Book Review

SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN BEAUTIFUL

Jim Shepard, the author of two novels, ''Flights'' and ''Paper Doll,'' teaches literature and writing at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., JIM SHEPARD

1988

Overview

Throughout there are small details of tenderness and suffering: the mechanics of undressing and changing a feverish 11-year-old so that she won't remember being lifted out of bed; a mother saving reprimands in the hope they'll count for more when finally used; the dying child's reacting, with heartbreaking matter-of-factness, to her brother's involuntary recoil at her touch (''You can't catch it from touching me or anything like that''). [Polly] watches her daughter running outside ''so quickly you'd think she was weightless, you'd think she was flying straight into the sun.'' [Charlie], abandoned by his best friend, who has been forbidden to see him anymore, waits outside all the time, keeping an eye on the empty street. [Amanda], with her braces finally off, is full of happiness, because now she knows that ''she would have been beautiful.'' Yet such is Ms. [Alice Hoffman]'s tenderness and perceptiveness that we come to care about her creations despite their imperfections the way we would care about those we love despite theirs. We're introduced to part of the nightmare. We're made to feel, as the doctor treating Amanda puts it, ''the indiscriminate order of cruelty'' in ''the random path of a virus.'' At one point, a friend of the family who has kept her son away from Charlie tells Polly during a chance meeting at the supermarket that this breaks her heart. '' 'No!' Polly tells her. 'It makes you uncomfortable. It breaks my heart.' '' It's the gift and the achievement of ''At Risk'' that it carries us across that line - from the uncomfortable to the heartbreaking.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Hoffman, Alice / Putnam, G P / SHEPARD, JIM