Here on Earth was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1997. March Murray returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up — Fox Hill — for the funeral of a woman who was like a mother to her. She encounters Hollis, her high-school boyfriend: beautiful, dangerous, obsessive. Their teenage affair nearly destroyed March; now, twenty years later, Hollis’s pull is undiminished.
Hoffman structures the novel as a retelling of Wuthering Heights: Hollis is Heathcliff — a man of such consuming passion that he destroys everything he touches. March is drawn back into his orbit despite her marriage, her daughter, her rational knowledge that Hollis is poison. The novel refuses the romantic reading that makes Heathcliff attractive: Hollis is genuinely evil — controlling, violent, and ultimately murderous.
The novel is Hoffman’s darkest — a study of how romantic obsession can overwhelm reason, how the body’s memory of desire overrides the mind’s knowledge of danger, and how women who “should know better” become trapped in relationships that destroy them. It was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 1999, introducing Hoffman to a wider audience.
Collecting Here on Earth
First edition (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1997): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $10–$20