UPDATED - 3/7/13 - see link at bottom

Let’s state it up front. This is a GREAT book. Not a pretty good book with some nice qualities, but a powerful, beautiful, thoughtful and incredibly moving work of art that will be read for generations. The Orchardist is even more incredible for being a first novel, the best first I have read since Edgar Sawtelle. Yes, that good.

Talmadge had lived forty years in the orchard without any exceptional event happening to him, barring inclement weather or some horticultural phenomenon. Nothing to speak of in the human realm, really. And then this happened.

He had had a tough time of it. After the mining death of his father in 1857, when he was nine years old, his mother travelled with him and his sister, Elspeth, north and west until they found a suitable piece of land in what is now Washington State. There they set up a farm. Three years later mom passes, and Talmadge and his one-year-younger sister are left on their own to run it. Oh, and toss in a bout of smallpox that he manages to survive a few years later. A year after that, at the ripe old age of 17, his sister takes off. Some childhood. When we meet Talmadge he is well into middle age. One day while at the market with his produce, he spots two filthy teen-age girls stealing some of his apples and everything changes.

Talmadge is a man who has lived most of his life alone. With the arrival of these girls he sees a chance to have what he always wanted, a family. But they are toting more than just hunger and the bulges in their young bellies. The girls had had a particularly difficult youth, orphaned very young, ill used after, and their fear makes it difficult for them to accept Talmadge as someone they can trust. They take up residence on his land. He takes care of them as much as they will allow. When the man from whom they are fleeing arrives, events take a very dark turn.

The core story of the novel is Talmadge’s struggle to save one of these runaways from the darkness both without and within, what he gains, loses, experiences and learns. You will love him. He is a good, good man, trying his very best in extremely trying circumstances. He will spend the rest of his life trying to do right by the young lives that have been placed into his hands, despite their resistance. Maybe in doing this Talmadge is doing what he hoped someone would have done for his long-vanished sister. One of his charges travels a similar path, searching always for that connection to her lost one.

He has two amazing friends. Clee is a mute Nez Perce who Talmadge has known since arriving, and Caroline Middey is a local healer, a sort of big sister for him. The depiction of Talmadge’s friendships with Clee and Caroline is rich and incredibly moving. Coplin has made many of her subsidiary characters come alive.

The text is sewn with descriptions of small pieces of this verdant and sometimes harsh world. These passages glow, capturing the vibrant beauty of the land, the affection the residents have for it and the depth of their connection. Coplin has a gift for description. You can feel the warm sun on your skin, the breeze brushing past your cheek as it ripples fields of grass

He did not articulate is as such, but he thought of the land as holding his sister—her living form, or her remains. He would keep it for her, then, untouched. All that space would conjure her, if not her physical form, then an apparition: she might visit him in dreams, and tell him what had gone wrong, why she had left him. Where did she exist if not on earth—was there such a place?—and did he want to know about it, if it existed? What was a place if not earthbound. His mind balked. He was giving her earth, to feed her in that place that was without it. An endless gift, a gesture that seemed right: and it need never be reciprocated, for it was a gift to himself as well, to be surrounded by land, by silence, and always—but how could this be, after so much time?—by the hope that she might step out of the trees, a woman now, but strangely the same, and reclaim her position in that place.

The land itself is family. There are other manifestations of this connection between people and nature. The Nez Perce deal in horses and one of the girls becomes enamored of these animals the way Talmadge is bound to his orchard, seeing in the horses the same presence of a lost loved one that Talmadge sees in his land.

Coplin, whose parents owned orchards in the Wenatchee County where her novel is set, knows of what she describes

In my family, which is somewhat nontraditional (some of us are related by blood, some not) there is a history of domestic violence, and sexual and substance abuse. When I was growing up, only some of this was known to me—I sensed it without understanding what it was—but what was immediately before me, what was right in front of my face was the immense beauty of the landscape—orchards, wheat fields, forests—and people who did not hurt me, but loved me very much and were affectionate and kind. These elements—a child’s half knowledge of a painful family past, and sensitivity to the physical landscape—formed the book.

There is such sadness here. We feel with Talmadge the loss of his sister, and it is hard not to choke up even when recalling this, long after having read the book. There is also the fire of hope that Talmadge guards, nurtures, that offers light by which to steer his course. He travels a hard road to find what he wants, needs, to give what he can, what he must. You cannot read this book without coming to feel for this man, and to admire the skill, and clearly love, with which he has been crafted.

I thought of The Old Man and the Sea, except in this case the fish the old man is trying to bring home is a lost soul of a young woman, who is in danger of being consumed before he can get her to port. Coplin, though, says that her models were Falkner and Toni Morrison. I leave it to those better versed than I to go into detail on those comparisons.

There is beautiful mirroring in use here. Talmadge is searching for some peace, denied him as a child, while the young woman he wants to help is searching for a peace of her own, so long denied her by the guilt she feels for a decision taken when she was still young. Both Talmadge and his charge keep their thoughts and feelings to themselves. A scene in which horses are broken reminds a runaway of how people were broken in her earlier experience. Silences pervade in this remote place. Talmadge’s mother had preferred quiet to almost anything, and Talmadge acquired the trait. Clee, of course, does not actually speak at all, and we learn that Elspeth had difficulty speaking as well. The two runaways also speak little.

There is an existential theme that permeates. Where does one’s self leave off and everything else begin?

There was no wilderness to lose oneself inside. She touched her face in the dark: she had her self. But then, she thought, her self was nothing. She was nothing.

Later

A gentle wind, a kind of sighing, moved over the earth; and for a moment he felt as if his body had evaporated

And again

when she was alone, when she was working, it was as if she forgot about herself. It seemed strange to state it this way but it was as if she had no outline, no body, even though the work was very physical. Where did her mind go? Her mind was steeped in the task at hand. At such times she felt a depth of kinship with the earth…

There are events that take place towards the back end of this tale that some readers might find a bit of a stretch. Would this person go that far to achieve the desired end? Maybe, maybe not. But it did not detract from the whole for me.

The Orchardist is not just a moving portrait of a remarkable man, but a look at how people relate to place. Not so long ago, I walked with my youngest through a particular stretch of Greenwich Village recalling events from a lifetime ago. This happened here. That happened there. An event took place in that building on the corner that changed my life. This is where I first set eyes on… I did this and such there. I told her that these streets and buildings held ghosts that called to me, “remember,” connections I cannot imagine abandoning for another locale. I get this connection to land, even if my orchard consists of wood and concrete structures and city streets rather than sylvan swaths, and bears a spectral fruit that only I can consume. I imagine most of us have similar experiences, history and place entwined in memory, sealed in, and maybe emerging from a particular patch of earth. Talmadge’s attachment is probably much more intense than many of ours, but it will resonate, I expect, for most. The Orchardist tells a sometimes harsh and more times beautiful story. You will care. Definitely have some tissues at the ready. This is a great one and you will not want to miss it.

LINKS

AC reading from the book

Very informative site with info about the author

Harper's Reading Group guide, by my Sweetie

UPDATE

8/17/12 - A review in the Washington Post should post a spoiler alert, but if that is not a problem for you the review is quite lovely.

8/23/12 - Another glowing review, this one from NPR's Jane Ciabattari, -A Lyrical Portrait Of Life And Death In The Orchard

3/7/13 - Amanda Coplin wins the Discover Great New Writers award for fiction from Barnes and Noble