The Third Angel

Opening a new Alice Hoffman novel is like opening the most anticipated gift of the year. You know you will again be swept away into a world like no other and meet characters unlike any you’ve met before. The Third Angel is Alice Hoffman at her gift-giving best. The worlds of 1999, 1966 and 1952 bring us coincidentally interwoven heroines joined one to the other by that cruelest of fate—being in love with the wrong man. And characters? How about a ghost, a hotel room and a heron! Hoffman tips the balance of narrative momentum as she takes us back in time or forward in time if you do, as Ms. Hoffman herself suggests, and read the interwoven stories back to front.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this elegant and stunning novel, veteran heartstring-puller Hoffman (Here on Earth; Seventh Heaven) examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect. High powered New York attorney Maddy Heller arrives in 1999 London having had an affair with Paul, her sister Allie's fiancé,; she must now cope with the impending marriage, and with Paul's terminal illness—which echoes the girls' mother's cancer during their childhood. Hoffman then shifts to heady 1966 London and to Frieda Lewis, Paul's future mother, who falls for a doomed up-and-coming songwriter knowing he will break her heart. The narrative then shifts further back, to 1952 and to Maddy and Allie's future mother, Lucy Green. A bookish 12-year-old wise beyond her years, Lucy sails with her father and stepmother from New York to London for a wedding. There, she becomes an innocent catalyst to a devastating event involving a love triangle. Hoffman interweaves the three stories, gazing unerringly into forces that cause some people to self-destruct (There was no such thing as too much for a girl who thought she was second best) and others to find inner strength to last a lifetime.


Quotes
On love:
There was good love and there was bad love. There was the kind that helped raise a person above her failings and there was the desperate sort that struck when someone least wanted or expected it.

On fairy tale love doomed from the start – Maddy and Paul have met purely by chance at Kensington Palace leaving flowers in memory of Princess Diana, and Maddy recalls the stories of Charles and Diana’s courtship:
When Maddy first heard the story, shed wanted to shout, What on earth is romantic about doomed love? But she’d said nothing. Only that Diana had been a foot not to know whom she was marrying in the first place. Maddy had seen an interview in which Price Charles had been asked if he was in love. “Whatever love is,” he had said with Diana sitting right next to him. She should have gotten up and walked away then.

The fatal first step into love:
It was so easy. She opened the door for him and the rest was like disappearing into the dark night to a place where no one could find you. No footsteps, no fingerprints, no evidence of any kind.

Clues forward and back, back and forward:
It was possible to read the story two ways: Front to back, the heron returned to his heron wife and the world of the sky. Back to front, he stayed with his one true love on earth.

Who is the third angel among us? Frieda’s father, a doctor who made house calls, said this of angels:
...there was the Angel of Life, the Angel of Death, and then there was the Third Angel. “It was either the Angel of Life or the Angel of Death who would ride in the back of the car when my father went on house calls, but he never knew which one it was until he arrived at his destination. Even then he said he was often surprised. It was hard to tell the difference between the two sometimes.” …and the third one? “Well, he’s the most curious. You can’t even tell if he’s an angel or not. You think you’re doing him a kindness, you think you’re the one taking care of him, while all the while, he’s the one who’s saving your life.”

Alice Hoffman on loving the wrong man (Hallmark Magazine May 2008):
The wrong man is who we believe we deserve. He’s the man we think we can save. He’s the one only we can understand or fix or relate to. He’s an outlaw, an outsider, a fallen angel, a blank slate, a charmer, a man we go back to despite his flaws. Just as there are women who stay with the wrong man, there are just as many who leave him, and still others who realize that, for a little while at least, the wrong man was, for reasons only they can determine, right for them.

****

My delight in opening yet another Hoffman gift was enhanced by attending a reading/signing on April 22 where Ms. Hoffman spoke about third angels (the people who come into our lives unannounced and who make changes in our lives…third angels that we don’t even realize until much later who they were and what they have done for us) and the wrong man (who may truly have been the right man all along). Alice Hoffman started out as a voracious young reader who now delights us all with her writing. She says she was “lost in the magic of reading and is now lost in the magic of writing.” And the ghost in Room 708? Real.

5/5 (General Fiction Scale)
Shaye Areheart Books [Random House Imprint] (2008)
Hardcover
278 pages
Finished: April 2008

The Memory of Water

As is often the case, the cover drew me to The Memory of Water by Karen White—there was just something about the steely blue-green that guided my hand to pick this book up from the New in Fiction table instead, perhaps, the book next to it.

From the back cover
On the night their mother drowns trying to ride out a storm in a sailboat, sisters Marnie and Diana Maitland discover there is more than one kind of death. There are also the deaths of innocence, of love, and of hope. Both harbor secrets about what really happened that night—secrets that will erode their lives as they grow into adulthood. After ten years of silence between the sisters, Marnie is called back to the South Carolina Lowcountry by Diana’s ex-husband, Quinn. His young son has returned from a sailing trip with his emotionally unstable mother, and he is deeply disturbed and refusing to speak. In order to help the traumatized boy Marnie must reopen old wounds and bring the darkest memories of her past to the surface. And she must confront Diana…before they all go under.

Quotes
Marnie, reacting to her decision first to leave to find her own life in Arizona, then to return to help her nephew:
She walked away quickly, her shoes kicking up gravel and sand and old crumbled shells, crushing them beneath her feet like dried-up dreams and memories she thought had long ago been relegated to dust.

Marnie, reflecting on the beauty of the marsh:
I watched as the creek surged at high tide, muddy brown and astonishingly strong. Despite everything, I still saw the beauty of the marsh and found respect for the strength that underlay its loveliness. My grandfather once told me that our Lowcountry marsh was like a mother to the mainland, buffering the continent from frequent storms like a mother would protect her children, and acting as the ocean’s incubator by nurturing the nourishing the filter feeders at the bottom of the food chain. I had liked this analogy, assuring me that nurturing mothers did exist after all, and I found comfort in the knowledge that I had been lucky enough to be born in this place of liquid arms and maternal love.

Marnie, remembering the wonder of believing in Santa Claus and the moment a child no longer believes:
I walked down the stairs, following the scent of roasting turkey and apple pie, feeling as giddy as a child. But there were no cookies for Santa or any other holiday traditions besides the opening of presents and the wonderful turkey dinner prepared by Quinn. He’d informed me that a year before Gil had approached him and calmly explained that there was no reason for his parents to stay up late on Christmas Eve to put together toys and lay out presents from Santa. Apparently Gil had ceased to believe in Santa following a forage into Quinn’s desk drawer to find a stapler when he had emerged instead with Gil’s letters to Santa, neatly tied with a ribbon. As sad as I’d been to hear that Gil’s childhood had grown a bit shorter, the story had also had the effect of fluttering my heart with the detail of Quinn keeping the letters and tying them with a ribbon.

Diana, remembering a love of books shared with her sister:
I stood and moved to the bookshelf I kept in the corner of my studio. It was filled with all the books I had ever owned. I‘d never been a huge reader like Marnie, but after she’d learned to read, it was to her voice that I fell asleep every night. Even now, when I pick up Anne of Green Gables or National Velvet, I hear Marnie’s voice reading to me. I have those books still, an innocent part of my childhood I shared with my sister that I could never give up.

Once settled into the multiple narrators’ voices (the sisters—Marnie and Diana; the ex-husband, Quinn; and the young son, Gil), I found this story of a family looking to heal and be whole again very captivating. Somewhat bothersome was the constant reminders of the “terrible thing that happened at sea that night.” That something went terribly wrong on a nighttime sail is the event that hurls the family’s story into full spin; constantly reminding me of this as the healing progresses was annoying.

Each chapter of The Memory of Water is headed with a quote which I like to go back and reread at the end of the chapter to see how/if the quote reinterprets the chapter just read. Here, out of context, are some I flagged:

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaen. ~ Martin Luther

When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. ~ Herman Melville

For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing river of time, the beginning and the end. ~ Rachel Carson

I finished the Memory of Water sitting at the Emerson Inn in Rockport, MA. The early April day was steely gray, and the ocean beyond the cove was filled with stormy whitecaps—the same setting that I have seen brilliant with sunlight reflecting from the crests of waves…memories of water.

Emerson Inn parlor.

The view outside.

4/5 (General Fiction scale)
NAL Accent (2008)
Trade Paperback
315 pages
Finished: April 2008

Dedication: This book is dedicated to the original Highfalutin, and to all those who lost so much in Hurricane Katrina.