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It's the middle of the country in the middle of the American Century, and nothing is quite what it seems in Jane Hamilton's novel When Madeline Was Young.
The prosperous Maciver family of suburban Chicago vaguely computes as average: gentle father, do-gooder mother, 2 1/2 children named Mac, Louise and Madeline.
Madeline is the strange fraction, because she is the father's beautiful first wife who suffered permanent brain damage in a bicycle accident shortly into her glamorous marriage and reverted to the mental and emotional capacities of a 6-year-old. She now lives as a daughter to her former husband and his second spouse.
Unlike the past that so tragically eludes Madeline's overgrown innocence, Hamilton's new novel is not to be forgotten.
Hamilton traces our history from World War II's end through what her Camelot warriors call the Vietnam "conflict" to the deadly Persian Gulf flare-up and intimations of current entanglements.
And there are glancing but sonorous allusions to The Light in the Piazza, Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 romantic novella revived as a Broadway musical last year. Madeline is a version of Piazza's pretty, love-struck heroine Clara -- if the head injury that impeded Clara's intellectual development had happened after the fateful trip she takes to Italy rather than before.
In Hamilton's telling, timing is everything. So is time.
Mac, the narrator, counts off the many passing moments that made up his family's quietly unusual life from the perspective of middle age and a solid career as a small-town doctor. Hamilton makes him sardonic and loving at the same time, a key combination for capturing Madeline's little-girl vanity and full-blown sexuality.
Hamilton suggestively shows how change happens, because for one, invisibly broken person, it never does.
When Madeline Was Young
By Jane Hamilton
Doubleday, 274 pp., $22.95
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