Book review: 'The Florist's Daughter'

Patricia Hampl has written a decidedly old-fashioned memoir, to my great relief. No abuse, no trauma, no high drama of any kind, only a thoughtful and ardent tribute to a normal childhood in a middling city (St. Paul) in a middling state (Minnesota) with modest parents who gave their children the inestimable gifts of security and love. But her book is no treacly sermon on an Edenic past. Rather, it's an intense gaze at "the spiral of wonder and wounds that accounts for the bravery of supposedly ordinary people in allegedly ordinary lives."

In "The Florist's Daughter," Hampl sits by her dying mother's bed, her duties as a daughter nearly done, and walks into memory.

Any child's parents are, like the weather, simply inevitable. Only the adult, looking back with the eyes of experience, can see them as people: contradictory, puzzling, mysterious, infuriatingly complicated. What Hampl has so generously done is to treat her parents like fully imagined characters in a complex novel. She is not the center of this book as she was in her first memoir, "A Romantic Education," but the observer, historian, scribe, a daughter trying to do right by two people who resembled each other not at all.

Her Czech-descended father was a man of silence and patience who trusted in the essential goodness of other people, even when they were swindling him. The greenhouse and florist shop he managed were more than a job; they were a passionate vocation, the cultivation of useless but necessary beauty.

No wonder that his daughter, who watched him raptly as he designed exquisite bouquets and arrangements, would chase the elusive nature of beauty in all her books. Does it have rules as "the highest token of reality"? Is it elegant human artifice or the transient reminder of death and resurrection that flowers so achingly evoke?

Her Irish mother was what we would call a piece of work. She belonged to the Irish "grudge culture," learning "to level the world with a strangely knowing mistrust, an ice chip of irony on her slouched shoulder." No cheerleader for her husband's trade, she "was a spy in the house of beauty, an ironist regarding the world he decorated so earnestly for people he trusted, people she regarded with a narrowed eye, waiting and seeing." She was Experience to her husband's Innocence. She also was a creature of language, addicted reader and fabulous storyteller.

Hampl has married both her parents' ways in her writing. Her style moves easily from the high lyricism of wonder and delight to the unfooled coolness of irony and skepticism. Take her descriptions of St. Paul. The city is seen in all its meanness and ugliness, but it also is a seductive presence, as much a protagonist as Stan and Mary Hampl and a proper subject for poetry.

"The St. Paul streetlights dissipated their glow rather than shed it on the crusted snow banks. This was strangely beguiling -- that light could be conscripted into the service of obscurity. ... A faint tea-dance violin floated over it all." What breathtaking metaphors Hampl can pull from her verbal store. "What a romantic city it was, full of believers, wrapped in pride and insecurity, those protons of provincial complacency."

And this: "The ice ... not a squeak, not a hiss, but a cello note like heavy silk slowly, intentionally ripped."

What gives her writing such intensity is her belief that "buried truth was seized up in metaphors and melodies. ... Only poems and music ... could express the real things, which were the unsayable things." She is practicing a metaphysics of language. Sometimes, in her ardent pursuit of truth and or beauty, she gets carried away. I don't know, for example, what it means to "give over the heavy lifting of the real freight of your soul."

But I can only admire her passionate attempts to parse reality -- as if she were attending closely to a text, pressing the juice out of every sentence and paragraph and translating it into her own luminous words.

Brigitte Frase of Minneapolis also reviews for the Los Angeles Times.