Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman, Sandra Burr (Read by)

From Barnes & Noble

When March Murray and her teenage daughter return to the town of her youth to attend a funeral, she comes face to face with the troubled man she still loves desperately. Against the advice of everyone in town, she follows her heart and leaves a broken marriage in her wake. Read by Susan Ericksen.

From the Publisher

March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. After nearly twenty years of living in California, March is thrust into the world of her past. She finds that Mrs. Dale knew more of life than March could have ever suspected; that her brother Alan, whose tragic history has left him grief-stricken, has turned to alcohol as his only solace; and that Hollis, the boy she once loved, is the man she can't seem to stay away from.

Here on Earth is the dramatic and lyrical account of the joys of love, as well as the destruction that love can release. Erotic, disturbing, and compelling, this is without a doubt Alice Hoffman's most unforgettable novel.

"[Hoffman is] a dreamy and mesmerizing storyteller." - The New Yorker

Karen Karbo

Here on Earth' owes a lot to 'Wuthering Heights.' It is a testament to Hoffman's gifts for language and narrative -- not to mention her boldness -- that the novel works at all. . . despite Hoffman's confident lyricism, her novel's premise -- of doomed, fated love, submitted to without question -- never becomes fully plausible. -- New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Often, in her soulful novels, Hoffman (Practical Magic, etc.) lets mystical atmospherics-animals that take on superhuman qualities, intense colors and temperatures, minute vibrations in the air that signal ghosts or spirits-do all the work while her characters behave in strange and incredible ways under the influence of forces outside themselves. In this novel, the characters' behavior, while highly emotional, is initially at least traceable to psychological motivation. Unfortunately, Hoffman abandons psychological credibility halfway through, after which her protagonist, March Murray, behaves like an automaton. When March comes back to her childhood home in a small Massachusetts town after 19 years in California, she is swept with longing for Hollis, her former soul mate and lover who ran away in a fit of pique. March waited for him for three years, then married her next-door neighbor, Richard Cooper. When Hollis finally did return, he wed Richard's sister, who has since died. Hollis now determines to win March back, and she can't resist his single-minded pursuit. Hoffman conveys the mesmerizing lure of a lost love with haunting sensuality; but March's excuses for Hollis's violent personality and for his physical abuse of her and her teenaged daughter, Gwen, are well beyond the willed myopia of even obsessive love. Other love affairsbetween the housekeeper who raised March and the man who was her father's law partner; and between rebellious teenager Gwen (the best character by far, drawn with delightful realism) and March's reclusive brother's sonare described with much more insight and plausibility. The high drama of this novel, and Hoffman's assured and lyrical prose, may carry the day for readers who can accept the premise that a passionate obsession can make sweet reason, maternal protectiveness and the instinct for self-preservation fly out the window.

Library Journal

As this novel opens, March Murray Cooper returns to her hometown, ostensibly to bury the woman who raised her but needing to resolve the unfinished business of her youthful love for Hollis, from whom she has been separated for years. Hollis has now grown into a man embittered by loneliness. He has learned neither to forgive nor to forget, and March must discover whether he can ever learn to love. Hoffman (Practical Magic, LJ 12/94) takes great care here to examine the many facets of love and relationships, turning them like a prism to reflect on March and Hollis. Hoffman's evocative language and her lyrical descriptions of place contrast sharply with the emotional scars that her characters must uncover and bear. Her novel is a haunting tale of a woman lost in and to love; it will enthrall the reader from beginning to end. Highly recommended. Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll., Sudbury, Ontario

Courtney Weaver

[W]hat makes Alice Hoffman's fiction so consistently compelling? Is it her story lines, reminiscent of Harlequin romances but with occasionally peppery dashes of cultural savviness? Or is it her characters, Anne Tyler-esque in their oddities, but without the irony? Or perhaps it's that quasi-New Age voice, lulling you into a Marianne Williamson world where one's fate is left to the movements of the sun, the moon, the planets or just some unnamed Higher Being?

Hoffman's fans won't be disappointed by the airy-fairy Here on Earth, her 12th novel, which weaves all of Hoffman's usual themes into a dreamy, intricate family melodrama, complete with alcoholism, wife-beating, obsessional love and whiffs of murder. It's the story of March Murray, who returns to her ancestral home at Fox Hill in New England after spending decades away in "lemon-colored" Palo Alto. In tow is her difficult teenage daughter Gwen, who is described as "pretty ... in spite of all her sabotage." At issue is a death in the family, but we know that March is really back to face her old ghosts, this time in the form of her adopted brother Hollis, whom she has been obsessively thinking about ever since his disappearance 20 years earlier.

Confused? Don't be. Here on Earth, despite its convoluted plot threads and histories, is at heart a romance novel with a bite. As with a good made-for-TV movie, you can pretty much guess what will happen to poor old March, whose naiveté is at best frustrating and at worst unlikable. Nor is it any surprise that Hollis -- with his black, snapping eyes, and whose exits are followed by a blast of cold wind -- reveals himself to be Evil Incarnate: Subtlety is not one of Hoffman's strong points.

Still, this novel's comfy, confident voice is enough to lure you into an armchair for the better part of an evening. Hoffman's world is a place where emotions become aromas: Longing is "the scent of grass on her pillow"; anger is a "scorching scent"; mourning is "the scent of roses sweet and ripe and sorrowful." Moons peep out behind trees, fox-colored dogs herald the advent of evil and dreams are to be courted and followed.

Hoffman relies on her readers suspending a certain amount of disbelief, which may lull her into thinking she can get away with some occasionally terrible writing. "One look from him is more substantial than the wooden bar she's leaning her elbows upon," Ms. Hoffman breathlessly writes when March spies Hollis for the first time. "It's realer than the bottles of whiskey lined up behind the counter; realer than the pull of fabric as Susie tugs on her jacket." Thankfully, descriptions like that are few and far between. Ms. Hoffman may have more in common with Robert James Waller than Robert Louis Stevenson, but Here on Earth is no toothless romance. It's curiously pleasurable, and reading it induces only a minimum of guilt. --Salon

Kirkus Reviews

From the author of Practical Magic (1995), among others, a kind of inside-out Bridges of Madison County in which the middle- aged mother of a teenager falls in love with a bad man, leaves her husband for him, and winds up abused and isolated. The results are predictably depressing.

It might seem that March Murray has purely sentimental reasons for leaving her apparently happy life in California (nice house, professor husband) to attend her former housekeeper's funeral in Jenkintown, Mass., the bleak, suffocatingly tiny town where she grew up. After all, Mrs. Dale did help March's father raise her after the girl's mother died, and she remained a loyal friend until her death. But anyone who knew March in her teenage years must suspect that her real reason for returning with sullen teenage daughter in tow is for a reunion with Hollis, the bad boy March was once inseparable from. An abandoned child and the product of a series of detention homes, Hollis was brought to the Murray house as a charity-case boarder when he was in his teens. He kept his own counsel, except when sending smoldering glances March's way. The two became lovers until a misunderstanding split them apart—March to marry the rich boy next door, Hollis to amass a fortune, marry March's sister-in-law, and survive her to wait, brooding, for March's return. Their heated reunion leads to the breakup of March's marriage, and, despite the warnings of practically everyone in town, March moves into Hollis's gloomy mansion, puts up with his neurotic possessiveness, and watches him scare her daughter back to California before she realizes that the Hollis she lives with now is nothing but the evil, heartless relic of the wounded boy she once loved.

A chilly, hopeless love story with an unhappy conclusion. Hard to see what readers will find to like in such a tale.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Alice Hoffman: Good. It is nice to be here.

Alice Hoffman: Well, I think mostly no, because I am not writing from reality-based situations. I think of my books as being like a dream -- in a dream every character is little piece of you, and that is how my novels work.

Alice Hoffman: That is a good question, but a complicated question. The truth is, I don't like labels. If people say I do magic realism, it is OK, but I don't think of my work in those terms. Maybe because I have written so many books over a long period of time, they are different from each other. That is what keeps it interesting for me.

Alice Hoffman: Thanks. I just finished a reading tour, but it did not include Canada. Thank you for the invitation.

Alice Hoffman: Hey, Rita. No, I am really more interested in emotional truth. The book closest to being autobiographical is SEVENTH HEAVEN. It takes place in Long Island, where I grew up, in the time I grew up, but everything else is imagined.

Alice Hoffman: When I start working on a book, I always think I know what it is going to be about, but for me, the process of writing is the way I find out what a book is really going to be about. My problem is that I have too many ideas and I won't have time to finish them all.

Alice Hoffman: When you write fiction, you don't have to know anything. All you need is to know the emotional truth. But it is true, I like to write about love.

Alice Hoffman: Thank you for saying this. When I write a novel, it is not to teach someone else but to teach myself. It always seems to me that people who don't understand domestic abuse seem to be missing the fact that the abuser is not a stranger, it is a husband, father, or boyfriend, somebody loved, and it makes the situation very complicated. And thanks again for the comment -- it means a lot to me.

Alice Hoffman: No, I really haven't, because my book HERE ON EARTH is so different. What I am doing is taking some of the themes she used. I would not try to copy her; I would be crazy to do that. I love WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

Alice Hoffman: The characters I write about are not based on real people. To be honest, I think they contain an element of myself. I want to write fiction. I am not trying to get at a reality that is already there. Maybe we all know somebody like Alan. If we all know somebody like Alan, then his character rings true for different readers even though they have had different experiences.

Alice Hoffman: Well, thanks for your kind words. I hear that, too. I think it may start in January, directed by Griffin Dunne, who has directed ADDICTED TO LOVE, and it will star Sandra Bullock.

Alice Hoffman: Sometimes I do start with an exercise. I sometimes find when I finish a novel and then start another that I forget how to write. I write down facts about the characters so I know them inside and out. And my favorite part of HERE ON EARTH was that I felt so immersed in this place when I was writing it. I painted my office so it felt like I was in autumn all the time, I covered it with leaves and painted it orange and green. And there I was.

Alice Hoffman: I just did Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, and I won't be doing any more soon. Sorry I missed you.

Alice Hoffman: Yeah, I guess it is HERE ON EARTH. The truth is, my favorite book is the one that hasn't been written yet, so it is always the next one.

Alice Hoffman: My favorite things to read were fairy tales when I was younger because I felt they had an emotional truth in them. I was also a fan of reading anything involving a dog. I just wrote a children's book, entitiled FIREFLIES, and it has some of those elements in it.

Alice Hoffman: PRACTICAL MAGIC looks like it might be, but you never know in Hollywood. It seems like PRACTICAL MAGIC may be made into a movie in January.

Alice Hoffman: I do believe in synchronicity, and I do believe there are magical elements in everyday life. All you have to do is look at fireflies on a summer night. If that is not magic, I don't know what is.

Alice Hoffman: Sometimes. I don't read them all. I think they are dangerous for writers to read -- it is not a good idea to be influenced by too much praise or too much criticism, because really you are writing the book for yourself, and if other people like it, great.

Alice Hoffman: Such a good question, and it is something I deal with every day. I like to work really early, before that critic is at work, and just let your writing flow even for a short time. I always think the more you write, the more free you become.

Alice Hoffman: It feels really, really good.

Alice Hoffman: Well, reading. I am mostly interested in writing. I have kids, dogs, and friends, and basically that is it. That is my life.

Alice Hoffman: Well, I feel like I am back and around in my writing. It is an important place for me emotionally. I still have friends there, and I do go back and visit.

Alice Hoffman: Well, I don't know. I am pretty open to believing in pretty much anything. In my real life, I am something of a realist. I am the kind of person who, when invited to a friends house for dinner and they begin talking about the ghost that lives there, I leave. I might believe in it, but I am not ready for it.

Alice Hoffman: My grandmother did. I was very close to her, and she told me lots of stories about growing up in Russia that I feel influenced my work. She was very supportive -- unconditional love.

Alice Hoffman: Thank you. I don't. I really like the cover of HERE ON EARTH. I don't design them, but I feel like I have been really lucky. I love this cover, and I think it is the best.

Alice Hoffman: When I am writing fiction, I don't read. When I was traveling with my book, I read THE COLOR OF WATER by James McBride. I love Anne Tyler, Amy Tan.... There are a lot of people I enjoy reading, but not when I am working.

Alice Hoffman: Interesting question, because it doesn't feel like a decision. When I write the book, the voice comes to me. HERE ON EARTH is about a whole town, so the voice telling the story has to know pretty much everything about that town.

Alice Hoffman: I am ready to believe.

Alice Hoffman: I have read both of those writers, and I think they are doing some very interesting work. Maybe it is my bias, but I have a bias for North American women writers.

Alice Hoffman: I have been online, but I have to say, I am not online myself. Personally I tend to get addicted to things, and I am afraid I might get addicted online instead of writing my book.

Alice Hoffman: When I am working on a book, I write very early in the morning for a couple of hours; then I write on and off all day till about 3. But when I am working on a book, I am very involved; I carry it around with me even when I am not working on it.

Alice Hoffman: Well, I just wanted to thank you for inviting me to be here today, and thanks to my readers.