Alice Hoffman’s newest book, The Red Garden, was perfect for dipping into over a chilly spring weekend when rain interrupted outdoor tasks.
The book’s fourteen independent but interrelated stories are set in the fictional town of Blackwell (originally called Bearsville), Massachusetts, somewhere in the Berkshires. It follows the town’s founder, the enterprising and restless Hallie Bradley, and her descendants, from 1750 into the present century. Bradley, an English orphan with no prospects in her home country, comes to the colonies to find a life that is much different, but no easier, than the one she had left in industrial England. She marries badly, strays with an unnamed traveler, and survives by befriending a sow bear and her cubs. This ends unhappily for the bears, one of which is buried in the odd plot of red earth that becomes the Red Garden. There, over centuries, everything that grows there turns red as blood.
Hallie’s descendents, never a contented lot, are repeatedly drawn back to the red garden, trying over generations to find inspiration, solace, or redemption there. Place names change: Bearsville becomes Blackwell. The high field that Hallie had grimly called Dead Husband’s Meadow softens and abbreviates, first to Husband’s Meadow, then to Band’s Meadow. The meadow remains, in the later stories, as it was in Hallie’s day: a verge between the manufactured and the magical worlds that Blackwell’s old families, the Motts, the Starrs, and the Partridges, inhabit.
Mythical and fairy tale motifs mark the stories. Hallie and her bears echo Romulus and Remus and their she-wolf. There are allusions to Beauty and the Beast (“The Monster of Blackwell”), Hansel and Gretel (“The King of the Bees,” in which a young boy drops crumbs, by which his father tracks him); and mermaids (“The Fisherman’s Wife,” who is really a magical eel).
Other writers wander into the narrative: a lorn Emily Dickenson, as a young girl, who plants the red garden in wildflowers in hopes of persuading a blind traveler to stay; and, perhaps, the Brontë sisters (indirectly, with their faithful dog Keeper transformed into a stubbornly loyal pug, in “The Principles of Devotion”).
Johnny Appleseed passes through town, just before the historic “year with no summer” (1816, when Mount Tamora erupted, filling the air with dust that chilled the earth’s atmosphere and produced famine in North America and northern Europe); Appleseed’s legacy of a magical apple tree saves the town.
And there’s a sweet ghost, a little girl in blue, whose fate the townspeople re-enact in an annual play about Blackwell’s founders.
While none of the characters in The Red Garden carries the story individually, they successively manifest variations of their founder’s salient qualities: strength, determination, curiosity, boldness, wanderlust, and, sometimes, the conviction that they have chosen the wrong life all together. In all of them, there is an unresolved separation from nature, and an uneasy relationship with the magic of nature’s ever-repeating “red garden.”
A satisfying work, by the author of Practical Magic, Fortune’s Daughter, and The Ice Queen.
