THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407070444
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PEGGY DEANS EARLE
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
A MAP OF THE WORLD
JANE HAMILTON
Doubleday. 390 pp. $22.
THAT HOT MONDAY, it had been Alice Goodwin's turn to watch her best friend Theresa's little girls. As Alice had readied the Collins sisters and her own two daughters for a swim, she hadn't noticed that the front door latch had somehow opened. Two-year-old Lizzy Collins had wandered down the lane to the Goodwins' 7-acre pond. And that's when Alice's world began to fall apart.
Jane Hamilton's second novel, A Map of the World, is an excruciating examination of the effects of guilt, real and perceived, on a woman, her family and their community. Both her first novel, The Book of Ruth, for which she received the 1988 PEN/Hemingway Award, and A Map of the World explore shattering loss and human cruelty.
Like her characters, Hamilton lives in a small town in Wisconsin. It was there that she read a newspaper account of the drowning of a local child. This incident, and the PBS documentary about the Little Rascals sex abuse case in Edenton, N.C., inspired the novel's plot.
The story is alternately told by Alice, a nurse at the local elementary school, and her husband, Howard, a dairy farmer. The Goodwins are ex-hippies who returned to the land to work the last farm in Prairie Center (formerly Prairie Junction), their increasingly suburbanized community.
Alice and Howard are happy with their life of honest, hard work; they are where they want to be. Yet, they have always been considered odd - outsiders - by the locals who, ironically, embrace the area's rapid development.
As Lizzy lies comatose in the hospital for two and a half days, the reader suffers Alice and Howard's vigil along with them. The chilly sense of doom is palpable. Alice begins almost to crave the punishment she knows she must suffer:
``It was one thing to wait stubbornly, to hold out in the rarified atmosphere of the hospital lounge, a place where, like purgatory, we accounted for our sins and hoped for mercy. I needed to devote myself to the waiting; I had no interest in trying to pass the time with mindless chores and food and people.''
After a vividly disturbing scene in which Lizzy's life-support is discontinued, Alice begins her own withdrawal. The citizens of Prairie Center, quick to cast blame, find her a more than willing scapegoat.
Incapacitated by guilt, Alice takes to her bed, and her mother-in-law moves in briefly to help out. When she finally drags herself to a school board meeting, Alice senses that she is being viewed as a murderer. Later, she learns she has been accused of physically and sexually abusing a boy whom she had treated in the school infirmary. She remembers once slapping the difficult child and reprimanding his mother for neglecting his health.
The next day, Alice is arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail.
Howard is left to maintain his drought-plagued farm and to care for their home and children while Alice awaits trial. Except for Theresa's kindnesses, the community treats Howard and his children as pariahs. More charges against Alice surface, and rumors abound.
A Map of the World is often painful to read, as the Goodwins endure one Job-like spiritual test after another. Alice envies Theresa's ability to find comfort in her religious beliefs, but her friend's forgiveness is almost too much for Alice to bear. She teeters on the edge of madness.
The novel is not without hope, however. Desperate to make sense of the world, to find in it some order, Alice configures a cosmic ``master plan.'' She adapts to the new role she is forced to play and seeks redemption, in exchange for which she is eager to offer her own ``pound of flesh.''
Hamilton's insight into the way people react to unthinkable tragedy is exceptional. Her storytelling deftly propels the reader onward, even through the novel's scary darkness. We find that we become accomplices, voyeurs. We stare with rapt fascination at the human wreckage, wreckage that could be our own. MEMO: Peggy Deans Earle is a staff librarian. by CNB