Practically magic

Skylight Confessions
By Alice Hoffman
Little, Brown, 262 pp., $24.99

Blanca, one of the three main characters in Alice Hoffman's magical triptych of a tale, believes in "the assured cruelty of fate." "Lost or found," she thinks, "there was no way to avoid the heartbreak. Glass shattered, bones broke, apples rotted." "Skylight Confessions" is a dramatic meditation on this theme. If "dramatic meditation" sounds like a contradiction in terms, consider this: Hoffman sets out to distill a family saga -- the lives of three generations on two continents -- into a short and essentially lyrical novel. A contradictory aim demands -- and, in Hoffman's sure hands, generates -- a wholly original form. The result might be called fairy -tale realism. You may embrace it or you may resist it, but you won't forget it.

Nor will you forget the three characters at the heart of this novel. The story opens with Arlyn Singer, a 17-year-old with 74 freckles and waist-length blood-red hair, who has just buried her father. Standing on her front porch in the foggy Long Island spring night, she resolves to love forever the first man who walks down the street. This, which she sees as fate, is nevertheless something she decides. She is "young enough not to see a glass as half empty or half full, but as a beautiful object into which anything might be poured," which explains why she conflates fate with free will.

Or does it?

Part Two centers on Arlyn's son, Sam, the offspring of what has turned out to be an ill-fated marriage. The beauty and strangeness of Arlyn's coupling with John Moody, the young architect who climbed her front steps to ask directions on that April night, have produced a child both gifted and troubled, and capable of great tenderness. At age 6 Sam comforts his dying mother -- something his distant and resentful father cannot bring himself to do. "She weighed so little that now when Sam got into bed beside her he felt bigger, stronger. . . . Sam's mother liked to look right into his eyes, and Sam let her do it even though her breath wasn't so good anymore and her eyes were milky. Every time she breathed out there was a little less of her." After her death Arlyn becomes a ghost seen only by a few of the other characters. She leaves behind 3-month-old Blanca, the child of her affair with the man who comes to wash the windows of the glass house the family lives in. John remarries and raises Blanca as his own, but Sam is the only one who can get close to her.

Or is he?

Part Three belongs to Blanca. When it opens she is estranged from her family and living in London, where she runs a bookshop that sells only fairy tales. She's always been someone who "preferred paper over flesh, ink to blood." Now, determined to fashion for herself a calm, detached life buffered by literature, she's even lost touch with her beloved half brother. For the past decade a heroin addict, "Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year." A death in the family brings Blanca back across the ocean to confront the destiny she's spent her life trying to elude. Without giving too much away, the satisfying close of "Skylight Confessions" proves Blanca both right and wrong about the "cruelty of fate."

Among the many pleasures of "Skylight Confessions" is a sense of continuous corner-turning, a chain of surprises. As in fairy tales, the narrating voice is often remote, giving us summaries of the action, so that it feels as if we see the characters through the wrong end of a telescope. But then, at rhythmic intervals, the sudden intimacy of a scene delivers them to us in vivid three-dimensional reality. Also as in fairy tales, the setting -- the material world of objects, landscape, weather -- packs considerable symbolic weight. There are the Moody family's glass house (reminiscent of the one designed by Philip Johnson, located in the same state), "made of a thousand windows" ; the pearls given to Arlyn by her window-washer lover and handed down to Blanca, "a sign that someone had once loved her" ; the limes that appear on both sides of the Atlantic; water; wings; and stones. All these things are beautifully concrete; yet at the same time, they convey in a continuous stream the thematic and emotional concerns of the novel. "The entire room was washed out by darkness, shadow upon shadow, so that a person had to squint to see anything. There was only one bit of color, a dark blue feather on the floor, the color of the sky when it's broken in half and the core of the universe can be seen."

At the end of this book I didn't know myself how its people and places had gotten such a hold on me. But there it is. There's magic in it. Ultimately, "Skylight Confessions" is not about fate versus free will, or even about a paradoxical conflation of the two. It's about the unresolvable contradictions that lie at the heart of life.

Or is it?

Ann Harleman is the author of "Happiness," "Bitter Lake," and the forthcoming "Thoreau's Laundry: Stories." She can be reached at annharleman.com.