Review of
Instaread Summary, Analysis & Review of Alice
Hoffman's Faithful
Four out of
five stars
According to
this summary, the plot of the novel can be summed up by the sentence, “Woman
suffers major trauma as a teen, her life continues to be a series of serious
problems with the possibility of happiness at the end.”
Shelby Richmond
is the main character and the story opens with an auto accident involving her
and her friend Helene Boyd before they are out of high school. While Shelby
suffers serious injuries, Helene is left in a permanently comatose state.
Blaming herself for the accident, Shelby goes through life in a state of
depression, using drugs and unable to establish any type of normal
relationship, including friendship. It is mentioned that Helene did not buckle
her seat belt, but that oversight does nothing to lessen Shelby’s guilt.
The plot
summary is a sequential statement of Shelby’s problems in life, from having an
affair with a married man, to issues with her parents that include the death of
her mother due to cancer and being repeatedly raped while she is recovering
from the auto accident. There is also the obligatory suicide attempt. Reading
the summary, the reader concludes that either Shelby lives a joyless life or
the author of the summary choses to ignore any positive events in her life.
There is a bit
of semi-mysticism mentioned in the summary, packed into two distinct aspects.
The first is that Shelby was pulled from the wrecked car by a mystery entity and
has only a vague recollection of that event. In her mind it may have been an
angel that did so, but it was a man. Later, she receives a series of
hand-created, anonymous, simple notes that encourage her to recover and do
better. The second is that for reasons that are not explained, the unconscious
Helene is considered to have the ability to perform miracles such as healing
the sick. One wonders why this distractor was put in the book with all the
severe problems Shelby must cope with.
The first line
of the analysis of the Shelby character is an excellent summary of her
situation.
“Shelby’s short list of interests includes dogs,
Chinese food, and pathological self-loathing.”
Although her situation improves a bit as the story
progresses, it is hard to find anything uplifting in the book. At least until
the end. However, as the author of summary states in the last paragraph:
“Finally, the last leg of the story suffers from the
sense of closure Hoffman forces as she aggressively ties up loose ends in
Shelby’s troubled relationships with Harper, Ben, her father, and Helene.”
Therefore, the possibility of a happy ending for
Shelby comes across as a forced implausibility.
In conclusion,
from this summary it is clear that there is little joy in the novel and what
little there is gives the appearance of being forced. It is the kind of book
that will make people think that there are people with problems worse than
their own. Which is not the best way to feel better.
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