The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman is about the wildness of love. Using deceptively simple sentences, Hoffman creates complex characters, imperfect (real) women from imperfect (real) families, who are trying to negotiate through pain and loss, and find their own way to selfhood, saving themselves, consciously or not, from the self-annihilation that threatens. Love is neither their vehicle of loss nor of salvation: it is a revelation of possibilities. And sometimes, rarely but truly, that revelation is enough to change a life. Love not as the end-all and be-all but as the presage of all that can be: love as a beautiful wild thing.
Wild things of nature appear throughout the novel: a great blue heron and birds of all sorts, abundant roses and gardens overgrown with wind-dispersed seeds, waving fields of autumn heather, a wild rabbit, and a puppy. Love is also wild and a thing of nature: love and the wild things come unexpectedly into the civilized but hurtful world of the characters, sometimes as an intrusion and sometimes as a sustenance, and always, as a revelation.
The Third Angel is about this wildness of love, raw and un-filtered and subjective love. Love springs into being and exists to be expressed or repressed or confused, to be held forever or held for an instant. The book gives us all the kinds of love out there, the love of a parent for a child and the love between sisters and the love between a man and a woman. Childhood ends when the characters in the book realize the contradiction of love, that although it cannot be circumscribed (it is without bounds), its power is limited (it cannot save a life or tell you how to save a life or tell you how to comfort the one you love). But there is a caveat and the third angel is that caveat: the third angel is when love is unbounded, for just a moment, and that moment is enough to change someone, comfort someone, help someone, save someone. The third angel is what happens when a sunset or a field of heather or a puppy is enough, when love is enough, when just knowing that life’s possibilities exist, is enough.
Alice Hoffman’s The Third Angel is a lovely and thoughtful book, weaving together three stories to reach a final conclusion that is itself, like love, a revelation of possibilities.
