Intersecting lives, touched by an angel

ALICE HOFFMAN (Deborah Feingold)

The Third Angel
By Alice Hoffman
Shaye Areheart, 278 pp., $25

The success of any novel, E. M. Forster maintained, rests on the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says. In "The Third Angel," as in many of her previous 24 novels, Alice Hoffman sets herself a difficult task. Its menagerie of characters includes a heron, a ghost, and a hotel room. Its plot relies heavily on coincidence. Its structure is one guaranteed to put the brakes on narrative momentum.

"The Third Angel" takes the form of a triptych, moving backward in time, each section following one of three heroines whose lives connect. There's Maddy, who in 1999 travels to London for her sister's wedding to a dying Englishman, and impulsively sleeps with him; then Frieda (the groom's mother), who in 1966 becomes pregnant by one man and marries another; and finally Lucy (the bride's mother), who in 1952, as a motherless girl of 12, travels to London for her stepmother's sister's wedding and witnesses a gruesome murder-suicide.

Novels like "The Hours" and "Three Junes" have made this three-part structure something of an architectural cliché, and initially Hoffman seems weighed down by it. The first section contains a number of stylistic infelicities - restating information already given as if it were new, simplistic sentence structure, limited vocabulary, jarring shifts in point of view - which, despite the melodramatic action, give it a perfunctory feel. "He left without saying anything more. She wasn't even worth that much to him. Maddy got dressed. She felt used and bitter. She went down to the hotel restaurant and sat in a booth in the bar. There was an elderly gentleman having a drink and a couple laughing and sharing dessert. The waitress came over." For much of Maddy's section it's hard to feel for her or with her. As the wicked sister, she's clearly not intended to be an endearing character: "She did her work and kept to herself, the sort of woman who could stand idly by while children removed a butterfly's wings or buried a toad in the mud." But she also - because Hoffman's summarizing and labeling keep us at arm's length - fails to be interesting.

What is interesting is the theme of compassion, with its evocation of the Third Angel. In this first section it takes the form of caring for those who are suffering. Allie, the good sister, tends her dying husband, Paul, even though she realizes he's been unfaithful to her. "She got into bed beside him. It was a drugged sleep, a faraway sleep. His eyes were open. It was the last kind of sleep; when you're no longer fully awake, and won't be again. They were face-to-face. Paul said something but Allie couldn't hear him, not even when she put her ear up to his mouth. She thought it was something about a mockingbird. She hadn't wanted to fall in love, but she had. Just the tiny bit of information about him, his preference for mourning doves, for example, now seemed the most important fact on earth. She wanted to remember it always. She wanted to study doves, their habits, their bone structure." Allie was also the one who, when they were young girls, took care of her and Maddy's dying mother. Yet in the end, both sisters experience the hard-won, ambiguous gifts bestowed by the Third Angel. Neither the Angel of Life nor the Angel of Death, this angel, in the words of Paul's grandfather, is "the most curious. . . . 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."

If the first section is somewhat heavy going, the second and third sections of "The Third Angel" amply reward the persevering reader. Hoffman's luminous language bounces us into accepting not only coincidence but also its consequences. Part 2 follows Frieda, Paul's mother, a young chambermaid at the same hotel where Maddy will stay 30-some years later. Like Maddy, Frieda hears and sees the ghost that inhabits Room 707 because she's infatuated with the wannabe rock star in Room 708 (later to be Maddy's room). Her consummated but unrequited passion results in a love child - Paul - who will become Maddy's brother-in-law and partner in adultery. In this section the theme of compassion is distilled into the love between parent and child. Frieda, who accompanied her doctor father on rounds as a child, cares for her son as her father cared for her.

Part 3 is even richer and more vivid. Lucy, crossing the ocean with her father and unsympathetic stepmother, has "the look that motherless girls sometimes have, uncared for in some deep way, hair unbrushed, socks mismatched." Won over by both language and character - who could resist bright, quirky, complicated Lucy? - we find ourselves eagerly following the novel's collision course. In the same hotel where Frieda will eventually work, Lucy is befriended by the man staying across the hall in Room 708. Her compassion - that invitation to the Third Angel - makes Lucy easy prey. This handsome, romantic stranger wants something from her, as it turns out - something that will turn her into an accomplice to tragedy, changing her life forever.

Bounce!

Ann Harleman is the author of "Happiness," "Bitter Lake," and "Thoreau's Laundry." Her new novel, out this month, is "The Year She Disappeared."

• Searched
• E-Mailed