THE POET'S HOUSE

A young woman with a reading disability finds an unexpected way into the written word when she crosses paths with a famous poet.

A recent community college dropout, narrator Carla “doesn’t process words on a page very well” and claims to be perfectly happy working for a landscape gardener in Northern California even though her well-meaning, bossy mother and her live-in boyfriend, Aaron, both think she could do better if she would only apply herself. Aaron, an IT guy who likes to camp and go hear music in local bars, is also skeptical when Carla becomes involved in the life of Viridian, a renowned poet she meets while taking care of the elderly woman’s garden. “Why do you want to hang out with these people anyway?” he asks after they attend a party at Viridian’s house with various chattering members of the literati (each one a sharp character study). “I’m not sure we’ve got a lot in common.” But Carla had her world expanded when, on a whim, she attended a poetry reading featuring Viridian. “For the first time [I] really heard a poem,” she says. And later: “It all ended up inside me.” In her usual accomplished and sensitive fashion, Thompson invites us into the consciousness of a young woman tentatively entering a whole new world that may give her a clue to who she is meant to be, while at the same time fearing that the enticing, glamorous creatures who live there simply view her as a useful helpmeet. The plot is propelled by various people trying to persuade Viridian to make public the last poems of her lover Mathias, a poet even more famous than she by virtue of killing himself at 35, but the real story is Carla’s gradual realization of what she wants and what she can be. The brilliantly rendered mise-en-scène of quarrelsome, ego-ridden, yet touchingly fragile poets and the literary entrepreneurs who circle around them makes a vivid backdrop for this classic coming-of-age tale.

More thoughtful, elegantly written fiction in the classic realist tradition by the gifted Thompson.