THE ORCHARD

A woman looks back at her complex childhood.

What’s to be gained from revisiting one’s youth years later? That’s a question that must be answered by Frith, the protagonist of this elliptical and moving novel. In the early pages, Heller reveals several things about Frith: She’s pregnant and the father is "known but at this point immaterial"; she was raised by her mother, Hayley, a translator who focused on poets from the Tang Dynasty. Frith begins the remembering process by opening a locked maple chest, aware that “what I see could sear beyond hope of recovery.” Much of the novel focuses on Hayley’s bond with Rose Lattimore, a weaver who lives near them in Vermont. That doesn’t mean this is a novel about Frith reckoning with a romantic relationship had by her mother; of Rose, she states, “Was she gay or bi? I honestly never knew.” Instead, Hayley and Rose seem to form an innate bond over living life on their own terms. “What Hayley did to find a through line was to have me,” Frith realizes at one point. This is a book where fathers are mostly absent; there’s a passing mention of Frith’s father being “sick in a way that could unintentionally harm others.” Where this novel excels is in evoking a sense of revisiting the past and noticing the things that both were and were not said. It’s no coincidence that Haley is a translator. And it’s not much of a leap to consider this novel the story of Frith’s translation of her own childhood memories into a form she can better understand as an adult contemplating parenthood. The novel is nominally intimate in scope, featuring only a handful of characters, but it also reckons with big ideas and impossible questions.

A powerful look at interpersonal bonds, familial and otherwise.