Fiction: Always wise, usually strange and sufficiently romantic to keep cynics as well as dreamers alert to the closing sentence, Alice Hoffman writes novels that compel and beguile. Her stories are like no one else's; she is an original whose subjects are love and death and hope. Somehow she manages to juxtapose the everyday with the surreal. Her world is magical and often frightening, slightly bizarre and always plausible.
The Ice Queen, her 16th novel, walks very close to territory she has previously favoured, that of European folk and fairy tales. It is no coincidence that the narrator and her brother, as children, found comfort in the Brothers Grimm. But as always with Hoffman, and her particular brand of Yankee Magic Realism, her fiction is set in the US, albeit at times in an America that looks closely back to old ties with the colonial past, although the new book takes place in New Jersey and Florida.
She is thoughtful, subtle and above all her stories possess urgency. An instinctive, traditional storyteller, Hoffman is aware of her immediate contemporary society and committed to the study of human nature. She brings a moral rigour to each tale.
For all the grace - and her prose is elegant, often beautiful - she never makes life easy for either her characters, or her readers. A Hoffman story is a serious undertaking; at times, as is the new novel, a cautionary tale.
A message for life is invariably present in most of her fiction. Hoffman believes in looking at the seriousness of trying to live morally. Yet she is neither polemical nor heavy-handed.
The narrator of The Ice Queen is a person so hurt by life and the weight of her guilt that she tries not to feel - it's easier. Except it's not. Her response to life is shaped by her mother's death in an accident when the narrator was eight years old.
"Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise and bake and come back to haunt you. I've made far too many wishes in my lifetime . . ."
Her first wish, uttered in temper at the age of eight, was made as her mother set off to met her friends to celebrate her 30th birthday. . "I wished I would never see her again. I told her straight to her face. I wished she would disappear right there, right then."
Her mother drove away, only to be killed on the icy road, leaving the narrator and her elder brother to be raised by their kindly grandmother, father having run off years previously.
Time flashes by; the brother becomes a scientist, the narrator, who remains unnamed - she is after all emotionally disconnected - works in a library, and is interested in ice and death, all kinds of death, and even takes to helping a local detective with reference material on the subject of death and ways of dying.
She also takes to having sex with the detective in his car. "The sex was hurried and panicked and crazy, but we did it anyway. We took chances . . . We were alone in the world."
A detached relationship is about as much intimacy as she can deal with, until the night Jack, the detective, makes an error of judgement. He brings her flowers. "The minute Jack acted as though we were anything more than two strangers who had a shared interest in death and sex, it was over. As soon as there was a possibility he might actually care for me, I stopped seeing him."
Two events intervene. Her grandmother dies. Then more upheaval soon follows. Her brother, with whom she has never been close, not only encourages her to move to Florida, he drives her there, secures her a job in the college library and settles her into a new routine. It is an unexpected shift, but Hoffman makes Florida seem as if it is a different country from that of New Jersey and the narrative draws much from these geographical contrasts. It is also clear that the narrator has exchanged one drab existence for another.
Then science and/or magic step in. While standing by a window, the narrator describes holding a fly-swatter and recalls seeing "something that appeared to be a tennis ball right in front of me". At first she thought "perhaps some neighbourhood kids had thrown the ball through my window" with a characteristic Hoffman flourish, the narrator adds: "I didn't care for children of any age or size. I knew how they thought and what they were capable of." But it was not a tennis ball. It was a lightening bolt, "when my gaze shifted I noticed that the fly-swatter I was holding was edged in fire and that the fire was dripping down onto the floor, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July".
The phenomenon of lightening strikes is well documented in the US, particularly Florida. The death-in-life subject is perfectly suited to Hoffman. Many lightening-strike survivors "die" and then come back to life.
The descriptions of being suspended in an intense, out-of-body, physical state somewhere between life and death are vivid and convincing. "My very essence, my inner self was gone," recalls the narrator. "I reached for things and couldn't feel them." Her body recovers, her mind and intelligence take longer. She becomes interesting to her brother's university at which a programme is dedicated to lightening-strike incidents. Recovery also needs the endorsement of other victims who have had similar experiences. Among these is Renny, whose hands have been damaged by lightening and now appear, although still part of his body, to have a life of their own.
Throughout the novel Hoffman moves her narrator closer to emotion, the reality of feeling and the purpose of being alive. The surreal, heavily symbolic "ice and fire" romance that evolves between the narrator and another lightening survivor pushes the story towards Magic Realist excess.
But Hoffman always knows when to return to earth and the reality of living - and learning how to live. Her stories are similar, if always different. Her invention never becomes routine or formulaic.
This is a book in which darkness is often pitted against colour. Sensual and commonsensical, Alice Hoffman looks to stories, the fantastical and the strange, as the surest path to understanding. Here, as so many times before, her insights make sense of the magic.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Ice Queen By Alice Hoffman Chatto, 211pp. £12.99
