The Orchard

The Orchard

A Memoir

By Theresa Weir

Grand Central Publishing, 227 pages, $27

FANS of Miriam Toews will instantly bond with this new eco-themed memoir.

The characters, unique though they are, will seem like old friends, the details of their daily lives as smartly drawn as Toews' finest work.

Theresa Weir, an American who also writes under the name Anne Frazier, tells her life story, the story of a city girl, struggling to shake the effects of a traumatic childhood, who meets and quickly marries a handsome farm boy and moves to his family's apple farm. Against all odds, the marriage becomes a happy one.

Critics are drawing comparisons to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, which documented the evils of pesticide, particularly on birds, and is generally credited with launching the environmental movement.

But Carson, an established writer of natural history, was writing to take aim at the chemical industry's habit of spreading disinformation and politicians' habit of believing it. Weir, whose 19 novels span suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense and paranormal, aims to tell the story of a marriage.

It's a story in which pesticides play a vital role, but The Orchard is not merely an exercise in condemning pesticides.

Weir does give a solid education on apple farms' dependence on pesticides and the precautions she and her husband, Adrian, take to protect their children from the endless chemical spraying. Her many references to pesticides make it clear from the early chapters what Adrian's fate will be.

In less talented hands, the passages that veer away from the story of the marriage to talk about pesticides could have been preachy. But woven as they are into her descriptions of life on the farm, which is not all dewy mornings and children playing in hay mows, but the reality of hard work, the spraying, the risks, those passages are poetic:

"The nature that existed in the dark was different from the nature that existed in the daylight. Night nature hypnotized me. Lulled me into thinking everything would be OK, that it was there to protect and nurture. Instead of being vast land and sky that went on for miles, it held us close, it sheltered us."

Still, the best parts of The Orchard are Weir's slice-of-life details. Her depiction of that first vicious fight all newlyweds have is spot on.

Her description of her mother-in-law from hell will appeal to anyone who's struggled to win over a spouse's disapproving family. They will find particularly satisfying the scene where finally, after 18 years of abuse, Weir tells her mother-in-law where to shove it.

Julie Carl is the Free Press deputy editor.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 8, 2011 J8