A Garden of Literary Delights

IN JANUARY, the Los Angeles Times ran an article with the headline: “Warm clothing, proper heating advised as freezing temperatures hit parts of L.A. County.” I admit, I had to read those words three times before I stopped turning “advised” into “advisory” and “heating” into “heat.” A heat advisory? Now that made sense. In February, New York Magazine’s The Cut declared it socially acceptable to discuss the weather: “It was 60 degrees in January. There’s lots to say.” And the Northeast experienced a collective pang of mourning for snowstorms — a somewhat short-sighted pang that did not factor in slush. Now that spring is officially upon us, one might reasonably ask: What spring? You mean that relic from the early aughts? The fleeting weeks before The Great Sweating? Where are we to find a sense of renewal if not outside our front doors? Well, you could do worse than letting your imagination bloom (desperate times call for earnest phrasing) with the help of a good book. Luckily, each of these early spring titles will blow a much-needed breeze through your days, thus opening you up to seeing the world as just a little bit new. You know, again.

Don’t throw in the trowel just yet: Eleanor Catton’s magnificent “Birnam Wood” (FSG) is a suspenseful and taut-yet-lyrical thriller about … gardening? Oh yes, gardening. Catton, the Booker Prize-winning author of “The Luminaries,” starts off with a bang (one can almost hear the truck explode in the first sentence). Suddenly, cut off from the larger world because of an accident, valuable parcels of New Zealand farmland have made themselves available and vulnerable to a guerilla gardening collective by the name of Birnam Wood. But an obscenely wealthy Peter Thiel-like American already has designs on the land. Catton plants all manner of delicious seeds in her narrative that function as, among other things, a generationally astute social comedy. From class and characters (Mira Bunting, a heroine who prefers enemies to rivals) to corruption and cocktails, this novel is at once a highly inventive spin on a morality tale and a logical interpretation of contemporary ecological doom.

Meanwhile, “Happily” (Random House), Sabrina Orah Mark’s memoir-in-essays, has earned the adjective “enchanting” fair and square. Once upon a time, Mark was a little girl in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, and now she finds herself in Athens, Georgia, the mother of two mixed-race boys, wrestling with the stories of childhood (hers, theirs, everyone’s: “I leave my children with my husband because my children are too young to go to a Holocaust museum. We are all too young. We are all too old.”) What at first seems like a pleasing thematic conceit, soon reveals itself as a profound approach to any life. Religion can be seen as a fairytale and so can art, family, inheritance, and the entire American experiment. This is particularly evident within the tradition of storybook boys (Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Tom Thumb): “As my sons grow, the American imagination grows around them like water hemlock. Poisonous and hollow. My son’s skin is light. So the hemlock may not grow as thick as it would for a darker boy.”