So Much Pretty

Sometimes you open a book and expect one thing, and though what you are reading is excellent, because it's not what you expect you are momentarily disoriented, like biting into a peach and expecting a pear. I had that experience with Cara Hoffman's So Much Pretty, which was listed in the New York Times as one of the best crime books of the year, which had me expecting more of a genre book. So Much Pretty, though it does center around crimes, is really a literary work, and a good one at that.

So Much Pretty is set in a small rural town in New York state. "Upstate New York" is a pretty big area, which can include everything from Buffalo to Plattsburgh, but I got the sense that this was in central New York, in dairy country. It is defined as being in Appalachia, also, but other than that, the town (Haeden) is fictional, but clearly Hoffman has some place in mind.

"Haeden was the whitest place I had ever been. And it was a specific kind of whiteness, a blankness I'd never experienced. Apart from the musicians, who played at the Rooster and the Alibi, and the guy who made stump sculptures of bears and eagles, and the ladies who knitted afghans or painted landscapes on rusty saws, there wasn't much of a scene."

Those are the words of Stacy Flynn, a reporter used to the big city of Cleveland, who has landed in a hick town. She's one of the many narrators of the book. I must admit I was more than halfway through it before I got a sense of what was happening--waiting for something to happen. Besides the multiple points of view, the book is also told nonchronologically. But the wait was worth it, for Hoffman has written an angry book, centering on two topics--violence against women, and violence against the land.

The book swirls around a missing young woman, Wendy White, who was dating the scion of the big dairy farmer in town. Flynn secretly got the job in Haeden to try to expose what the dairy is doing to the environment and to the economy. Meanwhile, a married pair of doctors from New York City have relocated to the town to try to get away from civilization. Their daughter, Alice, is something of a child prodigy, and we are led to believe something will happen with her. When it finally happens (I won't tell) it hits like a ton of bricks.

Hoffman is very hard on the community she has created. In her bio it says she is an economically depressed town from New York, so perhaps there is some lingering resentment. Otherwise what is to explain this tirade from Flynn, after she has written articles connected to the White disappearance with statistics on the number of murdered and assaulted women in the U.S., when she is accused of hurting the community: "What community? Is there a community here? Don't you fucking get it? Are you from fucking Mars? When the average income is fourteen K and the average educational level is eleventh grade and the so-called dairy is a factory fucking farm that employs next to nobody in town, and the Home Depot is where you all fucking work--if you even work. That's not a community, and it doesn't become one because people shoot clay pigeons or endearingly call women 'the missus' or have fucking parades where they crown a dairy queen! That's for actors in some anachronistic passion play about a town that never was, in a country that never, ever fucking was."

I also loved Hoffman's gift of a phrase, such as "Haytes was like a block of wood who could talk," or, describing the interior of a barn, "The space was cool and smelled of mold and apples and motor oil."

So Much Pretty is a very fine book, but I would suggest those looking for a standard crime novel might look elsewhere, unless you want to be challenged by a more literary book.