HOTHOUSE BLOOM, by Austyn Wohlers
“In the life of a creative man,” the Polish painter Jozef Czapski wrote in “Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp,” “biography can and must be considered only up to the 35th year, after that it’s no longer his life story, but his struggle with the substance of his work that must become central and, more and more, increasingly absorbing.” In Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” Czapski sees an account of “the slow and painful transformation of a passionate and narrowly egotistical being into a man who gives himself over wholly to some great work or other that devours him, destroys him, lives in his blood.”
The artist’s preoccupation, both ancient and evergreen, with the source and trajectory of creativity lies at the heart of Austyn Wohlers’s beautiful and strikingly original debut novel, “Hothouse Bloom.”
A painter named Anna abandons her old life in an unnamed city for an apple orchard that’s been left to her by a grandfather she barely remembers, hoping to remove herself from the “artifice” of humankind and, like Noah after the flood, to rebuild a “life free from human error.” On her drive to the orchard, the land around her is so formless and cloaked in fog that she hits what she thinks is an animal. “She felt embarrassed of her humanity, as if it were a violent and intrusive thing,” and resolves that “things are about to be so different. The slate wiped clean.”
Though it never explicitly mentions the Bible, “Hothouse Bloom” is steeped in Old Testament themes of creation and destruction. Arriving at the orchard, Anna determines that her first act “would be a sacrifice or an offering”; at the home of her new neighbors, Gil and Tamara, she assists in the birth of a lamb. In an inversion of Genesis, she expels herself into a garden of apples where, instead of naming the animals, she practices “forgetting her own name.”
This journey of forgetting is part of Anna’s attempt to distance herself from what she considers the inauthentic artistic life she once led. But Anna’s past haunts her in the form of Jan, an old writer friend who arrives on the farm to pierce her solitude with his cheerful forthrightness. When he asks why she hasn’t been painting, she “balked and replied: Jan, even better than making something is living something.” In sections like this one Wohlers seems to be grappling with her own attempts to evoke life through the fraught, fragile, radiant and sometimes inept process of writing.
Through much of the novel, her language is sharp, saturated and wonderfully active: “Here the heights of the hills were dizzying,” she writes of Anna’s new surroundings, “the curvatures of the earth so enormous it seemed the ground itself was warping as in a dream, or as though she were racing like a little green marble down to the bottom of a massive glass ball.” But at times the prose becomes bogged down with unnecessary explanation (we are told that Anna “felt free” just after reading a lovely passage that communicates this sentiment vividly through images) and clunky similes (“the sun settled on a branch like an incubator while the apples formed like eggs”).
And where Anna is intense and obsessive — much of what makes “Hothouse Bloom” distinct is her wild and dreamy point of view — the brief shifts in perspective toward the end of the book, from Anna’s to Jan’s, Gil’s and Tamara’s, serve to deflate that intensity, and the novel’s rising tension.
But even in these moments, it is thrilling to witness a writer attempting and mostly succeeding at something so ambitious, to feel her reaching for the root of all awe instead of settling for the smaller canvas of identity and biography.
HOTHOUSE BLOOM | By Austyn Wohlers | Hub City Press | 199 pp. | $24
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