Skylight Confessions

Skylight Confessions
Alice Hoffman
Little Brown and Company
ISBN: 0-316-05878-5
General Fiction
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

In this 21 first century of technological miracles taken for granted and privileges demanded as rights, something is missing. Our children are tested out of their childhoods and they lose their sense of wonder before they can barely walk. We’ve forgotten how to communicate and have a true dialectic because our language is gone. The writer Joyce Carol Oates said: “We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.” But aren’t we more than a Jungian collective unconscious without responsibility? Shouldn’t we learn from these genetic memories instead of just retaining them like some vestigial tail? It is frightening to think that minds that could create something as magnificent as the Eiffel Tower or the beauty of the Sistine Chapel can also build bombs that kill people but leave buildings intact and still resort to calling countries with differences of opinion that strive towards our standard of living the “Axis of Evil”. Not to mention the majority of our population so captivated by the inanities of reality television showing the worse of humanity as entertainment. Believing in fairy tales, pursuing the dream of happily-ever-after might be the only thing left that renews our spirituality and separates us from the animals. The original fairy tales, such as Grimm’s and Mother Goose were written for adults. They became watered down over the years, told as bed time stories and taught as moral lessons. There is a darker brutal side to fairy tales that have been lost in the retelling and mirrored by life, that is why Oscar Wilde said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” (some may argue otherwise)
Alice Hoffman’s (Author of Practical Magic and The Ice Queen) new novel, Skylight Confessions is a return to the adult fairy tale. She asks us to believe in something other than our superficial selves. Call it unconditional love. Call it a higher purpose that refuses to be labeled, categorized or pigeon holed. Call it magic. Magic is so much easier to believe than our reality of e-coli spinach, mercury in our fish, and authenticity of so-called male enhancement pills.
Skylight Confessions begins like a fairy tale, “a once upon a time”, “She was his first wife, but at that moment when he first saw her she was only a seventeen year-old girl named Arlyn Singer who stood out on the front porch on an evening that seemed suspended in time.”
On the night of her father’s funeral, Arlyn promises herself that the next man she sees will be her true love. She chooses John Moody, a college student that has lost his way. John spends the night with Arlyn and she gives up her virginity. John runs away back to his college and later to his wealthy parent’s home, The Glass Slipper. Arlyn tracks him down because she is carrying his child, they eventually marry. In a child’s fairy tale, happily-ever-after comes after marriage, but Skylight Confessions is written for adults, where happily ever after comes only as much as the world allows Skylight Confessions is divided into three sections: Part 1 The Ghost Wife, Part 2 A House Made of Stars and Part 3 The Red Map. In Part 1 The Ghost Wife John and Arlyn beget a son, Sam in a loveless marriage, where Arlyn’s feels that she might as well be ghost because of the way John looks through her. Her search for love and renewal of magic leads her to a passionate affair, from which she gives birth to a baby daughter named Blanca. Later, like in a fairy tale, Arlyn suffers from the repercussions of her actions. Her “sin” of adultery develops into cancer.
In Part 2, A House Made of Stars Hoffman explores the lives of the Moody children, Sam and Blanca without their mother. In a physical sense they are haunted by memories of their mother especially Sam. He slips deeper into mental illness. John Moody is literally haunted by Arlyn’s ghost. Enter Meredith, a young woman tormented by restless spirits of her own past. She becomes a nanny/companion to Sam and Blanca. She is a calming influence to the Glass Slipper and is instrumental in helping Sam deal with his angst of mental illness and drug abuse.
Hoffman best sums up fairy tales and their relationship to the Skylight Confessions in part 3 of her novel, The Red Map. Blanca, now an adult living in London., is the owner of a book store, called, Happily Ever After that sells only fairy tales. Hoffman writes, “It made sense that a girl that had grown up in a house called the Glass Slipper would be partial to fairy tales; her senior thesis at university had been entitled, The Lost and The Found, a study of those who managed to find a way out of the woods and of those that were never seen again, whether they had been snagged on thorn bushes or caught up in chains or stewed into a soup of flesh and bones.”
Hoffman brings the reader into the novel with simple but elegant language as an observer, but at the same time a participant. Skylight Confessions is peopled with characters so familiar, that they might be neighbors or relatives that are discussed over backyard fences and friendly games of pinochle. Skylight Confessions is a short book that is easily accessible but goes so deep into the human condition and is so entertaining, that like a beloved fairy tale of magic, heartache and splendor, it should be read over and over again.