A Fairytale of [New York]: Alice Hoffman's Green Angel

Forget that we haven't yet forgotten it, or that we're still living and working and fighting through its direct implications. The next major milestone anniversary of 9/11 is upon us, and I'm preparing myself for a glut of 5 year anniversary memorial specials, documentaries, inadvertent kitsch artifact and chain e-mails with angels and eagles laced with if-you-do-not-forward-to-50-people threats - we love this stuff, don't we? It sure beats grief and thoughtful meditation. But Alice Hoffman may have beaten the bloggers, the forwarders, and the 24-hour-news networks to the punch with her latest young adult novel, entitled Green Angel - a compact story about grief and meditation that nevertheless packs enough schmaltz and whispery new age platitude to fill a 12-hour major network mini-series.

15-year-old Green always had a gift for growing things. She's had an almost fraternal bond with trees and flowers and plants as long as she could remember, until one day, she loses her whole family is a very 9/11-ish apocalypse. Though the ground around her is charred, the water has turned brackish and undrinkable, and most everyone in her (the?) world is either dead, dying, or escaping from their survival with the aid of drugs, booze, and loud music, Green maintains a sense of perseverance (if not necessarily optimism). In order to ward off various demons and predators, she becomes Ash: tattooing herself with thorns and ravens, hacking all her hair off Sigourney Weaver style, and eventually caring for the various living remnants of a lost world: an old, blind crone; a younger, mysterious boy; and various other plants and birds and rocks and things. But try as she might to harden herself into this gray new identity, she is still Green on the inside.

Like her previous novel, Indigo, Hoffman has attempted here to apply the magic and whimsy of centuries-old fairy tales (not to mention the anthropological studies of Joseph Campbell) to more immediately topical themes. But where Indigo had an actual setting and characters that actually had relationships with one another, Green Angel substitutes strategic vagueness for exposition. The time is simultaneously modern and Medieval. The city is simply "the city". Green is less character than archetype. With references to a giant explosion, and people living among us who made the explosion happen, Green Angel wants to be a 9/11 novel (for kids), without the 9/11. But then, who is Hoffman fooling with her self-consciously rhythmic, repetitive (at times, hypnotically circular) prose?

Still, there's something touching and genuine at the heart of the book. Green's denial of her own grief - the way she wants to fully identify herself with the sudden barrenness of the world - and her journey back to her Green-ness all rings true. But part of what made Indigo feel so magical was how grounded its not-so-everyday characters were in a real world. They lived in a town with a name and history. They had parents with names and real-life backstories. Green Angel doesn't read like a fairy tale so much as it feels like a high-priced therapy session disguised as contemporary myth. It's certainly admirable to have written a story for teens about dealing with something as catastrophic and unimaginable as 9/11, but Alice Hoffman does us all a disservice by not setting this story of magic in the face of unreal horror in our very real world. Green may have found the magical powers within herself to recover from the apocalypse, but then, she was never really a girl to begin with. I would have loved a story about a real kid (with a name like Sarah or Kelly or Matthew) who found that same magic on a sunny Tuesday morning in New York City.

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MORE ALICE HOFFMAN:

Indigo (2002)