Blue Diary

Alice Hoffman

At first, it seems like a great premise for a novel. You take a happily married New England couple, Ethan and Jorie, and you drop a bomb on their marriage. In this case we learn that Ethan is wanted for the rape and murder of a fifteen year old girl some thirteen years earlier. Alice Hoffman isn't so interested in Ethan himself, after all, he admits his guilt. She is more interested in how Jorie and their young son react. Ethan's crime took place before meeting Jorie and since meeting and marrying her he has lead a blameless life. A pillar of the community, a volunteer firefighter and a good husband and father. So where does that leave Jorie? And will she stand by him?

But it's harder to make this kind of plot work than you might think. For Ethan's downfall to have dramatic momentum he needs to fall from a great height. And this is the problem. Ethan and Jorie, we're told, are the most beautiful couple in town. And, not only is Ethan beautiful, he is also wise, reliable and brave. And Jorie is the perfect wife and mother. Ethan single-handedly saves children from burning buildings. You can taste summer in every spponful of Jorie's home-made jam. Ethan and Jorie have better sex than a couple who have been married twelve years have a right to have.

The problem, of course, with all this is that you've stopped believing in the characters by around page seven and stopped caring about them a couple of pages after that. Which leaves 294 excruciatingly overwritten pages still to go. Oh, there's some stuff about Ethan and Jorie's son's first love, about Jorie's best friend's cancer and a chapter in which Jorie goes off to Maryland to find the dead girl's family but why bother?