It’s no accident that the narrator of Carol LaHines’s second novel, The Vixen Amber Halloway, is a literature professor named Ophelia. That was also the name of a woman who had her heart broken and was driven to madness by the title character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
When we first meet LaHines’s Ophelia, she is being interviewed by a prison psychologist. Ophelia’s heart has been broken, too, and it is evident that it has led her to do something terrible. Her field of study, we soon learn, was Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a 14th century narrative poem about the horrifying wages of sin.
Obsessed with her work, Ophelia had no time for dating, so she was well into her 30s when a friend fixed her up with Andy, a medical equipment salesman. Although they had little in common, they fell in love and married. But five years later, she discovered he was cheating with a young woman named Amber. At first, he denied the affair, but not long after he filed for divorce and declared his intention to marry his paramour.
“I have a hole in my heart the size of a shotgun wound,” Ophelia says. Quoting Dante, she adds, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
This is not the first time Ophelia was abandoned. When she was a child, her mother ran off with a car salesman, leaving the girl to be raised by her inconsolable, suicidal father.
