FAITHFUL
By Alice Hoffman
258 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.
When we first meet young Shelby Richmond, the heroine of Alice Hoffman's latest novel, she's a wounded soul living in self-imposed exile in suburban Long Island. Shelby, we learn, holds herself responsible for a car crash that nearly killed her best friend. After a guilt-fueled suicide attempt and a stay in a mental ward, she now lives in her parents' basement, venturing out only to meet with Ben, her softhearted, Vonnegut-reading pot dealer. When the love-struck Ben persuades Shelby to move with him to New York City, the path to her inevitable redemption begins.
"Does no one else see all this pain floating around Manhattan?" Shelby wonders in one of her more solipsistic moments. What's most vexing about "Faithful" is that you're supposed to feel like a monster if you laugh. Hoffman builds Shelby out of trauma and not much else, and her observations suffer from a certain clichéd vagueness. Through Shelby, we learn that "feelings are best left concealed," that "she doesn't even think it's possible for her to smile" and, most egregiously, that "it's true, tragedy can bring you closer or drive you apart." Hoffman might be making a point about the banality of heartbreak, but it's lost in the actual banality.
Thankfully, once in Manhattan, Shelby begins to accrue detail and personality. She finds work at a pet store, fills her apartment with rescued dogs and eats nothing but Chinese takeout. She befriends a co-worker, Maravelle, as well as Maravelle's three skeptical and defiant kids. Hoffman adds a few of her trademark magic-realist touches, though they're lighter here than in previous books like "Practical Magic" and "The Probable Future." Shelby's best friend, now comatose, is said to have healing powers, and pilgrims crowd her bedroom to touch her hand. Someone keeps sending Shelby postcards inscribed with messages like "Say something," "Do something," "Want something." Each, of course, is exactly what she needs to hear.
But mostly the magic lies in a lack of real-world consequences for Shelby's more reckless lurches toward self-actualization. She confronts the man who's been stalking Maravelle's daughter in a manner that ought to get her killed, but she escapes with a pop on the nose. When she liberates a menacing "monster" dog from its junkyard captivity, it's tamed in an instant, as smitten with Shelby as we're meant to be.
"Faithful" is most successful when describing the everyday details and habits of Manhattan: the supervisor who runs the pet store "as if it's a small, corrupt country," the takeout deliveryman "who always seems in the grip of some great and quiet sorrow." If you can hang up your disbelief and surrender to the soft-focus glow, the book becomes enjoyable, satisfying even, as the mystery of the postcards is solved and the catharses arrive right on schedule. In the end, it feels as harmlessly saccharine as an after-dinner mint, with one exception — the disclosure, early in the book, that when Shelby was in the mental hospital she was raped repeatedly by an orderly. It's a terrible choice on Hoffman's part, seemingly made only to increase Shelby's misery. As though Hoffman realizes she's overreached by adding this dark twist, it's mentioned again only a handful of times before it vanishes like a bad dream. One wonders why it wasn't edited out completely. It's the only truly jarring misstep in this feel-good confection of mystical postcards and amiable one-eyed dogs, in which every tragedy ends in uplift and you can see the grace coming for miles.
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