“Hiding in Plain Sight”: An Interview with Cara Hoffman

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois Cara Hoffman’s work enacts George Orwell’s imperative to “pay attention to the obvious” (an idea that several sympathetic characters repeat in her 2011 novel So Much Pretty), probing aspects of twentyfirst century life in the United States that have become so accepted as to be unremarkable, such as epidemic levels of violence against women, unchecked corporate assaults upon ecologically fragile systems, and the unrelenting pursuit of military campaigns in oil-rich nations. In particular, So Much Pretty grapples with the appropriate response to a culture in which the objectification and humiliation of women is a lucrative form of entertainment; similarly, her more recent Be Safe I Love You (2014) investigates the ways that the continuation of war depends on an aestheticization of violence. Laying bare how men’s exploitation of the earth, of other men, and of women are interrelated and mutually sustaining, these novels, like much of Hoffman’s nonfiction work, are centrally concerned with that which is “hiding in plain sight” literally and metaphorically, asking us to face what we have so studiously avoided. A young woman’s abduction, mistreatment, and murder are at the center of So Much Pretty as the novel describes the kind of world—the local community and the larger global context—in which women’s victimization is, in the words of one character, “expected . . . unsurprising. . . normal” (50). A multiperspectival novel, So Much Pretty is driven by the linked stories of three female characters: Wendy White, a working-class girl who dates an older, more affluent man (the mastermind behind her abduction); Alice Piper, a slightly younger former swimming teammate of Wendy’s, the precocious daughter of progressive back-to-thelanders; and Stacey Flynn, a local reporter who takes Wendy’s murder personally and who aggressively publishes information about violence against women in her newspaper, including national domestic violence statistics and information about local domestic violence cases (225). Perhaps not unlike Flynn’s readers, Hoffman’s readers are thus confronted with the pervasiveness of violence against women; also perhaps not unlike Flynn’s readers, Hoffman’s readers may feel a pressure to act in response to this information. In the world of the novel, the information Flynn provides activates Alice, who decides “Hiding in Plain Sight”: An Interview with Cara Hoffman