Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World
Alice, the central character in Jane Hamilton's great 1994 novel A Map of the World, takes a one-two punch that could knock any of us flat, if not out cold. First this school nurse and wife of a Wisconsin dairy farmer is still looking for her swimsuit when the two-year-old daughter of Teresa, her best friend, drowns in the farm pond. Numb with grief and guilt, Alice is then arrested, charged with sexual molestation of a boy in her school. She's jailed for months, while virtually the entire community thinks the very worst of her.Most of the story is told from Alice's point of view, but in the middle third of the novel Hamilton gives us the perspective of Howard, her silent, handsome husband, for whom a dairy farm is a dream come true. Yet a lawyer, not to mention bail, costs money.
A third main character is Teresa, a devout Catholic woman who despite her daughter's death, perhaps because of Alice's carelessness, cannot turn against her friend. At least not until she spends a night in Howard's arms, albeit the two of them consumed more with grief than passion. Still she and Howard now have their own reason for feeling guilt.
Alice is clearly not guilty of the criminal charges against her, yet her trial proves dramatic anyway, mainly because we see it through her eyes and can read her compassionate thoughts about not just those who testify against her but also about those women with whom she lived with so long in jail.
As for the book's title, it refers to a map of an ideal country in an ideal world that Alice had drawn when she was a girl. She finds the map, in fact, while she is looking for that elusive swimsuit, and the image pops up here and there throughout the novel. Alice's own story shows us that such a perfect world is impossible, yet by the end we see that the only chance we have is for the people of our own world to accept, forgive and even love one another. The story is really all about grace.
No comments:
Post a Comment