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Book Review: The Girl in the Garden
Oct. 29th, 2016 06:06 pmI liked a lot of things about Melanie Wallace's The Girl in the Garden: the beautiful cover, the astonishing descriptions of landscape and weather - the sea and snowstorms in particular; their vastness, their overwhelming quality, are both well-captured in this book, along with their paradoxical ability to make everything else seem cozier because smaller and warmer and less huge. It's vivid enough that I was at times surprised to look up and realize I am nowhere near the sea.
But my God is the emotional landscape of this book bleak. It is largely populated by intermittently suicidal characters with the emotional repertoire of turtles. Faced with trouble, they pull away inside themselves and share nothing with anyone. One of them builds a literal concrete wall around her entire property and ceases to speak to almost everyone, including her thirteen-year-old daughter.
They all seem to feel that the best and truest way of showing love is to just quietly be with someone without ever actually talking about your feelings or your past or anything really, just work side by side and... silently despairing together, I suppose. Until all that side-by-sideness alleviates the despair a bit.
And on the one hand, I do think that it's important to be able to simply be sad with people, to be around sad people without feeling that you've failed somehow by not cheering them up. Our culture doesn't value the ability to mourn together and suffer together, but sometimes things are just sad and the most helpful thing you can do in that moment is validate that sadness.
But on the other hand. I also think there are times when it's better to try to intervene, and when a dear friend stops speaking to her daughter, that's one of them.
Because this is a novel, the daughter is preternaturally self-contained and mature and doesn't seem much bothered by it - I really wish the book had included more of her POV, so we could see if that's actually true or she's fronting - but in real life I'm pretty sure that not speaking to your child is emotional abuse. It bothers me that no one in the novel is much bothered by it.
But my God is the emotional landscape of this book bleak. It is largely populated by intermittently suicidal characters with the emotional repertoire of turtles. Faced with trouble, they pull away inside themselves and share nothing with anyone. One of them builds a literal concrete wall around her entire property and ceases to speak to almost everyone, including her thirteen-year-old daughter.
They all seem to feel that the best and truest way of showing love is to just quietly be with someone without ever actually talking about your feelings or your past or anything really, just work side by side and... silently despairing together, I suppose. Until all that side-by-sideness alleviates the despair a bit.
And on the one hand, I do think that it's important to be able to simply be sad with people, to be around sad people without feeling that you've failed somehow by not cheering them up. Our culture doesn't value the ability to mourn together and suffer together, but sometimes things are just sad and the most helpful thing you can do in that moment is validate that sadness.
But on the other hand. I also think there are times when it's better to try to intervene, and when a dear friend stops speaking to her daughter, that's one of them.
Because this is a novel, the daughter is preternaturally self-contained and mature and doesn't seem much bothered by it - I really wish the book had included more of her POV, so we could see if that's actually true or she's fronting - but in real life I'm pretty sure that not speaking to your child is emotional abuse. It bothers me that no one in the novel is much bothered by it.
