Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 5, 1993 TAG: 9312130301
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by GEORGE CORE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Hoffman, who grew up in Virginia and West Virginia, has lived in Charlotte Court House with his wife, Sue, for 30 years. On two different occasions he has taught for long stints at Hampden-Sydney College, where he earned his BA immediately after World War II, during which he had served in the Army Medical Corps.
Three of his novels explore that war and its aftermath. The best of them, ``Yancey's War'' (1966), may have influenced ``M*A*S*H.'' Hoffman's novels exhibit strong cinematic qualities, and it is surprising that at least one of them has not been adapted for a movie.
``The Dark Mountains'' (1963), involves the battles between management and labor in a coal-mining community. He has depicted a wide range of experience that runs from sexual misdeed to spiritual life, incarceration in a sanatorium, murder and other violent acts, and aging and suicide. His recurring themes include the power of ambition and greed, the ramifications of lust and love, the persistence of untruth, and crime and punishment.
Hoffman intimately knows the post-Depression history of the Virginias as well as the details of everyday life in this complex region. He writes as compellingly about the Piedmont as the Tidewater. His version of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is a fictional city in Southside Virginia named Tobaccoton, but he has written as memorably about life in the West Virginia mountains and around the Chesapeake.
This author reveals the psyches of plain folk and gentry alike, the claustrophobia of the coal mine and the spaciousness of the country club, the gritty feel of small farms and coastal villages as well as the tony surroundings of estates and boardrooms, the charged world of daft preachers and possessed sinners.
To appreciate Hoffman's fiction fully, you must see him as working in the rich tradition established by such writers as William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. He believes in humanity's corruption and its possibility for redemption; he is appalled by mankind's rape of the environment and its indifference to the consequences; he is fascinated by the complexities facing Southerners burdened by the past and perplexed by the present.
Hoffman writes about figures caught in the vise of circumstance, and he considers people of all social stations and many walks of life who confront universal dilemmas of the flesh and spirit.
In wrestling with our agonies, Hoffman is writing about what Faulkner calls ``The old verities and truths of the heart ... love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.'' Although he often writes in a lighthearted and even hilarious vein, Hoffman's vision of our fallen world is finally tragic.
Writers major and minor often are not accorded their just deserts for reasons that range from the failures of publishers to the failures of the reading public. Hoffman has been recognized in Time, Book World, and the New York Times Book Review after having been published in such magazines as Shenandoah, the Virginia Quarterly and the Atlantic, and by such major publishing houses as Doubleday and Viking. He has won many other prizes, especially for his stories, but he has yet to gain the full measure of recognition he has earned as a leading writer of contemporary fiction.
The Dos Passos Prize reminds readers everywhere what an abiding presence William Hoffman has been in the literary world for nearly four decades and just how talented and accomplished this son of the Old Dominion is.
George Core, who has edited the Sewanee Review since 1973, regularly contributes to the periodical press in this country.
by CNB