PARTING THE WALTERS

JANE HAMILTON'S NOVEL SEEKS THE NEXUS BETWEEN A YOUTH AND HIS OLDER SELF

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, April 5, 1998

Page: K4

Section: Books

Even before she was anointed by Oprah, Jane Hamilton had garnered critical acclaim for the psychic texture of her fiction: the close-focus, sometimes painful realism of both ``The Book of Ruth'' and ``A Map of the World.'' ``The Short History of a Prince'' is her third novel and arguably her best, for it matches its range of emotion with a technical precision both masterful and haunting. Its story takes place over the course of two decades, but the narrative moves between two pivotal points in Walter's life: the early 1970s, when he was a teenager in Oak Ridge, Ill., and the mid-'90s, when he has bailed out on cruel New York to return to the Midwest. Reflecting off each other as they do, these crucial eras show us Walter as he was and Walter as he will be. We know from the meticulous retrospective quality of the novel that Walter the adolescent has to watch his older brother die at 17 of Hodgkin's disease; know, too, that Walter the grown man will go back to the scene of the tragedy, taking a job teaching high school English in Otten, Wis. The one portrait continually informs the other: As Walter the teenager struggles with his emerging gayness, we get a glimpse of the losses and triumphs that lie ahead, then know when they occur what created them.

The effect is prismatic, and the events of the novel -- the shaping moments of a life, the little Jamesian decisions that can forge the entire road -- are delivered in layers, from varying perspectives. This careful sense of time makes Walter's familial saga over the years seem enigmatic without being withholding; the story unfolds like the dance Walter loves, as if preordained but hardly foreseen. By the time the boy becomes the man, he has recaptured the memory of that youthful splendor in the grass, when the first etchings of heartbreak and survival make us who we are.

The technique is reminiscent of the masters, of course, and Hamilton exhibits her affection for them often, without being heavy-handed. There are ghosts of Dickens, Woolf, and Eliot here, and Walter's English curriculum (as ``Mr. McCloud,'' in Otten) allows him to drop Emily Dickinson lines without seeming precious. As a student, he was equally passionate, but the love was for Tchaikovsky and Balanchine -- for the heavenly marriage of form and content that dance promised, then delivered. With his brother Daniel dying in a hospital a few miles away, Walter boards the el with his artistic soulmates, Mitch and Susan, to the dance studios in Chicago where they live out their adolescent dreams. A few will last: Within the trio, only Susan will emerge as a lifelong dancer, but all three have their own drama-laden narrative to enact among themselves. The title of ``The History of a Prince'' refers to Walter's starring role in ``The Nutcracker'' as well as his spontaneous embrace of a moment in ``Swan Lake''; even for the uninitiated, the dance portions of the novel are beautifully enacted and revealing. When Walter decides on a whim to portray for Mitch the good swan of Odette, the ensuing scene is one of pathos-ridden brilliance.

Death is no foreigner to Hamilton's fiction; she has faced that final fact with clarity before, and does so here without sentimentality or cliched hope. Daniel's terminal illness is apparent from the beginning of the novel, and yet his dying -- his frail assumption of the starring role in the McCloud tragedy -- possesses a long and vigilant mystery, inviting the subtler truths of death to surface in Walter's story. Puzzled, then angered, by his brother's illness, Walter expresses neither reaction outright, much to Hamilton's credit. Instead he dances his heart out, ignores his parents, refuses to go to the hospital, mistreats Daniel's beloved dog. By the time grief fully arrives at Walter's door, he has taken refuge in every possible masquerade -- and to his great credit, he learns that grief is a lifelong affair.

The other strain throughout ``The Short History of a Prince'' is the less dramatic but equally insistent realm of family, epitomized here by Sue Rawson, Walter's lesbian aunt and a veritable exercise in Wagnerian thunderbolts. Mentor to her nephew's artistic longings, Sue Rawson assumes a formidable control over everything from Walter's inner aesthetic to the family's summer home on a Wisconsin lake. Walter has been drawn to Otten partly by the proximity of Lake Margaret, where generations have left their emotional and physical mark. The place is as close to a lodestone as anything he knows, and it offers a kind of solace to his story that winds up being structural as well as psychological.

The shortcomings in Hamilton's novel are rare; as with ``A Map of the World,'' she can imbue a character with a smugness that seems dangerously authorial, as when Walter disdains his straight brother-in-law's inner life. The few clunky moments in dialogue seem forced in part because so much of the narrative is seamless; Hamilton has eased time and memory throughout her novel with the expert abandon of a dancer in full pirouette. I was won over gradually and then thoroughly by ``The Short History of a Prince,'' which has an emotional authority that is almost a relief to encounter. An archeologist of the 24-hour shards that form a life, Hamilton has illuminated the details here with the sparkling hue of permanent memory: the secret glen of a parent's walk-in closet, the perfect -- and therefore elusive -- moments of a near-forgotten youth.

The first bell rang, and even as it sounded the students' voices came up the stairwell and into the hall. ``Thank you, Julian, or whoever you are,'' Walter said. He put his hands to his face, steadying himself, and then he went to the door and opened it to the here and now, to the noise and chaos and mess of this, his life.

JANE HAMILTON

From ``The Short History of a Prince''