A Map of the World
December 7th, 2002by Jane Hamilton
ISBN: 0385473117
Jane Hamilton is a good writer: she is careful in how she chooses her words (without seeming over-careful or prissy) and you have a sense that she always knows where her story is going.
I really liked this book — and I found at parts that it was almost unbearable. Not bad unbearable, but not to these characters you don’t unbearable. At one point, and I think this was a shift and not that I didn’t notice it earlier, the narration turns so that the characters are looking back to the ‘present’ experience of the novel. I needed this to happen, because I needed to know that they made it through. It was a fine line Hamilton walked: not many authors could pull off a small child’s death and an arrest for a false charge of sexual abuse involving the same character without entering the territory of over the top schlock.
Hamilton creates an unflinching look at grief, and gets the details right. The characters grapple with big questions: How to you find meaning in the details of life? What is betrayal, how does a marriage work? What does love mean? What does forgiveness mean? What does faith in practice look like?
That isn’t to say that there are no missteps in this book. I think the shift from the wife’s perspective to the husband’s and back is a bit (just a bit) too device-like, and the final section from the wife’s perspective could have used tighter editing. In the final analysis, these are small flaws in an interesting and challenging book.
