‘The Invisible Hour: A Novel’
By Alice Hoffman
Atria Books, 272 pages

An independent young woman, Ivy, spurned by her Harvard-undergraduate lover who says pregnancy is her problem, slapped down by her father who wants to send her away to give birth so that the child can then be adopted, runs away from home and is rescued by a commune dominated by an autocratic male leader who forbids contact with the world outside the precincts of his farm.

Ivy marries the commune patriarch, Joel Davis, who enforces the idea that she must give up her child, Mia, to the community he rules. He forbids the reading of books and punishes rule-breakers with branding and letters they wear as signs of their transgressions. He is so maniacal that Ivy does not dare to escape his penal colony. Yet she cannot let go of her daughter, and the two share a secret love of rebellion and of literature.

Does the story sound familiar? It does to Ivy’s daughter Mia, who secretly visits the local library, hides the books she borrows, and is astonished to find a first edition of “The Scarlet Letter” dedicated to her. How can that be? she wonders. Mia has no idea, but the book becomes her Bible, and Nathaniel Hawthorne is not only her inspiration but her beloved.

Mia runs away — not to her future but to the past. I’d rather not say much more than that for fear of spoiling a novel that is about biography as a form of salvation and inseparable from the author who made the book that prevented her from killing herself when, like her mother, leaving the brutality of the community’s supreme leader seemed to her impossible.

In effect, the literature that Mia absorbs simply cannot stand by itself. She has to find out how someone could write a book that saves the life she was about to drown when she discovered a life-saving novel, which becomes the true rescue operation that is the antidote to Joel Davis’s tyranny.

Mia learns everything she can about Hawthorne, visits his house, the old Manse, and learns so much about him that a whole section of the novel is devoted to his biography and his own tormented confrontation with his Puritan ancestors and the Salem witch trials. Hawthorne is as disabled by his community which disbelieves that a writer can be of any worth as Mia and her mother are by a commune confined to its leader’s bibliophobic dictates.

“The Invisible Hour” is that hour when reading becomes the reality Mia is reading about, when her imagination transcends time and societal restrictions and becomes a fully functioning world unto itself. In Alice Hoffman’s wondrous novel, literature and its author do not become fully alive, do not achieve their full powers, until Mia provides Hawthorne with the story that will one day become “The Scarlet Letter,” a story of today as much as of yesterday.

How the first edition of “The Scarlet Letter” could possibly be dedicated to her, I won’t say, since when you do learn how that can be so, the novel will have clicked all of its parts into place as a great mechanism of creation that would be a travesty to disassemble in a review.

The subjects in works of biography and biographical fiction are assumed to be complete in themselves so that the biographer or novelist investigates or invents how that subject or character came to be, although neither the novelist nor the biographer becomes part of the evidence, part of the process of interpretation by which we know the biographical subject or fictional character. Not so in “The Invisible Hour.” Without Mia, there is no Hawthorne, as we have come to know him in his fiction and biography.

Fiction and biography, as “The Invisible Hour” shows, constitute a way out of circumscribed circumstances, but to do the work of liberation requires readers to whom that work is dedicated. Every reader knows this who has experienced the attachment to a book akin to Mia’s feeling that “The Scarlet Letter” was written for her.

There you are, dear readers, awaiting the opportunity to make yet another novel or biography live again so long as you never forget it was all meant for you.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Confessions of a Serial Biographer”