What was it like to live before the internet, social media, instant and constant communication, and diverse sources of information? In this book, the characters grope about in the haze of incomplete information and haphazard communication. Bits fall into place, slowly forming a direction toward understanding for both the main characters in their personal lives and for the little Long Island town that hosts Angel Landing Three, a nuclear power plant.
The only person who cuts through the haze is Minnie, the aunt, who focuses on particular issues right in front of her. However, she also lives in a dream or evasion of the truth of her marriage (her husband is dead some years ago). Even this romanticism makes her seem more alive than the other characters.
The main character, Natalie, struggles to learn what is going on around her. Unlike Minnie, she finds herself in a complicated situation. Until she discovers the basic threads she cannot take action. In a Hamlet-like way, she wanders and wonders throughout her days. Her boyfriend Carter is lost in his anti-nuke cause. The new man is evasive and secretive, as he should be (no spoilers, but the light in the sky came from the nuclear power plant where he worked). His story is one of familial distrust and anger, made worse by a stint in a juvenile facility. All haunting stuff.
As I read this book, I kept saying, when was this written? (The book was published in 1980.) It's a lost world, and yet it's one I grew up in. People hunting for pay phones, phones ringing with no answer. People counting change for the bus. If only for this depiction of life before the super-technological age, and its appraisal of modern activism, Angel Landing is a book worth reading.
The story unfolds at a slow pace and in the haze of a town that was once thriving but has become a backwater, and where the social fabric is frayed, and people feel trapped and hopeless. Natalie's Hamlet is frustrating, but she perseveres and the ending is a different kind of light.
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- Kellie GarrettReviewed in Canada on September 14, 2013
An early Hoffman novel shows her promise
