Seventh Heaven
Alice Hoffman, 1990
Penguin Group USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425188484
Summary
Nora Silk doesn’t really fit in on Hemlock Street, where every house looks the same.
She's divorced.
She wears a charm bracelet and high heels and red toreador pants.
And the way she raises her kids is a scandal.
But as time passes, the neighbors start having second thoughts about Nora. The women’s apprehension evolves into admiration. The men’s lust evolves into awe. The children are drawn to her in ways they can't explain. And everyone on this little street in 1959 Long Island seems to sense the possibilities and perils of a different kind of future when they look at Nora Silk . . .
This extraordinary novel by the author of The River King and Local Girls takes us back to a time when the exotic both terrified and intrigued us, and despite our most desperate attempts, our passions and secrets remained as stubbornly alive as the weeds in our well-trimmed lawns.. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 16, 1952
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Adelphi Univ.; M.A., Stanford Univ.
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Born in the 1950s to college-educated parents who divorced when she was young, Alice Hoffman was raised by her single, working mother in a blue-collar Long Island neighborhood. Although she felt like an outsider growing up, she discovered that these feelings of not quite belonging positioned her uniquely to observe people from a distance. Later, she would hone this viewpoint in stories that captured the full intensity of the human experience.
After high school, Hoffman went to work for the Doubleday factory in Garden City. But the eight-hour, supervised workday was not for her, and she quit before lunch on her first day! She enrolled in night school at Adelphi University, graduating in 1971 with a degree in English. She went on to attend Stanford University's Creative Writing Center on a Mirrellees Fellowship. Her mentor at Stanford, the great teacher and novelist Albert Guerard, helped to get her first story published in the literary magazine Fiction. The story attracted the attention of legendary editor Ted Solotaroff, who asked if she had written any longer fiction. She hadn't — but immediately set to work. In 1977, when Hoffman was 25, her first novel, Property Of, was published to great fanfare.
Since that remarkable debut, Hoffman has carved herself a unique niche in American fiction. A favorite with teens as well as adults, she renders life's deepest mysteries immediately understandable in stories suffused with magic realism and a dreamy, fairy-tale sensibility. (In a 1994 article for the New York Times, interviewer Ruth Reichl described the magic in Hoffman's books as a casual, regular occurrence — "...so offhand that even the most skeptical reader can accept it.") Her characters' lives are transformed by uncontrollable forces — love and loss, sorrow and bliss, danger and death.
Hoffman's 1997 novel Here on Earth was selected as an Oprah Book Club pick, but even without Winfrey's powerful endorsement, her books have become huge bestsellers — including three that have been adapted for the movies: Practical Magic (1995), The River King (2000), and her YA fable Aquamarine (2001).
Hoffman is a breast cancer survivor; and like many people who consider themselves blessed with luck, she believes strongly in giving back. For this reason, she donated her advance from her 1999 short story collection Local Girls to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Hoffman has written a number of children's books, including Fireflies: A Winter's Tale (1999), Horsefly (2000), and Moondog (2004).
• Aquamarine was written for Hoffman's best friend, Jo Ann, who dreamed of the freedom of mermaids as she battled brain cancer.
• Here on Earth is a modern version of Hoffman's favorite novel, Wuthering Heights.
• Hoffman has been honored with the Massachusetts Book Award for her teen novel Incantation.
• When asked what books most influenced her life or career, here's what she said:
Edward Eager's brilliant series of suburban magic: Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Magic or Not, Knight's Castle, The Time Garden, Seven-Day Magic, The Well Wishers. Anything by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, J. D. Salinger, Grace Paley. My favorite book: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews;
Part American Graffiti, part early Updike, Seventh Heaven simultaneously chronicles the coming of age of a group of teenagers in a Long Island town, and the gradual dissolution of their parents’ repressed, middle-class world...A parable about changing times and changing values.
New York Times
Before you know it, you're half in love with the ordinary people who inhabit this book; you're seduced by their susceptibility to the remarkable.
The New Yorker
Literary magic... A beautiful, deceptively simple story about ordinary life in an ordinary housing development nestled beside the Southern State Parkway...Hoffman breaks down the barriers of time, distance, and reticence. She takes us inside the houses of Hemlock Street and shows us how our ordinary neighbors—like ouselves—are both unique and universal, and worthy of love.
Newsday
Brilliant and astonishing...Suffused with magic. If ever a book deserved to be called "haunting," this is it. In every sense of the word.
Newsweek
Nora is ahead of her time. A single mother in 1950s suburbia, she's strong, sexy, passionate, and mysterious. Everyone in town is touched by her, and in the mirror of her magnetism, people see themselves as never before. With Nora's courageous image before them, they begin to ask themselves questions they had never asked—finding answers they had never dared to imagine
Cosmopolitan
In the full flowering of her extraordinary talent, Hoffman has produced a wise, poignant and uplifting novel luminous with the sensitive evocation of ordinary lives. The setting is a Long Island, N.Y., housing development from 1959 to 1960, a place of conforming, happy families where husbands mow the lawns of the tract houses and wives meet for coffee, where "safety hung over the neighborhood like a net." The arrival of Nora Silk, a brassy divorcee with two young children, is the catalyst for disturbing changes and events, some of them violent. Plucky, impetuous, innocently seductive and a messy housekeeper, Nora is anathema to the subdivision wives, who ostracize her and whose children torment her eight-year-old clairvoyant son, Billy. But as Nora's presence disturbs the community, it is slowly revealed that behind the identical facades of the houses are secret lives of turmoil, restlessness and longing. As in all Hoffman novels, mundane existence is disrupted in surprising ways: families disintegrate, a teenager dies, a placid housewife disappears. And ultimately Nora, whose optimism about her dead-end life is unquenchable, becomes an instrument of healing. Hoffman has intuitive grasp of the thoughts and feelings that are masked by conventional behavior. Like some of her characters, she seems to have a spooky ability to read thoughts; how else to account for her unerring understanding of people of nearly every age and across a broad social spectrum? She has a gift for perceiving the cruelty of children and the wide gulf that yawns between the most loving, attentive parents and their offspring's unknown wishes and deeds. As usual, she tells more than a compulsively readable story. She does magic, she unsettles you and she leaves you feeling emotionally purged and satisfied.
Publishers Weekly
In felicitously recording the lives of newcomers-on-the-block Nora Silk and her sons, baby James and young Billy, Hoffman proves once again that she can tell a charming story about suburbia that is, at once, mundane and oddly transcendent. Nora, a young, sexy divorcee, moves to the suburbs of New York City following her divorce (in 1959 a scandalous event). All alone, she manages work, her sons, and assorted domestic responsibilities with quirky flair, if not thoroughness (and occasional help from assorted magic spells inherited from her grandfather). Hoffman takes the reader back to that apparently innocent time and into a "nice" neighborhood, where the sunny replicated exteriors of the houses hide sometimes desperate lives within. Nora and her neighbors signal lifestyles of the future: a woman walks out on her family, another goes back to work; a boy is abused and strikes back; a father leaves home. Combining reality with magic, this novel surpasses At Risk. —Lauren Bielski, New York
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Seventh Heaven:
1. Start with Noral Silk. What is it about her that, at first, the neighbors on Hemlock Street find so disturbing? Should Nora have tried a little harder to blend in with the residents, if only for Billy's sake? What, eventually, draws residents to Nora? What does she offer them?
2. What is Nora hoping to find or experience in her new life in the Long Island subdivision? What kind of lives are all the residents of this suburban world hoping to live? Are suburbs really the safe, insulated world their residents hope it will be?
3. What about Nora and 17-year-old Ace McCarthy? How do you feel about their relationship?
4. When Billy begins to practice his father's magic trick, is he really starting to look fainter or is that that others are simply ignoring him?
5. Hoffman shows us Hemlock Street, not just through Nora, but through the eyes of a number of residents. Talk about some of the other characters in the subdivision: Joe Hennessy (why does he find his role as detective troubling?); Donna Durgin (what prompts her diet and her abandonment of her family?); Danny and Rickie (what adolescent struggles are they going through?) What do these characters' stories reveal about life in a 1950's era subdivision?
6. The novel is set in the late 1950s, on the cusp of the '60s. Why might Hoffman have chosen that particular time for her story? What larger issue is she exploring? In what way were the '50s and '60s different from one another? (Think about Nora, for instance, and how she represents, thematically, a disruptive influence on a seemingly placid community.)
7. Hoffman makes use of magical realism, the incorporation of supernatural elements into otherwise realistic stories. She believes that we live in a magical world. How does she inject fantastic events and objects into this novel? Do you appreciate her fantasy or find it contrived?
8. By the end of the novel, how have characters changed? What, if anything, have they learned...or gained? Do you find the ending satisfying? Do you feel as if all the strings are tied neatly together...or are some things left open and unresolved?
8. Have you read other Alice Hoffman novels? How does this one compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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