114 - Hothouse Flower & the 9 Plants of Desire

Today, waiting around in between out-of-town interviews, I finished Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, by Margot Berwin (Pantheon, 2009). With a title like that, and a garish hot pink cover to boot, how could I resist?

And I'm glad I didn't. Like the rare plants of the title, this one was both highly entertaining and unusual enough in terms of plot to keep me guessing. The bookclubs.ca Reader's Guide describes it as "Eat, Pray, Love meets The Orchid Thief." Not having read the latter, I can't say if that's accurate, but it does hint at the book's intriguing nature. It tells the story of Lila Nova, a NYC advertising copywriter and recent divorcee who's decided that her "small, newly renovated studio with absolutely no character" needs some sprucing up. This decision takes her to the Union Square Greenmarket, where she meets the "rugged country-sexual" Plant Man, David Exley, who persuades her that a Hawaiian bird-of-paradise plant is just the thing. Whether it's David or the plant itself working the mojo, Lila's easily convinced ... but no sooner does she get the plant home than she begins seeing her life in a new light. The first and funniest inkling of this comes in the "Advertising" chapter, when Lila and coworker/ BFF/ surfer dude extraordinare Kody attend a film shoot for a sneaker commercial:

"When the hair and makeup people arrived, Kody and I gathered around to watch them turn the teenaged giant into a supermodel. ...

"The model stripped down naked and stood with her arms out to her sides while her genderless cohorts sprayed her body with large silver canisters of foundation. They wore masks over their faces and sprayed her from head to toe like they were putting out a fire. They airbrushed her into a monotoned six-foot-two column of a human being with no visible veins, nipples, nails, lips, or eyelashes.

"When every single thing that was real about the model was gone, the makeup artist dug through a suitcase of brushes and plowed through undreds of tubes of flesh-colored colors and began to draw human features onto her face. At the same time, the hair stylist meticulously sewed, with a needle and thread, strand after strand of long blond hairs onto her thin light-brown locks, creating a thick, full mane of shimmering gold."

It's on her way home from this very shoot that Lila notices "a most unusual plant" in a store window, and steps inside to find a far more unusual laundromat:

"I opened the door and stepped down onto something squishy. It was moss, velvety smooth, creating uneven hills of emerald green across the floor of the laundry. ...

"Thick grass grew from squares of soil perfectly cut to fit the tops of the industrial-sized washing machines and dryers. Dense pockets of jewel-colored flowers on long, thin stems grew from the grass. There were red poppies, purple bells, and bright-yellow daisies. The laundry looked like a meadow. Like a field of wildflowers.

"Plants were strung across the ceiling in between the tracks of flourescent lights, stretching from one side of the Laundromat to the other. Colorful flowers sprang from the pots and hung down over the benches and folding tables. The pots were hung on invisible fishing line, so the flowers seemed to float in midair.

"The Laundromat was like a jungle where washing machines had been dumped, or maybe a laundry where a jungle had sprung up."

She is drawn into a long chat with the owner, Armand, who offers her a challenge: take a cutting from the fire fern in the window home, make it grow roots, and he'll show her the 9 rare and valuable plants he keeps hidden in the back room -- that is, provided she agrees not to mention them to anyone else. While it doesn't make sense even to her, she is intrigued, and accepts:

"I stared at the cutting on the way home, trying to understand why I didn't throw it away. Or simply drop it on the street. It looked like any other cutting I'd ever seen. It was a basic, four-inch-long green stem with a few random leaves sticking off the sides. But somehow I knew it wasn't like any other cutting. I found myself gripping it more tightly than my bag with my money, phone, and credit cards. ...

"I'm not a superstitious person. I don't even read my horoscope for fun, but I knew I wanted to see those nine plants in the back room of that Laundromat."

In the coming days, Lila cares painstakingly for the fire fern cutting, and returns to Exley's plant stand seeking further exotic adventures, not all of them horticultural. Initially, Exley resists her overtures, but after learning about the fire fern, he changes his mind. Smitten, she reneges on her promise to Armand, and takes Exley to the laundromat on their first date before heading home for a night of unprecedented passion.

Sadly, not only does Exley not call the next day and disappear from the Greenmarket, but on Lila's next trip to the Laundromat, she finds it devastated: shattered windows, uprooted plants and soil everywhere, a hole in the secret back door, and the 9 plants gone without a trace. Exley is clearly at fault, as is Lila herself for leading him there. She offers to repay Armand, but he insists there's only one way she can make up for the loss: come with him to Mexico to replace the plants.

And so begins Lila's odyssey. Armand leaves before she does, so she finds herself driving and then walking alone through the jungles of the Yucatan, working her way towards Armand's second home as best as she can. She is rescued at gunpoint by Diego, a mysterious Huichol shaman sent by Armand who's a bit of a plant man himself ... just before she accidentally tramples on 2 of the 9 mythical plants. From here, the story veers into magical realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Lila must confront demons internal and external to repay her debt and reclaim her identity. The conclusion offers just enough twists and turns to keep the reader on her toes, though one of the plot lines is wrapped up just a bit too neatly for my tastes (and in a way that doesn't quite fit the story otherwise).

The book is tremendously readable, and at 260 pages, not all that long. Funny, thought-provoking, and just a little steamy in parts (at the risk of conflating my Spanish-speaking artists, the combination of the humorous and the erotic reminded me of some of Almodovar's films in places), it's an excellent choice for a damp, drizzly November weekend.

#91 - The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

From the moment you pick it up, you know The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen (Penguin Press, 2009) is an unusual book. It's shaped differently, for one thing, taller and wider than the average novel. And throughout the entire book, beginning with the back of the title page that contains the LoC data, are notes and sketches in the margins; a kinder, gentler footnote, if you will, explaining some tangent or other of the narrator's reverie.

In the wake of the vaguely disturbing Fault Lines, it's nice to read about a far less creepy and more likeable childhood prodigy. Here, it's the title character, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, of the Coppertop Ranch near Divide, Montana. Named for a long line of Tecumsehs (most recently, his father) and the bird that flew into the kitchen window the day of his birth, T.S. is a brilliant cartographer who maps everything from older sister Gracie's corn-shucking movements to his bedroom to the Continental Divide to the mysterious tiger monk beetle (and that's just in the first 10 pages). As he explains it, "[a] map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between dispaeate ideas that we did not know were previously connected. To do this right is very difficult."

T.S. is also 12 years old, which presents some logistical problems when he receives a phone call from the Smithsonian Institution, congratulating him on receiving the prestigious Baird Award and inviting him to come to Washington, D.C. to accept in person. Chief among these is, he can't tell his parents. His father is a taciturn rancher who's never understood his map-obsessed son; his mother, Dr. Clair, is herself a scientist whose lifelong search for the elusive tiger monk beetle seems to have stalled her career indefinitely. The whole family, T.S. included, is still grieving the loss of his younger brother Layton, who shot himself while playing in the barn. His mentor, Dr. Yorn, knows (he submitted T.S.'s porfolio for the award, after all), but is a little too emphatic in encouraging T.S. to come clean with Dr. Clair about the work they've done for the Smithsonian and how it's now come to fruition.

So T.S. does what any normal 12 year old would do, or at least what they'd imagine doing: he packs a suitcase and hops aboard a freight train, determined to hobo it across the country. Thus begins an adventure that lead Stephen King to claim the book "combines Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Little Miss Sunshine." I've never read Pynchon, but the Twain and LMS analogies only partly capture the core of T.S. Spivet -- yes, there's travel involved, and yes, some of T.S.'s observations are fascinating and funny. However, there's also an underlying sadness here, as we see when the monotony of T.S.'s train trip leads him to wonder if going out into the world to claim his prize is really all it's cracked up to be:

"And yet, I still could not shake the feeling of dull melancholy that had been lurking since my departure, a kind of persistent hollowness, similar to the feeling I got when eating cotton candy: initially there was so much associated nostalgia, so much promise emanating from those luscious pink threads, but when I got down to the act of licking it or biting it or whatever one did to cotton candy, there was just not a lot there -- in the end, you were just eating a sugar wig."

Likewise, for all his sense of being out of place as a rancher's boy (read: not being Layton), he begins to wonder upon waking up in Chicago whether even his map-making skills have their limits:

"I fell under the city's spell of multiplicity and transience. One could not possibly process an urban landscape like this through the sum of its details. All of my usual abilities of observation, measurement, and visual synthesis began to shut down one after anoter. Fighting a rising panic, I tried to retreat to the familiar territory of pattern recognition, but with thousands of minute observations to choose from, there were either too many patterns or none at all."

Not surprisingly, many of his musings involve family: the idiosyncracies of his parents, the seeming mismatch of Dr. Clair and Tecumseh Elijah, and the relative importance of choice, predetermination, and love in who and what we become.

"Perhaps the family tree was not the best natural metaphor for tracing your genealogy back in time from the single quivering stalk of your existence to the many roots of your ancestors. Trees grow upward, and thus they would be growing back in time. ... It seemed better to picture the forking and joining of the Spivets and Ostervilles as the forks and splits of a river. And yet such an image raised parallel questions of choice: were the bends of a river guided only by chance -- by wind, by erosion, by the fitful heave and sigh of their granulated shores? Or was there a prefixed destination dictated by the sequence of bedrock beneath the riverbed?"

These ideas are fueled by a notebook of his mother's that T.S. inadvertently packed, which (surprisingly) contains not her field notes, but the story of his paternal grandmother, Emma Osterville, a one-time geologist. When the young Emma wavers in her determination to enroll in Vassar's inaugural class, her mother Elizabeth's exhortations highlight T.S.'s growing ambivalence about not telling his parents of his trip:

"If you do not pack all of your garments and drawings and notebooks and pens by week's end and you do not take that train, I will never forgive you. You mustn't throw this away. To close yourself off to what is possible is to kill part of yourself, and that part will never grow again. You can marry and you can bear many beautiful children, but a part of you will be dead and you will feel that coldness every time you wake in the morning. You are on the cusp of opening up the world -- who knows what great and glorious things lie in store for you at that college? This is a world that has never been tested before, never been dreamed of."

Despite a close call in the Windy City, T.S. eventually does make it to D.C. and the Smithsonian's Emerald City, where he makes the most of his chance to explain his craft to the capital's finest scientific minds:

"Many people have asked me why I spend all my time drawing maps instead of playing outside with other boys my age. My father, who is a rancher from Montana, does not really understand me. I try to show him how maps can be useful in his line of work, but he doesn't listen. My mother is a scientist like you people ... . But you know what is strange? Even though she is a scientist, she still doesn't understand me. She doesn't really see the purpose of mapping all the people I meet, all the places I see, everything that I have ever witnessed or read about. But I don't want to die without having taken a crack at figuring out how the whole thing fits together."

However, he soon begins to wonder if these patrons, and even their science, are all they're cracked up to be. At one point, we see a sidebar excerpt from one of his notebooks about what marks the transition from child to adult, where he observes, "You were an adult if you: 1. Took naps for no reason. 2. Didn't get excited about Christmas. ... 9. Were suspicious of children and their motives. 10. Didn't get excited about anything." Later, his enthusiastic and heart-tugging Smithsonian speech notwithstanding, he confesses privately to his notebook that he isn't quite as firm a believer in his maps as he lets on:

"When you drew a map of something, this something then became true, at least in the world of the map. But wasn't the world of the map never the same as the world of the world? So no map-truths were ever truth-truths. I was in a dead-end profession. I think I knew I was in a dead-end profession, and the dead-endedness was what made it so attractive. In my heart of hearts, there was a certain comfort in knowing that I was doomed to failure."

For the most part, this is a (pardon the pun) novel and fascinating story, with a lot to say about family, growing up, scholarship, and loneliness. Without giving too much away, I do take issue with some of the goings-on in the Washington, D.C. segment of the book; there's a whole subplot that turns up here that frankly, just seemed tacked-on and silly ... a disappointing wrinkle in an otherwise-exceptional story. This hardly spoils the effect, though; this is a gorgeous book.

#71 - Eat, Pray, Love

Finally got around to reading Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking Penguin, 2006). Truthfully, I was prepared not to like it. The title seemed a little arrogant, which mirrored the opinion of a co-worker who got to it months ago. And hey, you know I'm a little jumpy about classism, so the idea of a Perils-of-Pauline style travelogue by someone who's privileged enough to spend an entire year traveling around the world just didn't appeal. But I'd bought it some time ago (partly on the advice of a dear friend, herself an expat in Bali, who proclaims Gilbert's description of that piece of her journey dead on), and here it is.

As you've probably guessed after all that, I did enjoy the book tremendously, which was a pleasant surprise. For the 3 people out there who haven't heard the buzz, Gilbert had pretty much everything she'd ever wanted by the time she hit her mid-30s -- a successful writing career, a lovely suburban New York home and a Manhattan pied-a-terre, and a husband -- but still wasn't happy. After a bitter divorce and a passionate but troubled rebound affair, she took off in search of the meaning of life -- specifically, spending four months each studying and living pleasure (chiefly food) in Italy, prayer and devotion in a remote Indian ashram, and balance in Bali. Each locale gets its own section, which is further divided into 36 short (2-5 page) chapters or stories. The writing is superb, and made me wish I could transport myself into the midst of any one of her experiences, from being consumed with mosquitos during a twilight meditation to waxing rhapsodic about the best pizza in the world in Naples to trading bawdy jokes that transcend culture with a Balinese folk healer. I sound like a broken record (I rarely meet a book I don't like) but really -- read this one, or just a chapter or 2, if you haven't yet.