*****8 1/2 stars****
Did you catch Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion this weekend? Keillor informed his faithful listeners that our nation's supply of English majors is dwindling--we're down to only one English major for every 75 citizens--and our American memoirs may be in peril!
Well, not if Patricia Hampl has anything to say about it.
Pat Conroy has said, "Sentence for sentence, Hampl writes the best prose of any American writer, period. The rest of us can not touch her," and "Patricia Hampl writes the best memoirs of any writer in the English language." So you know this book Hampl wrote about her parents was good. (It wasn't as deliciously edible as a Haven Kimmel memoir, but it was terrific nonetheless.)
My only complaint about The Florist's Daughter? Not only did Ms. Hampl NOT share a certain photo of her parents mentioned repeatedly in the book, but it's not even available on her web site. (For those of us who came to care about Stan and Mary, it would have been nice to see the cottonwood photo. Just sayin'.)
Here's a memorable passage from The Florist's Daughter:
"During their yearlong engagement, sometime between leaning into each other under the cottonwood on the riverbank and the Scarlett O'Hara wedding day, they had bought the exquisitely uncomfortable pieces of Victorian dark wood and upholstery that we lived with our entire family life. The love seat, scrolled armrests set high, discouraged any form of affection. It looked like a purposely unforgiving settee used to keep hapless petitioners waiting, ramrod straight, before entering a chamber of power. She called it--and therefore we all called it--Napoleon. It's French was her only explanation. Bring your aunt her old-fashioned. She's sitting on Napoleon.
And the hideous, low-squatting little chair with the lion-faced armrests? That was Benito. It's Italian.
Two little dictators, gloomily commanding the living room. Mr. Williams was also there, the red mohair chair named for the kindly man who had sold them Napoleon and Benito. He liked us, he knew we were setting up housekeeping. Mr Williams was a widower, he was breaking up his own house. A very sweet man, but of course heartbroken. This we knew, had always known, though we never met Mr.Williams. His story was part of the chairs, part of our story. A figment of their romance. I'm not sure when it dawned on me that other people didn't name their furniture."
***
I laughed out loud when I read that passage. Bethany made me read "What was so funny?" out loud to her. (When we visited Thomas Everett's Fine Furniture later that weekend, we sat in lots of chairs, looking for our own "Mr. Williams.")
A slow, delicious read...a perfect book for summer...especially when you're roasting in the heat and kicking the SHEET off your bed as Hampl describes the brutal cold of St. Paul! It certainly shut my mouth and stopped me from complaining about the temperature! I'll take hot Abilene over frosty St. Paul nine days out of ten!
