THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507130594
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVID MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
PRACTICAL MAGIC, Alice Hoffman, G.P. Putnam's Sons. 244 pp. $22.95
IN A RETURN to the landscape she knows best, Alice Hoffman gives us in Practical Magic a story full of wonder, temptation, mystery and desire. That she has again placed it in a suburban setting crying out for normalcy is testimony to the keen perception that Hoffman brings to her writing. She takes us on a journey into the world of the Owens women, their realm of magic and the beauty they see all around them.
For as long as anyone can remember, the Owens women have been blamed for the ills of the Massachusetts community where they live. ``It didn't matter what the problem was - lightning or locusts, or a death by drowning. . . as soon as there was a hint of trouble. . . people began pointing fingers.''
Orphaned, Sally and Gillian Owens are sent to live with their aunts in the house on Magnolia Street, a house with 15 kinds of wood for the window seats and mantels - wood that never needs dusting and where the ``green-tinted window glass was so old and thick that everything on the other side seemed like a dream.'' It's here that they learn things most girls never know as they watch the parade of townswomen come to the back door at twilight to ask for special favors from their aunts in love gone wrong. It's here that the girls learn there is little difference between dream and reality.
Although the girls are treated to the same benign neglect, they are as different as their nicknames, ``Night'' and ``Day.'' Gillian is fair and blonde, languorous, bedeviling to every male who sets eyes upon her. Black-haired Sally hates confusion and mess and doesn't believe anything that can't be proved with facts.
At 18 Gillian manages to stay in love for three months, long enough to run off and get married; but she escapes from that two weeks later with a mechanic. Sally finds love close to home, marries, has two children and is soon widowed (as the aunts knew she would be when they heard the ticking of a beetle). But she has never lost her yearning to be treated as normal and escapes to a suburban house after she can no longer stand the taunting her daughters suffer for being Owens women.
All the quiet of a life of anonymity and an absence of spells is broken, however, when Gillian turns up at Sally's door shaken, upset, and trying to explain the corpse of her drug-dealer boyfriend in the trunk of the car. ``It was an accident. . . more or less.'' And that's when the trouble begins.
Ghosts appear to Sally's daughter Kylie; romances erupt and bring with them the haziness that lust creates. An investigation into the boyfriend's disappearance is launched, and the helpless investigator is drawn into this dreamlike place where passion rules the senses.
Hoffman tells this story with such charm and humor that the reader suspends all disbelief, all questions. Here is a suburbia that is like any other place in America, and yet Hoffman invests it with everyday magic that we often overlook. Here we can get lost without regret in the story of an ordinary place filled with extraordinary people that we come to love. MEMO: David Monroe is the owner of Island Bookstore in Duck, N.C. by CNB