Austyn Wohlers’s novel Hothouse Bloom effortlessly draws the reader into a fever state of interiority, an interiority too large to be seen in its entirety. The edges of raw, unadulterated color are visible from the rows of apple flowers in bloom. With a pendulum-like balance, Wohler draws back and forth from the protagonist Anna’s inner world and the external world. How Anna chooses to mediate between the two determines the arc of this nuanced look at artistic loneliness, as she wends and winds her way through the roads toward her late grandfather’s orchard in the countryside.
Here, she intends to cultivate a way of being foreign to her: a kind of empty artfulness that focuses on a philosophical brew of detachment, solitude, and self-reliance—its too-neat edges hinting at lost love. Ironically, what she finds at the end of the road aren’t giant juicy Teratourgima apples so much as a surprise in the form of one of her many dreamlike abstractions: this time, a symbol for capital and the uncanny presence such market logics wield over our own lives, whether we like it or not.
“No great tragedy, people peter out. You annihilate the shameful parts of yourself, forget your failures, you’re born again. Besides, how horribly anyone had understood—as if her desire to make work had anything to do with public success,” Anna bargains with herself, escaping from the trappings of her previous public self by incarnating herself as an orchard owner far away from anywhere resembling home. The orchard is an apple orchard, and Anna, whose internal musings suggest she believes herself a failed painter, eagerly disposes of one identity in favor of another: inheritor. She distances herself from her unsuccessful painting, this time for a more fruitful gain.
Soon, a friendly face appears: Jan. From before. Asheville neo-hippie and fellow directionless wanderer, ready to room for an unspecified amount of time, in return for giving her a helping hand with running the untended orchard. Ostensibly there to write a book, he engages Anna in conversation and feels tender affection for his reclusive friend, whose behavior is unsettling to him. Anna embarks on the protracted process of experiencing life anew, “[living] a painting, instead of making them.” New is the orchard; new is bucolic rural life.
She attempts to impart this cryptic lesson to the ironic and playful Jan though he rebuffs her, eschewing her solitary internal voyages, her inward tunneling into layers of abstraction. Charming scenes of seduction and failure, of instinctual attraction, of tension unreleased, ensue. Through Jan we see another drifter, though one with a plan, and we see Anna refracted: he compares her favorably to the watercolor painter Charles E. Burchfield, the artist’s mystical, transcendent landscapes giving credibility to the passion she has left behind. Anna, bent on leaving the project of painting in pursuit of a way of life, of “deciphering the world,” is tired of “[s]orting color into form, form into technique, and water into objects.” In other words, the kind of work serious painting required of her, with its continual sense-making and categorization, its honed understandings of hue and space. Though supportive, Jan finds himself at a loss over her choice to leave behind painting, choosing the void instead. Her departure appears to be a betrayal of all of her talents for a different kind of life, with which she has no real history, is unsuited for, and has so far entirely romanticized. That is, until she begins to see the orchard turn a profit.
Then there are the neighbors: Gil, Tamara, the two workers Victor and Sean whom she hires for the picking season; and those familiar figures down at the apple stalls of the farmer’s market, competing orchards’ sellers whom she can’t stand and bitterly rejects for how they detract from her sales. Tamara, “[s]ilent, stoic, frowning, reigning over things . . . [who] had the solid and inflexible quality of an immense object,” serves as unlikely ally to Anna, helping her overcome her initial squeamishness about birthing sheep, allowing her to acclimate better to the actualities of farm life, the ewes and dogs and alone time. Anna maintains a cold, respectful distance from deep human engagement, occasionally lapsing into cruelty and hardness, whether in interactions with the farmhands or down at the market with her goods. With the seasons changing, the regularity of life on the orchard becomes routine, even as Jan “[carves] whole fat frozen hens into quarters and [tosses] them into a plastic crate beside him, beak feet gizzard and all, ice crystals rigidifying their feathers . . . incomprehensible like an abstract painting.”
Painting, though Anna has preemptively thrown out her materials and brushes, remains an invisible hand hovering over her psyche, even while she distracts herself from her lost vocation with the farm’s never-ending daily needs. “The whole world was sweating. She was alone among the trees. She could hardly keep a schedule and at times worked past nightfall.” The slipperiness of time cues the reader to understand Anna’s loose unraveling, her inattentiveness to the chronological passage of clock-time and the outside, as she begins to anchor her understanding of her place in the world around the orchard, finding through the demands of harvesting apples a slow way back to healing. Late spring days. Water, feed, prune, shovel. Her new troubles are to contend with a black bear, the honeybees. The necessity of others is handled with a serene and distanced caring, or carefully applied avoidance.
Yet, the emotional distance from human relationships rings hollow, as a stream of constant frustrations comes and goes across the landscape of Anna’s mind. These internal anxieties cloud her thoughts, even when presented with the undeniable beauty of the countryside. Wohlers possesses a facility for creating evocative images of nature: “And down below, the reservoir had contracted with their increasing distance, from something immense to the size of a little blue jewel, as if the moon itself had sunk down into the pit of the forest and shrunk, leaving behind the lush blue crater that was the body of water.” With the orchard coming into full bloom, Jan’s exhortations for her to return to normalcy, and to a greater relationality with the world, provide the story’s emotional core, bringing a touching vulnerability that is sure to outstrip the tired parable about capitalism, infusing it with bold color, new life.