"The Red Garden" is a collection of 14 stories that unfold, over the course of three centuries, in a Berkshire County town famous for its eels, the dogs and bears who are forever altering the course of human destiny, and its blood-red soil. When I need a memorable book to keep me warm on a winter's night, I generally look no further than Hoffman. Look-No-Furthers, those apples are called, a gentle admonition that the fruit isn't redder somewhere down the road. The Red Sox are invariably on the tube at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill, and the Tree of Life, planted by Johnny (Appleseed) Chapman in 1792 at the center of town, still drops apples into the laps of those caught between love and loss. The Apology Cake - Ava Cooper's very best - is red velvet, naturally. Auburn hair, freckles and mercurial tempers abound. Because red light has the longest wavelength, red is the color with the fiercest claim on the human eye, a power Hoffman exploits in "The Red Garden." Scarlet amaranth and crimson larkspur grow wild in Blackwell, Mass., the small town at the center of things. (Jan.Is pink - the pink of cupcake dresses and princess phones - necessary, The New York Times Sunday Book Review asked on Jan. The prose is beautiful, the characters drawn sparsely but with great compassion. The result is a certain ethereal detachment as Hoffman's deft magical realism ties one woman's story to the next even when they themselves are not aware of the connection. The novel moves forward in linked stories, each building on (but not following from) the previous and focusing on a wide range of characters, including placid bears, a band of nomadic horse traders, a woman who finds a new beginning in Blackwell, and the ghost of a young girl drowned in the river who stays in the town's consciousness long after her name has been forgotten. Hallie makes an immediate and intense connection to the wilderness, and the tragic severing of that connection results in the creation of the red garden, a small, sorrowful plot of land that takes on an air of the sacred. The story opens with the arrival of the first settlers, among them a pragmatic English woman, Hallie, and her profligate, braggart husband, William. Hoffman brings us 200 years in the history of Blackwell, a small town in rural Massachusetts, in her insightful latest.
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