12/01/01

Magic and reality are often the major ingredients in fiction, mixed to bring a spark to the ordinary and a recognition to the imaginative. A reader can both escape reality through this mix, as well as nod along with the truth in it, the that’s it feeling that a writer aims for. Alice Hoffman tries this combination in The River King. And this is what she is known for.

This novel is set in a fictional New England town where tragedy casts its spell over a boarding school. With the simplistic charm of her setting the magical elements can be seen to detract from a clear view, yet the murkiness itself almost becomes a character.

Or consumes a character. We enter Hadden school with Gus, a troubled loner figure who has already gone through a few private schools, and we drown there with him. Gus’s death comes early on, and pulls us down under a surface world to the murky surreal elements that begin to surface in other characters. Pieces of him are held in the living world by a girl he loved, Carlin, and by a local policeman, Abel Gray, who wants answers from the dead, and through the guilt of other students in the school.

Gus is the typical outsider, not a rich kid, not athletic, not gregarious. Carlin is an outsider who wins the attention of a popular boy, thus is accepted, leaving Gus that much more alone. These are the surfaces of the characters. With her imagery of water and depth, Hoffman tries to show that there is much more to them. But this effort seems to fall short. The privileged richer kids are pitted against the sincere outcasts, and a dull, organized teacher against a charming but troubled local man with piercing eyes.

The consequences of guilt are at play between these sets of rivalries, as well as how deeply we are able to let ourselves go to follow a hunch, a suspicion, an emotion. It is here that Hoffman’s characters are appealing, stepping out of a rather flat surface to splash up a little wave of recognition in the reader. These tugs, these hunches that the characters feel blend with the supernatural aspect of the book, the magical hints about what may have caused the death that is central to the book.

The magic in the book is what should lend it the charm to raise a valid but basic tale to something more imposing or impressive. But it seems to add little but discomfort, as though the characters have words placed in their mouths that just don’t fit. The tugs of emotion and intuition should be understood through the characters themselves, it seems, not through the mechanisms of magic. This magic pops up in photos of Gus’s room after his death, in which "..even the haziest of the images, the shadowy figure appeared to be soaking wet: there were pools of water in every picture…`the girl told me he’s leaving her things…’"(223) But there seems almost no point to this haunting. The crime is traced through the fact that "grief could manifest itself in a physical form" (247), thus leaves traces of itself in the lives of the characters. This may add quirkiness, but it takes away plot: it takes away the subtlety of human emotion and mystery when we see the physical evidence.

The play of shallowness and depth is the main thrust of the novel, in terms of character and imagery. But it wears thin, as the characters move, like the river, towards an end that is easily foreseen. Any treasure in their depths can be seen from the surface without much searching. But the river does make its presence known. If Gus is the river king, he uses the river to communicate a presence that he had difficulty with during his lifetime. If Abel is the river king, he takes a cue of motion from the river, although a predictable one. Yet his image is even more obvious: he carries guilt, in his name, from a dead brother whose place he thinks he should have taken.

The title itself, like the uses of magical imagery, attempts to put myth into a small town tragedy. Maybe Hoffman is right in this, that our actions have a power and repercussions that we should be able to see. Our little loves and losses on a personal level are our own myth. But in Hadden, the characters get lost in the need for apparition and the desire or magic. As stated above, the murkiness becomes a character, but at a great loss in the clarity of the others. The characters are restricted by this overbearing symbolism, and the reader sympathizes with their plight: "..he’d found a thin, black tie in the back of his closet, which he realized was choking him." (213) The choking feeling may indeed come from the book itself.

Editor's Note: other great Alice Hoffman books that I have read and loved...

Practical Magic, 1998
Here on Earth, 1998
Second Nature, 1995
Local Girls, reissue 2000