One of the Best Love Stories Ever for Summer Reading: The Extraordinary Garden

Sometimes the best stories are the simplest one.

“I can sum up… in two minutes…”  Marc-André begins . “I desired her for seven years, I loved her for three days and three nights, and then I spent seven years trying to forget her."

That is indeed the bare bones of the action in The Extraordinary Garden, François Gravel’s lovely novel, which came to mind this week as the warm late spring weather:  makes me think of summer time reading.  The novel was published in 2005, but is worth seeking out because behind the simple summing up lies a story that is much more—a moral tale for a time when morals have been left behind, a meditation on the relations between men and women, a tribute to the love a man feels for his children.

With a few false moves Gravel could have plunged the story into cliché, into waves of tear-jerking sentimentality.  But by some small miracle he has written a clean, taut book that slices through emotion the way a gold medal diver slides into the water on a perfect dive.

That image is not chosen lightly: Marc-André’s daughter is a diver and it is at a big provincial athletic meet that he and Josée finally come together after years of longing.

 They have travelled to Baie Comeau, an eight hour drive from Montreal, along with Josée’s daughter who also began as a diver but who was badly injured in a diving accident.   The two girls want to hang out with the team, leaving the adults alone.  What happens is both predictable and also very moving.

The publisher’s blurb for compares it to  John Updike’s and John Cheever’s sex-in-the-suburbs work.  Gravel’s people live in suburbia, it’s true; the garden the title refers to is a big park that lies between the two families’ houses.   But this is a story about what happened after the sexual revolution was won. Marc-André, Josée and their spouses grew up with the idea that sex is a playground, but now they’ve made other choices.  The tension between their commitment to the family-centered lives they’ve chosen and their errant emotions are what make this novel so appealing.
The Extraordinary Garden

Sheila Fishman’s excellent translation deftly catches the rhythms of Gravel’s French original.  The novel is available from Amazon.ca and Abebooks.com