Ms. Hen reviews A Map of the World

A Map of the World

Jane Hamilton

Anchor Books

1994

Ms. Hen bought this book a while ago at the branch of the library near where she works. Some people might think it’s strange to buy a book at a library, but they are considerably cheaper than at bookstores, and the money supports the library, so everybody wins. This book sat on Ms. Hen’s shelf for some time. She bought it because she had read another book by the author, WHEN MADELINE WAS YOUNG, which she enjoyed.

Ms. Hen thinks this book is long and winding. The print in the book is small, so it took her a long time to read. The problem Ms. Hen had with this book is that it’s extremely sad. She knows that most literary fiction is about people who are sad, but this is one of the saddest books she has read. It’s about how a woman’s life can turn one day and then spiral downward out-of-control into a pit out of which she can never return.

This novel is about Alice, a woman married to Howard, who live on a dairy farm with their two daughters, Claire and Emma. They are both college educated and it was Howard’s dream to own a dairy farm. After they were married they purchased a large piece of land with help from his mother.  Alice is babysitting her friend Theresa’s children when one girl, Lizzy, accidentally drowns in the pond on their land. Alice is riddled with guilt, and becomes depressed and immobile. Soon after that, she is accused of sexually molesting some boys where she works as a school nurse.

Alice ends up in jail, and Howard and her daughters are desperate. Her friend Theresa is heartbroken about Lizzy. Everyone’s life is terrible in this novel. One of the aspects that Ms. Hen didn’t like about this book is that all the characters seem to be pretentious. She does not usually like books about rural areas, because that is not the world that she understands. Ms. Hen prefers urban novels, but everything she read about this book was positive, so she decided she needed to stick to it. It was considered one of the best books of the year when it came out, but Ms. Hen thinks it’s too depressing to be one of her best books of this year.

One thing Ms. Hen did like about this novel was the sense of place. She felt she really knew what the farm looked like, and she felt that the characters loved the land and the house. Ms. Hen liked that the characters felt connected to the land, even thought they had not lived there that long. The entire surrounding area was turning into unattractive housing developments, and theirs was the last farm in that area of Wisconsin. There are enough chickens in the book to keep Ms. Hen’s radar on, even though the book brought her down.

One other piece of the novel Ms. Hen admires is the inner lives of the characters, especially Alice. She has a rich fantasy life about everyone around her; she has the capability to imagine people in their ordinary lives, what they do and how they spend their time, which most people do not, unless they are writers. Ms. Hen wonders if the author is projecting her propensity to imagination onto Alice, giving her insight that a regular person would not have. Alice might not be a regular person, but she is invented by a writer who thinks like most writers do.

Ms. Hen did not love this book. She understands that the world is sad, but when she reads something, she wants to be enlightened or invigorated in some way. She doesn’t like to just be brought down. She realizes, and knows it’s true, that life sucks and then you die, but she prefers to read books that distract her from that fact rather than remind her of it.