Not everyone will be haunted by The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin, but I was. I was first haunted by the setting. This novel takes place on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, in the fruit-growing region of the state around Wenatchee. I’ve driven through the Wenatchee Valley many times and seen modern orchards on those hills. I’ve stopped to play tourist in the quaint town of Leavenworth. I’ve swum in Icicle Creek. I’ve vacationed on Lake Chelan, though I’ve never taken the ferry (still operating today) from Chelan to Stehekin. I know about the prison in Walla Walla. All of these places are mentioned in the novel.
Other towns mentioned are just dots on the map to me, like Cashmere and Peshastin. But the names are familiar, whether I’ve been in the towns or not (and I might have been). I can picture the creeks and mountains, the trees and the sky, which are all characters in the novel as much as the people are.
The area where The Orchardist takes place is near where I grew up. So I was haunted by memories as I read—I could see these locations with every turn of the page. Perhaps I imposed my mid-20th Century visuals on the story that took place decades before I was born, but the forests and the rivers and the lakes in that area have changed very little in the last hundred years.
The Orchardist starts in the mid-19th Century when the protagonist Talmadge and his mother and sister arrive in the Wenatchee area. The story continues until well into the 20th Century after Talmadge has lived there many decades. Early in the novel, Talmadge’s mother dies. A few years later, his sister disappears. Talmadge—the orchardist of the title—is left alone to develop his orchard.
Talmadge’s loneliness permeates the story. He befriends two young women whose lives have been enmeshed in violence. He attempts to rescue them, in part, we suspect, to replace his missing sister. Talmadge raises the daughter of one of these young women.
With the help of two friends—a midwife and a Native American horse wrangler—Talmadge tries to nurture these women into a family to replace the family of his birth. But he has far better luck in nurturing his trees. Unlike human beings, the apples and apricots and plums don’t think for themselves and they do not hurt each other.
To reveal much more of the plot would create spoilers. Suffice it to say that the life of the orchardist, a man trying to wrest productivity and meaning out of the wilderness, is hard and often cruel. Talmadge might try to recreate Eden in his orchard, but once human conflict enters, his earthy paradise is lost.
Amanda Coplin’s prose is sparse and yet beautiful. Her Talmadge is a man of few words, and what he leaves unsaid is often more haunting than what he says. Talmadge is a man trying to control his world, but he is haunted by everything he cannot control—love, hate, loss, other human beings.
There were things I didn’t like about the novel. There are long, slow passages where not a lot happens. Coplin didn’t use quotation marks for her dialogue—a convention some modern writers adopt, but which I despise because it makes the reader’s job harder.
I liked Talmadge and his ward Angelene and the midwife Caroline. But some of the other characters weren’t very likable. No matter how much their wretched pasts had shaped them, it was hard to feel sorry for them. That includes Della, whom Talmadge spent many years trying to save.
I was also disappointed in the ending. After a big build-up to the climax, it felt like the book fizzled in the denouement. There wasn’t a satisfying resolution, in my opinion.
But through the entire book, the sense of place in The Orchardist sustained me. The novel depicted my part of the world (well, an area near my part of the world) in all its beauty and barrenness. It took me home while transporting me to a time and circumstances far different than my own.
What books about your part of the world have haunted you?
