2007 ‫ באוקטובר‬7 , ‫סקירת ביקורת על ספר חדש בעיתון ניו יורק טיימס‬

The Hopelessness of Escape

By DANIELLE TRUSSONI

October 7, 2007

THE FLORIST’S DAUGHTER

By Patricia Hampl.

227 pp. Harcourt. $24.

Watching a parent die can be a startlingly unreal experience. Call it

denial, call it self-delusion; no matter how much you’ve prepared, you
simply don’t believe it will happen. You assume that both of you —
dying parent and attentive child — will get through this unfortunate
experience as you’ve gotten through everything else: together. After
all the madness of hospice nurses and morphine and final
confessions, the relentless deathlike goings-on you’ve endured, life
will snap back to a normal shape. Death is just a hiccup, a trick, a
detour in your lives. Soon, the two of you will walk down the street to
a bar, order a few drinks and complain about how uncomfortable the
whole thing was, how absurd and overdramatic. In the hours before
losing a parent, the notion that death is final seems
incomprehensible. Death is something that happens to other people.

Joan Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” explored this

zombie-walk of denial as it occurred after a sudden death in the
family. For a year, Didion lived in a state of unreality, mourning a
husband she expected to walk through the door at any moment. But
there is an equally befuddled zone of psychic stasis that occurs in the
days before an ill family member dies. Through the haze of
exhaustion and horror, we see death coming and quickly close our
eyes. Time warps at the edges and then stops altogether. The past
seems more real than the future. This is “magical thinking” in
reverse.
It is on the pulse of this moment that Patricia Hampl’s fifth memoir,
“The Florist’s Daughter,” begins. “Funny, the idea of keeping time —
here of all places,” Hampl thinks as she sits by her mother’s side
during the final hours of her life. “In this room it’s yesterday. We
won’t reach today until this is over, the time warp we entered three
days ago.” Mary Catherine Ann Teresa Eleanor Marum Hampl, her
beloved spitfire mother, is dying in a hospital room. Her father (the
florist of the title) died years before. As Hampl’s memories of the
years she spent in the realm of “eternal daughterdom” unfold, the
reader understands that what is about to occur “soon, in hours
apparently,” is not only the death of the mother, but the death of the
daughter, too.

For the moment, however, reality is in dreamlike abeyance. As Hampl

wards off death with her memories she is able to evade, if just for a
short while, the terrible loneliness of being “nobody’s daughter.”

It is a heavy load to carry, being nobody’s daughter. Especially for

Hampl, who spent much of her adult life in service to her “frail,
failing parents,” always within their reach, living only “a long walk”
from her girlhood home. While her brother left for the West Coast,
Hampl remained behind while her father suffered heart attacks and
her mother grand mal seizures, dutiful despite being the “family
hippie, onetime pot smoker and strident feminist who refused for
years to marry.” The truth — one Hampl readily admits — is that she
was more attracted to home and family than she allowed herself to
believe. One of the saddest, most searing moments in “The Florist’s
Daughter” occurs when Hampl admits that, despite a lifetime of
scheming, she never actually left home. “How is it that I never got
away?” she wonders.

The simple answer is that she loved her parents too much to leave.
“M. & D.,” as she referred to them in the journals she kept as if “doing
research for a historical novel,” were the force that pulled at her so
profoundly that her identity formed around them. Hampl’s mother,
with her lion’s mane of flyaway hair and arsenic wit, self-immolating
with “elderly fury,” was a woman of scabrous intelligence who kept
Hampl on edge. A librarian who secretly wanted to be a writer, she
loved her daughter to distraction, keeping an archive or “shrine” of
Hampl’s writing. She liked her daughter to play a role, “to be the
Writer” in her presence. Hampl’s father was a timid, steadfast artist
who believed in poetic proportion above all else; he held that order
“exists within matter itself and is understood as elegance.” While her
mother may have been the impetus behind Hampl’s career choice,
her father taught her the importance of beauty. Together, this
seemingly ordinary couple became the poles of Hampl’s existence,
opposing magnetic forces that held their conflicted daughter firmly
between them.

Since her first memoir, “A Romantic Education,” was published in

1981, Hampl has yearned for the beyond, and her search has skewed
to exotic regions beyond the pallid Midwestern landscape. New York,
the Côte d’Azur, heaven — she can be relied upon to illuminate our
desire for meaningful pilgrimage while reminding us of the
“hopelessness of escape.” Her previous memoirs portray a woman
watching the world go by without her, an outsider gazing in. Hampl
could see but not touch, and one felt that it was only a matter of time
before she would jump headfirst into the life she wanted to live. And
so it is ironic that, for all her dissatisfaction with exile in “a provincial
capital of the middling sort” (in Gogol’s words), Hampl has remained
in St. Paul all her life, rooted to the city of her birth in the “blameless
middle” of America.

“The Florist’s Daughter” confronts this central irony with ruthless

honesty. It turns out that despite her endless pining for faraway
lands, Hampl “didn’t long for the Great World after all.” Her “deep
Midwestern faith: that life is elsewhere” was a false religion. Gone is
the romanticism of much of her early writing, including the
somewhat precious obsession with her own position as a writer. Now,
Hampl takes a hard look at the life she has led, where she has ended
up, and why. Her signature literary triangulations — the author
analyzing herself as she explicates the world through artists she
worships — dissolve in the emotional immediacy of her subject. Many
of her previous interests show up: St. Paul society; F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Hampl’s patron saint of escape, who left St. Paul for the East);
Prague; the physical contortions women go through for beauty; the
allure of religious experience. Only now, she is no longer a groupie of
the beyond; her own life takes front and center stage. The result is
electric and alive, containing a fire her mother would surely recognize
and a beauty her father would approve. “The Florist’s Daughter” is
Hampl’s finest, most powerful book yet.

In many ways, Hampl’s emotional range brings to mind Vivian

Gornick’s classic memoir, “Fierce Attachments,” particularly its
unsentimental portrayal of the contradictory feelings a daughter
harbors for her mother. As Gornick is both proud and horrified to
realize she has become similar to her mother, so Hampl admires and
abhors the prison-hold her parents have had on her. Both writers
distance themselves from family drama enough to look closely,
without judgment, upon it. And yet “The Florist’s Daughter,” with its
blighted Midwestern provinciality, mystical yearning and the sense
that home (despite its comfort and familiarity) is not quite home, is
uniquely Hampl. Like all of her work, this book demonstrates that life
is much bigger than it appears. One only has to look long enough.

Perhaps this is why the title is so unfortunate: it suggests a smaller,

narrower book than the one Hampl has written. The title is not only
one of the few flat notes in this uniformly high-pitched book, it is also
misleading. Hampl is as much her mother’s daughter as her father’s.
In fact, in many ways this is a book about the complex and passionate
love between a daughter and her difficult, charming mother. But
maybe this tendency to downplay is another Midwestern trait that
Hampl cannot shake. After all, in the Midwest, where lives are “little;
our weather big,” it is bad form to play the drama queen. Everyone
west of Ohio and east of Nebraska knows that drama is “all just
weather.”
And, in a way, playing down her most intense, brilliant book with a
soft title makes sense: Hampl is a memoirist almost completely
devoid of ego. She once wrote that good autobiographical writing is
less about self-absorption than about the individual’s interaction with
the world. Memoir, she claimed, “begins as hunger for a world, one
gone or lost, effaced by time or a more sudden brutality.” Like the
best memoirists, Hampl has used her own experiences to understand
what is exterior, amorphous, longed for. She has written about herself
to understand what shaped her, but also about the ways desire has
pulled her beyond the self. Her tireless ambition to rise above her
own limitations — in art, in God, in escape from her home — has
always been best served through a voice that is highly suspicious of
glorifying the self.

But in the end, Hampl’s honest examination of her own life makes
“The Florist’s Daughter” a wonder of a memoir. A conflicted
daughter, a begrudging Midwesterner and a woman who has been
besotted by illusions, Hampl proves that the material closest to home
is often the richest. Her mother, who complained that her daughter
never confided in her, who wanted her daughter to open her “cold
heart,” said upon learning that Hampl was writing this book: “Good.
It’s about time.” I think you will find that Mary Catherine Ann Teresa
Eleanor Marum Hampl was right.

Danielle Trussoni, the author of “Falling Through the Earth: A

Memoir,” is working on her first novel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/books/review/Trussoni-
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