Alice Hoffman's 'Red Garden' could use a little pruning

By Olivia Barker, USA TODAY

So how does Alice Hoffman's Red Garden grow?

  • The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman is intertwined with tales of the families who founded the tiny (fictional) Berkshires town of Blackwell, Mass.

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    The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman is intertwined with tales of the families who founded the tiny (fictional) Berkshires town of Blackwell, Mass.

handout

The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman is intertwined with tales of the families who founded the tiny (fictional) Berkshires town of Blackwell, Mass.

Lush and full, intertwined with tales of the families who founded the tiny (fictional) Berkshires town of Blackwell, Mass. Hoffman digs up the dirt on 250 years of Blackwell history: its settlers and interlopers, their descendants and the one cryptic constant in their lives, a garden of red earth that nourishes only red vegetation.

The prose, fittingly hushed, toys with the truth of the town, as though the facts were "stretched out like the muslin" used by the early residents for their needlepoint samplers.

Of course, in unearthing the legend of Blackwell, Hoffman taps into the story of America, ticking off often predictable milestones Forrest Gump-style. The great influenza of 1918 strikes? Check. The Great Depression and the WPA leave their mark? Check. Vietnam, communes and hippies turn up? Check, check, check.

The Red Garden

By Alice Hoffman

Crown, 270 pp., $25

With every chapter of the novel comes a new chapter in the town's history ? and a new, if vaguely familiar, crop of characters (they're the children and grandchildren of the folks in the preceding chapters, after all). The effect is dizzying.

It would have been helpful if Garden had opened (or ended) with various Blackwell family trees ? but then maybe Hoffman's point is to show how tangled our collective roots really are.

Hoffman describes a river as "changing and quick, always a surprise." The same could be said for her Garden.

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