A novel collection of stories

Is it a novel or a book of short stories? Surprisingly, it isn't always easy to tell.

Take Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, for example, or Mister Monkey by Francine Prose. Both consist of stories that could stand alone, yet they have characters and a few other points of reference in common. It helps when the author makes it clear what it is, as Edward Rutherfurd does when he tells the history of places like London, Paris and New York in a series of stories, some of which may take place decades or even centuries apart. He calls his books novels, so that is what they are. Other writers aren't as helpful.

I started reading Alice Hoffman's Blackbird House (2004) under the impression it was a novel. Soon I was not so sure. Some editions of the book identify it as a novel. Mine does not. Neither the paperback cover nor the copyright page makes it clear. Then I skipped ahead to a conversation with the author at the end of the book, where Hoffman refers to her "stories." So let's call it that, yet her book actually has much in common with Rutherfurd's. While Rutherfurd tells the history of a certain place with related, sometimes reoccurring characters, Hoffman does the same thing, but her place is a fictional New England house. Her "history" tells of the occupants of that house over a couple of centuries.

These stories are beautifully written in that lyrical style Hoffman does so well in her best work. Some end tragically, as with sailors lost at sea, a murder or a suicide, while others paint more positive pictures. As for painting pictures, the most important color on Hoffman's palette is red. In these stories we find red hair, red skin, red pears, red oaks, red-winged blackbirds and so on. There is the more common blackbird in the first story, "The Edge of the World," but after that it is a white blackbird that flies through the stories, as if it were the ghost of that original bird. Some characters view it as an omen, but whether it brings good luck or bad varies from story to story.

Hoffman says in the conversation at the end that Blackbird House began with a short story she was asked to write for the Boston Globe. That story, "The Summer Kitchen," inspired the rest.

I love this book, whatever it is.