Quiet novel explores decency in the wake of a tragedy

When Madeline Was Young, By Jane Hamilton, Doubleday, 273 pp., $22.95

Both sprawling and intimate, Jane Hamilton's "When Madeline Was Young" is a book best enjoyed with adjusted expectations.

This is not to say that Hamilton has lost her touch for conveying the complexities of family life or for engaging the bruised dignity of her characters. Yet compared with the staggering calamities in her earlier bestsellers ``A Map of the World" and ``The Book of Ruth," this story can seem deceptively languid. Instead, it's a quiet novel more given to gentle realizations than shattering epiphanies. Tragedy, always dramatic and capricious in Hamilton's work, remains at the center here as well. But its presence is the catalyst for what becomes a study in grace and compassion.

Madeline is the titular character, but this story belongs to Timothy Maciver , known as Mac, who is also the narrator. Through him, and the recollections of conversations with his thorny aunt Figgy , we hear about Madeline, a woman whose refined beauty reminds others of Princess Grace.

``I think it's probably fair to report," Mac says, ``that Madeline was the kind of woman who steps into the room and at once is the center of attention, the kind of woman who knows she has that effect, and pretends it's nothing."

Mac grew up with Madeline, though she was already grown by the time he was born. Still, he explains, ``despite [her] height and her regal charms, I always thought of her as a girl, first someone who was my older sister and then, forever after, when I'd bypassed her intellectually, as my youngest sister."

Mac later reveals that Madeline was his father's first wife. This isn't a spoiler; it's revealed in the novel's second chapter, and anyway Hamilton never intends it as a cheap shocker. Shortly after Aaron married Madeline, she was injured in a bike accident that left her brain-damaged. Or, as the tart Figgy succinctly puts it, ``she was out long enough to return quite less than herself."

Yet Aaron never abandons Madeline. He continues to care for her, even after he falls for Julia, a friend of Figgy's who is also a nurse. Julia becomes Madeline's caretaker, and eventually Aaron's second wife and Mac's mother. Throughout the marriage, Madeline remains ever present. Like the child she has become, she can be demanding, obstinate, and uninhibited. Even more poignantly, she is also a constant reminder of all that was robbed from Aaron during one fateful bike ride.

Whenever Aaron's and Julia's selflessness borders on otherworldly saintliness, Hamilton is wise to include their frustrations as well as their mistakes, especially in infantilizing Madeline with puppets, dolls, and finger paints as playthings. (Not surprisingly, Figgy, Aaron's sister, is particularly critical.) Ultimately, Mac concludes his parents did the ``best they knew how; they meant to help her hold still in her new self."

There are other stories here, of course, primarily that of Mac's more audacious cousin Buddy, a Vietnam War veteran, who loses his 21-year-old son in Baghdad. But it is Madeline, forever young even as she grows old, who haunts this novel with a ghostly presence that helps Mac better understand his parents, and eventually himself.

This could easily have been a deadening story of upheaval, lamentation, and regret. Instead, Hamilton concentrates on something far more extraordinary -- simple human decency -- in the remarkable ability of one family to discover that what remains of life after tragedy can still harbor its own treasures and charms.