is still prostrate with sorrow and guilt, a second blow falls. A troubled young boy at the school where Alice works as a nurse accuses her of sexually abusing him. The community turns against her; she is jailed and regains her freedom only after a wrenching trial.

How can we survive when we are threatened with the loss of all that we value? For Alice's friend Theresa, Lizzie's mother, the answer is religious faith. And Theresa finds help in her spiritual adviser, a former priest who remains mains wise, even holy, despite the erratic course of his own life. She is able to forgive Alice, to care for Alice's children, and to resist her attraction to Alice's husband, to whom she feels drawn by their common suffering.

Alice has a harder struggle--a struggle to forgive herself, her community, and what she feels have been her husband's betrayals. She is helped to do this by her encounters with the women she meets in jail. Though she cannot share Theresa's certainty of God's presence--or even existence--she nevertheless cannot stop praying.

Jane Smiley won a Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres, a King Lear set in Iowa. If that was her Shakespearean tragedy, Moo is her Shakespearean comedy--full of antic love complications resolved at the end in marriages; villains who are eventually exposed and isolated, though their punishment is light; and discoveries that, after a proper period of suspense, restore the world to balance. The book is written from an omniscient point of view, rather like what we hope God's might be as he looks down on our muddled world--kind, amused, approving of some of us and not completely rejecting even the worst of us. Yet despite its good humor, Smiley's satire has bite.

All the world converges on Moo university. Marly Hellmich, a server in the cafeteria lunch line, likes to think about how far people had come "to walk through her line--not only from all corners of the campus, but also from all corners of the world."

Chairman X of the horticulture department reflects on the school's connections to the physical universe and to the sweep of history. "The mutable, almost fluid landscape where the campus sat like a stone in a stream rolled gently downward from the northwest to the southeast, a hospitable slope that ended in low bluffs overlooking the Orono River... The campus tempted most of its denizens to nest--to crawl into their books and projects and committee work and pull their self-absorption over their heads like bedcovers, but Chairman X never lost the sense of the slope, and the sweep of the forces across it. Whatever was produced on the campus, from toxic waste to ideas, flowed uncontrollably into the world."