Discoveries
Paths of Desire: The Passions of a Suburban Gardener
Dominique Browning
Scribner: 240 pp., $24
Spring is here. What’s the next best thing to gardening? Reading about it. (Some may say better -- no messy dirt, no incriminating black thumbs.) Dominique Browning, editor in chief of House & Garden magazine writes about how her garden, less than a half-acre in Westchester, N.Y., “feels, or said another way, how the garden makes me, and those who visit, feel.” This sets her book apart from such giants in the field as Katharine S. White or Eleanor Perenyi or even Gertrude Jeckyll, who advise and instruct. Browning’s is a 100-year-old garden, and her writing is infused with a 19th century passion for naming things and a liberal sprinkling of capital letters. She refers to the backyard as the “Back Forty,” the owner of a local nursery and part-time boyfriend as her “True Love,” the gardeners, masons and tree surgeons who work for her as, collectively, the “Helpful Man.” When an elegant French woman comes to visit the garden in which she grew up, she becomes an incarnation of the “Original Gardener.” Browning can’t resist offering helpful advice on neighbors, curves, teenagers and varmints. The title, “Paths of Desire,” is a term landscape designers use for the “paths traced by people’s habits of movement from one place to another,” she writes. In this suburban garden, it means “that in the evening ... streetlights cast their beams through the sassafras; that the neon lights of the local picture house flicker over; that headlights from the cars passing by in the night swing eerily across my bedroom walls; that what sounds like a rushing river is really traffic on the parkway.”
*
Walden Pond: A History
W. Barksdale Maynard
Oxford University Press:
404 pp., $35
Walden POND (all 61.5 acres of it) may be as close as Americans come to Lourdes or the Ganges. To swim in its waters is to absorb the transcendentalists’ soothing message through organs other than the brain. This fires W. Barksdale Maynard’s intentionally exhaustive history of the place, from the two years, two months and two days Henry David Thoreau spent there in 1845 to the present. It is the place not the man that commands respect in “Walden Pond: A History.” As for Thoreau, Maynard includes so many slyly sarcastic facts about the philosopher/woodsman that he begins to look a little smaller than life. Take E.O. Wilson’s question: “So how did it happen that an amateur naturalist perched in a toy house on the edge of a ravaged woodland became the founding saint of the conservation movement?” Or this, in Maynard’s own words: “Life in the woods?” he asks rhetorically. “Actually, it was life on ... a stump-strewn area larger than eight football fields surrounded by a larger, patchwork forest.” And how, he wonders, “did an ordinary pond come to have such extraordinary meanings ... such power to delight and disappoint, inspire and alarm?”
*
Piano: A Novel
Jean Echenoz
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
The New Press: 182 pp., $21.95
World-famous pianist Max Delmarc is afraid of performing, afraid of “the terrible Steinway with its wide white keyboard ready to devour you, those monstrous teeth that would chew you up with the full width of its ivories and all its enamel, waiting to mash you into a pulp.” Mid-novel, the 50-ish Max is killed by a mugger. He wakes in the “Orientation Center.” He is told that he won’t be able, in his next life, to renew his old profession. Like so many modern French novels, “The Piano” is delightful and annoying because it refuses to follow any curve, arc or plot line. Add to that frequent authorial asides and you have the ingredients for book abuse. And yet, and yet. “It’s just that on any white expanse,” Max thinks, “be it ice floe or bed sheet, it takes almost nothing, the tiniest suspect detail, for everything to turn, just as it only takes one fly for the entire sugar bowl to go into mourning.” The sheer charm of it can keep you going.
