Alice Hoffman is a prolific
novelist who has won high praise from a wide range of newspaper book critics; The
Ice Queen, her latest novel, is according to the publisher a
bestseller.  It is a short book, at a
little over 200 pages, and the unabridged audiobook read by Nancy Travis is
just 5 CDs long.  The central character
loses her mother at the age of eight, and she believes that this has damaged
her permanently.  She comes to think of
herself as an Ice Queen, unable and uninterested in loving anyone else,
especially after her grandmother dies and she goes to pieces.  Her brother comes up to New Jersey for the
funeral and sees she needs help, so he arranges for her to move down to Florida
to be in the same town as him.  Soon
after arriving there, she is struck by lightning.  She survives but is left with many odd symptoms, the most
significant of which is that she can no longer see the color red.  She joins a support group for lightning
strike victims, and through this she hears of, and eventually meets, a man who
is known as Lazarus.  He was also struck
by lightning, but it affected him even more, since he was dead for 40 minutes
before coming back to life.  His touch
is hot and he can make metal objects move without touching them.  When they have sex, he insists they do it in
the pitch dark.  When they are together,
she at last feels something. 

The Ice Queen feels like a
book formed by concepts: ice and fire, loss and love, science and the
supernatural.  Its nameless narrator is
more of an idea than a person.  The
message is simple enough: life can be wonderful despite the pains we
experience.  The characters are more
like archetypes than real people.  Their
actions all represent declarations of beliefs. 
For such a light book, it is enormously heavy handed.  Occasionally, her metaphors seem to go awry
in clumsy ways.  To give just one
example, the narrator says of her relationship with Lazarus, "We spent
most of our time in the bathtub; we had sex the way fish must, in waves, in the
cold, skins shivering into scales." 
The facts that fish don’t copulate and don’t shiver from cold seem not
to occur to her. 

Clearly, Hoffman is a more
thoughtful writer than most best-selling authors, and her preoccupations engage
many of her readers.  I tried to read a
previous novel by Hoffman several times, yet I could not push myself beyond the
first page.  I found it much easier to
listen to the audiobook version of The Ice Queen, read tidily by Nancy
Travis.  Yet nearly every paragraph
provokes a sense of exasperation, even of manipulation, by the overworked
symbolism and wooden characters. 
Hoffman’s admiring reviewers rave that this is one of her best books,
which helps me to conclude that I don’t want to read any others.  

© 2006 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.