Gene Stratton Porter: The Magic Garden

 Every time I visit my sister, I find myself in a liminal time.  My nephews, her husband, her job, her various extra involvements, conspire to keep her occupied in a way that leaves me alone with nothing to do and no tasks to perform.  If I were at my own house, I'd find something to tidy, some task that needs done, or something to worry about.  In her space, though, there is nothing that needs done, and there are shelves filled with books.  At my own house, the books stare at me accusingly, demanding to be read, heavy with "should", just like the house itself.  At my sisters', the books are friendlier, inviting rather than insisting.  "Wouldn't you like to relax for a change?" they say, "Let us help you with that."

And this book was a perfect example of one that offers, rather than demands.  The English teacher in me insists that a narrative require a conflict to be interesting.  "A story where everyone is just happy and wonderful things happen is boring," I would tell my students, but this item belies that dictum.  Certainly, there are moments that one could label "conflict" if necessary.  The book begins with the characters already in melancholy, filled with longing, an exposition that feels much like the middle of a Dickens novel.  Porter takes a decidedly un-Dickensian path with these characters, though.  She starts at the end of such a novel, just as circumstances turn around and the characters' virtues are rewarded with idyllic bliss.  The entire book is then spent reveling in that bliss, somehow avoiding becoming saccharine, and spins around in a dance that is almost pure joy.

Naturally, she needs to introduce a bittering agent near the end, and seemingly pull the rug out from her characters.  Another author might have made this tragedy the entire conflict of the book, but for Porter it is only a tease.  Of course the lovers would be given their paradise, their Magic Garden, eventually. That is the entire point of the book: to give the reader--and presumably the writer--the chance to ask, "What if life were actually good?"