A Map of the World
By Jane Hamilton
Oprah Book Club® Selection #31, December 1999
Editorial Review:
In A Map of the World, appearance overwhelms reality and communal hysteria threatens common sense. Howard and Alice Goodheart, the couple at the center of Jane Hamilton’s 1994 novel, have labored mightily to create a pastoral paradise in a Wisconsin subdivision. Their 400-acre dairy farm is the last in Prairie Center, and they’re working flat out to raise their two young girls in a traditionally bucolic manner. Yet paradoxically, they strike their neighbors as unacceptably modern, and have been treated as interlopers since the day of their arrival. Howard, in love with his vocation, chooses not to believe that they’ve been frozen out. But Alice, flinty and quick to judge, finds things harder. And her job as school nurse doesn’t work wonders for her reputation either. Happily, there’s one exception to this epidemic of unfriendliness: their closest neighbors. Theresa and Dan, who also have two young daughters, function as a virtual lifeline for the embattled family.
But in June 1990, whatever idyll the Goodhearts have worked for comes to a permanent end. On a beautiful morning–marred by her 5-year-old’s tantrum but still recuperable–Alice looks forward to taking her children and Theresa’s youngest for a swim. Distracted for several minutes, she has no idea that the 2-year-old is no longer in the house: Continue reading »