The Girl in the Garden

November 7, 2016
Set in the mid-1970s at an unnamed beach enclave, Wallace’s (The Housekeeper) powerful novel centers on June, a young girl who is abandoned at a coastal motel with her infant child, Luke, and taken in by the motel’s aging owner, Mabel. Following a cast of characters who are all emotionally hindered by the traumas of the past, the narrative switches perspectives chapter by chapter. Mabel, who is trying to move on after the death of her husband, is ready to close up the motel for the off-season when June’s plight changes her plans. Iris, Mabel’s reclusive friend with dark secrets in her past, repays Mabel for a long-ago favor by sheltering June after the motel closes for the off-season. Duncan, Iris’s lawyer, helps June settle in while also trying to maintain the tenuous relationship between Iris and her estranged daughter, Claire. Sam, a disfigured Vietnam vet who has abandoned his prewar life, takes up Claire’s offer to drive her from New York back to her childhood home. Though it is a dim journey for most of the characters, the book focuses on the resiliency of the human spirit. Wallace makes use of long, unconfined sentences to build the many distinctive voices and has a knack for teasing out important details. This is a quiet, contemplative novel that builds slowly and leaves a lasting impact. Agent: Claudia Cross, Folio Literary Management.

November 15, 2016
In Wallace's (The Housekeeper, 2006, etc.) tightly structured third novel, unspoken feelings and long-endured suffering give birth to love and acceptance among the residents of a New England town.Withdrawn mothers, surrogate daughters, and sympathetic men with scarred faces come in pairs in Wallace's latest novel, which has unusually visible authorial fingerprints all over it. Narrated by six voices in the years 1974 and 1977, the story connects a group of isolated individuals in a backwater port town. One character links them all: a young mother named June, who arrives with her baby, Luke, at Mabel's motel and is soon abandoned there by the child's father. June, whose wastrel mother has taught her that "desertion [is] a normal state of being," is saved by a human chain of compassion composed of Mabel herself; her rich-widow friend, Iris; a benevolent loner named Oldman; and Sam, a physically and psychically scarred Vietnam vet. The only figure uncommitted to June is Iris' estranged daughter, Claire, who also, in her time, experienced Oldman's loving aid. Wallace's heightened approach to her narrative is evident not just in its symmetries, but also in the extremes and absolutes she invokes. Iris' marriage contained a bizarre secret which led her, after her husband died, to withdraw utterly from the world. Oldman "would do everything, anything" for June because she is the double of a refugee he loved during World War II. For Sam, ruined and isolated after his war injuries, "not even his father had called him [son], no officer or nurse or doctor...had ever put a consoling hand on his shoulder." Delivered in short story-like chapters, packed with narration but almost devoid of dialogue, this mannered tale is written in prose that is both lovely and sometimes as self-conscious as the book's composition. Too much engineering tends to suck the life out of a sensitive salvation story.

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