Sitting in a Cambridge, Mass., restaurant, one of America's most-loved authors mentions that she didn't store up memorabilia from her college years. No diplomas, report cards or awards from the bachelor's degree at Adelphi University or the master's in English from Stanford. But then Alice Hoffman produces two treasures: the 1973 letter that offered her a fellowship at Stanford and her scarlet-bound, typewriter-written master's thesis. These things she kept: They remind her of Stanford professor Albert J. Guerard, '34, PhD '38, and how much meaning she took from two years of studying with him.
Hoffman, MA '75, isn't sure whether her new book, The Dovekeepers (Scribner) —a rich historical novel set against the backdrop of the massacre and mass suicide at Masada in 70 C.E.—is her 29th book or her 30th. The roster includes Here on Earth (an Oprah Book Club choice), and Practical Magic, The River King and Aquamarine (made into movies), and last spring's The Red Garden, which, like many of its predecessors, became a New York Times bestseller. The Red Garden is dedicated to Guerard, "the great critic, writer and teacher who . . . changed the voice of American fiction and also changed my life." (An oval photo above the dedication shows a top-hatted Guerard, age 8, in front of the Paris Opera.)
The stories in her scarlet-bound master's thesis turned out to be an uncanny preview of coming Hoffman literary attractions. One story takes place in Israel, the setting for The Dovekeepers, a novel Hoffman calls her most ambitious undertaking to date. Another story involves immigrants from Russia in New York, subject matter that also happens to be "what I am writing about now." Another is "a magical piece" about New York City. Literary critics and devoted fans would agree that "a magical piece" describes most of Hoffman's body of work.
"It's all there," she says of the stories she wrote in her 20s at Stanford. "It didn't change. I'm still writing about the same things." Again she invokes her professor. "I think all writers are who they are from the beginning, and that was Guerard's thing. He said the most important thing for a writer is his or her voice."
Hoffman's literary agent, Elaine Markson, remembers being in the publisher's office when Turtle Moon sold its millionth copy. There's no total tally, but she knows that "millions of copies of [Hoffman's] books are out there. I think her influence is enormous."
Nancy Pate, a blogger who was the longtime book critic for the Orlando Sentinel, can speak to that influence. "The people I know who read Alice Hoffman love Alice Hoffman," Pate says. "We read everything she writes. We may not love everything equally, but we read it all. . . . She does great things with words. I just think there's magic there."
Magic—leaps of faith, not flying broomsticks—is a recurring motif for Hoffman. Her name arises when readers discuss magical realism, the literary genre in which the reliable, ordinary world encompasses bursts of the impossible. David Young, an Oberlin professor who edited an anthology of magical realism fiction, says that rather than trying to explain the inexplicable, "the magical realism author exploits it."
Most of the best-known authors to exploit that kernel have come from outside North America, such as Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, Chile's Isabel Allende or Italy's Italo Calvino. By contrast, Hoffman, who is North American, accessible and very prolific, can be easy to dismiss as a book-club favorite or a chick-lit lightweight.
The Dovekeepers, in which Hoffman tackles ancient history and religion, may prove harder to take for granted than her novels about domestic life in America. Hoffman spent five years researching and writing a vast novel that winds together the stories of four formidable women at Masada, where 900 Judeans in a mountain fortress held out against the Romans. While she was a visiting scholar at Brandeis University, Hoffman read everything she could find about Masada—and then digested journals of archeology so she could get details like food, clothing and ax handles right.
Hoffman made several visits to Masada, one time "when it was about 128 degrees." On the site which overlooks the Dead Sea, "I was shocked by the spiritual experience that I had. It's hard to articulate. It was a mystical experience. There was a timelessness. Everybody's stories were lingering there."
From the sole contemporaneous account of the massacre, by the historian Josephus, Hoffman learned there were survivors: two women who hid inside a cistern with five children. "I thought, that's my story," Hoffman says. Nevertheless, the project was daunting—the story's scope was far broader than Hoffman had imagined. "If I had known what I had to know, I never would have written the book."
One early reader of The Dovekeepers sounds pleased that she did. Providing a dust-jacket blurb for the book, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Hoffman's literary idol, calls the novel "beautiful, harrowing, a major contribution to twenty-first century literature." Hoffman was floored.
"I do not mean to compare myself to Toni Morrison, but when I read Beloved, I felt like I was reading a map of the author's soul," Hoffman says. With The Dovekeepers, "I feel like for me, this is the map of myself. This is the book that I was supposed to write."
Some combination of map, index and word cloud for Hoffman's works would include such adjectives as enchanted, fabulist, gothic, Grimm, lovelorn, lyrical, miraculous, metaphoric, mythic, orphaned, outcast, outsider, pining, unrequited. That might sound grim, as well as Grimm, but Hoffman's characters usually come to optimistic ends, or at least consolation.
Conjuring up the four Jewish women who narrate sections of The Dovekeepers, Hoffman relies on her familiar themes of sisterhood, friendship and the wisdom that mothers hand down to their daughters—but with urgency wrought by war and wrenching life dramas. Yael, daughter of an expert assassin, bears her father's unending rage that his wife died giving birth to her. Revka has witnessed her daughter's hideous death at the hands of Roman soldiers. Aziza, a warrior's daughter, is raised as a boy who becomes a fearless marksman. In Shirah, Hoffman delivers her almost mandatory component of mysticism: a woman schooled in magic and medicine who can "see" beyond the earthly world. All share an indomitable quality of resilience that lets the reader know that life, and faith, will go on. "I am always writing about survivors," Hoffman explains.
That theme gained heightened resonance when Hoffman was diagnosed with breast cancer. Twelve years have passed since her last treatment, and in gratitude for the care she received at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, she established the Hoffman Breast Center there. (Each year she hosts a glittering "Evening With Your Favorite Authors" to benefit the facility.) Shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Hoffman also started the Green Angel Foundation, which supports women's health and education.
Hoffman, long married and the mother of two adult sons, kept writing throughout her bout with cancer. During one crucial bone scan, she thought up the entire plot for The River King. "I always feel that I am writing because there is just not that much time."
Hoffman and Guerard maintained a close relationship until he died in 2000; she sent him every manuscript she wrote for feedback. She credits him with giving her the guidance and the watchwords that made her the writer she is today. "Everything he taught me—that is still how I run my writing life.
"I had the best writing teacher in the country," Hoffman says. "And I will always be his student."
Elizabeth Mehren is a journalism professor at Boston University.
