Four years ago, Carrie Brown suddenly found herself unemployed. "I hadn't been writing until then," she said. Her first novel, "Rose's Garden," (Algonquin, $20.95 ) hit book stores a few weeks ago and is receiving rave notices from critics, including The New York Times Book Review.
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The book focuses on a widower, Conrad Morrisey, who at 75 remains stunned by the death of his wife Rose four months earlier. When an angel apparently appears before him in Rose's garden, Conrad feels compelled to spread the news. But the local paper's editor rebuffs Conrad's carefully composed letter describing the magical event.
The editor's stalwart secretary, defying her longtime boss, puts the letter into print, causing Conrad to discover the power and necessity of reaching out to others. The novel is an emotionally stirring, occasionally sentimental, and wrenching delight. Reading it should make even cynics brush away tears.
A reviewer for The Times, calling the novel "magical," wrote that through the gift of remembrance, Conrad realizes "just how astonishing Rose was not only in cultivating her garden but also in her careful, unheralded nurturing of the needy. And when a flood threatens the town, Conrad sees with a visionary's clarity that acts of heroism can be both small and large. In keeping with the memory of its absent heroine, `Rose's Garden' is both luminous and wise."
Brown's path toward publication began in 1994. "My husband John Gregory Brown was offered a job here at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and we had to move and I became quite suddenly unemployed," she said during a telephone interview with G21.
Brown's her husband told her she ought to try writing something. "I surprised us both, I think, by writing an enormous amount very quickly, as if I had suddenly popped a cork. I discovered, thanks to his encouragement, that this is what I should have been doing all along."
This month she will receive a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Virginia, where she held a Henry Hoyns fellowship. Next year she'll teach two courses in fiction writing at Sweet Briar.
She grew up in New England, in Connecticut and Vermont. "My father worked for IBM and we went overseas with him a couple of times, to England in the 1960's and then to Hong Kong in the '70's." She earned a BA from Brown University. The Browns have three children, Olivia, 12, Molly, 6, and Walker, 4.
There wasn't a long struggle to get published, she admitted. "I haven't published anything else in the literary vein unless you count some very undistinguished poems a long time ago," she said.
Her husband heads Sweet Briar's Creative Writing Program. His novels are "Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery" and "The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur."
She has twelve years of experience as a journalist, having worked for a chain of weekly newspapers in the Baltimore/Washington area, "some quite old and distinguished, others brand new and created for the burgeoning suburban markets there. The chain, called Patuxent Publishing, was terrifically successful financially and editorially and was bought out finally by Times Mirror." She worked for a number of those papers, both as a reporter and as an editor.
In her interview with G21, Brown talked about the book and her assessment of the vocation of writing.
G21: Conrad is a wonderful character. One feels his sense of loss, his idealism, his love for his homing pigeons. When he has the vision of the angel in the form of his dead father-in-law, you create an aura of mystery and a sense of religious faith. However, the novel makes little mention of organized religion. Was that by design?
Carrie Brown: It's true that there is little mention of organized, or what we think of as conventional, religion in the novel. Though I am clearly interested in notions of faith,how one comes by it, how one holds onto it, I think I have not much feeling for or experience with traditional religious belief personally, and so was drawn perhaps to a more eccentric (though no less powerful, I believe) notion of what it means to believe in some power higher than oneself. And of course the novel does concern itself deeply with typically Christian notions of selflessness and forgiveness and patience and kindness, ideas which are very important to me.
Most people seem to view the presence of the angel in the novel as a rather risky thing to have done,to have written about an angel endangers the novel's literary merit and tests a reader's credulity, is the suggestion. I can happily report that I was too ignorant to have considered such matters when I sat down to write the book. I wanted Conrad to be confronted with something powerful enough to shake loose both his misery and his conscience. I find something quite moving,and rather awe-inspiring,about the seriousness of people's belief in angels. I suppose I'm as interested in how they come to believe something the rest of the world thinks is so unlikely, as much as in the thing itself.
G21: The novel is about enduring love. Is there any incident that caused you to choose this topic? Do you believe that love can last beyond death?
Brown: My husband and I suffered through a few years in which we seemed to lose someone every time we turned around, my last grandparent, both our fathers, a daughter who died in infancy. Clearly the book is saturated with the sense of loss we all feel when the world is so suddenly and irrevocably changed by the loss of someone we love. I suppose, in a rather simple-minded way, I was writing to conjure up for myself and for my family some manifest notion of solace, some way by which we may still feel the pleasure and comfort of those relationships, some way to understand the apparent purposelessness of those partings. Conrad remarks at one point that surviving Rose has been a "terrible privilege;" the notion is that there is something to be learned, something to be gained by way of grief, some grace, I suppose.
G21: What is your next project?
Brown: My second novel, "Lamb in Love," has been purchased by Algonquin. I hope will be out in a year or so; I'm finishing revisions to the manuscript now. I also am at work on a third, set in 1933 at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. The story has to do with a physician who exhibits premature babies at world's fairs, and the characters who come to have a sudden investment in one particular child.
G21: Do you work with a literary agent? How difficult was it to get someone to represent you and your work?
Brown: I do have an agent; some people think it's harder to get an agent than a publisher. I don't know about that. I got his name from an acquaintance and sent him the manuscript. He liked it enough to want to try and sell it.
G21: Do you have advice for aspiring writers?
Brown: I'd feel silly offering advice, but I can pass on something my husband told me when the manuscript of "Rose's Garden" was out waiting for a buyer. Do something while you're waiting, he said. Write another one. It's the best thing any writer can do, though often the hardest, too, just keep writing.
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Rose's Garden
