In anticipation of the inaugural BookEnds Book Club on Wednesday, March 1, alum  J. Greg Phelan offers a close reading of a passage from program mentor Paul Harding’s This Other Eden. For a link to this virtual event, and to order signed copies of books from our authors in conversation, visit the BookEnds website here!

One of the best parts of working with Paul Harding during my BookEnds fellowship was gaining insight into his writing process. During a recent interview, I had the privilege to once again prod him to reveal his secrets––to ask him how he renders the complex states of being that propel his stories with such clarity and concreteness, in so few words. “I’m fascinated,” he told me, “by how much meaning you can get into a given sentence without being exhausting, exhaustive, or ponderous. To make the book 220 pages long but feel 1200 pages deep.”

Paul provides a master’s class on how to do just that in his extraordinary new novel, This Other Eden, which evokes the breadth and depth of a much longer book. 

Take this passage of a sixteen-year-old maid removing sheets from clotheslines. Describing this everyday chore, Paul effortlessly weaves Bridget’s past, present, and future to precisely render the rich, complex interplay between what she does, perceives, thinks, and feels. Looking closely, we can consider the range of his mastery in a single, nearly page-long paragraph, which he starts boldly with a sentence fragment: 

Bridget in the lowering light, unclipping the sheets from the lines. 

The sole verb––unclipping––connotes an eternal present, as if we are observing Bridget unclipping the sheets both now and forever, if she’d been captured in a painting. It’s a dazzling effect Paul employs throughout the novel. The paragraph continues: 

The lines spring back when taut when she pulls the sheets from them, like the plucked strings on the homemade driftwood fiddles her father and uncles played at night. 

The present tense action pulls recalls the past tense activity played as we drift along with Bridget’s thoughts, mirroring how the mind works, gliding from the activity at hand to impressions of the past.  

She walked along the water with her father, looking for good pieces of wood. He traced the outline of a neighbor’s fiddle on a sheet of paper in charcoal, like Ethan drawing in the meadow.

Ethan is the boy she admires; as we start to intuit, her feelings about him confuse her. Indeed, she’s not yet ready to fully consider him, so we linger in the past:

Her father worked on the fiddle all one winter, when there wasn’t much to do and it was dark most of the time and the wind moaned and fog covered the island and the fairies moaned and wailed out in the dark and knew death, too. 

Did you catch how by grounding us in the concrete detail of the natural world (darkness, wind, and fog) Paul seamlessly carries us into a supernatural world of moaning and wailing fairies? His transition is so smooth, we don’t question but feel. All to prepare us, at last, to drift back to the boy circling her thoughts. 

There is something about that Ethan, with his charcoal and sunburned face and neck, something about him she can’t put a name to.

This sentence warmly and efficiently dramatizes the fact that Bridget’s confused feelings regarding the boy both compel and frighten her. This is the quiet conflict Paul so deftly dramatizes through these successive moments: Bridget is trying to keep a lid on her budding sexuality. In a vain attempt to do so, she returns to the task at hand: 

The sheets are so clean and stiff and crunch when she folds them and places them in the basket. 

A concrete, simple description in the here and now, gently invoking her innocence. These plain and powerful details juxtapose with her stream of thoughts and feelings to provide what it might otherwise take pages to convey. Then we return to her inner world, transported by the following wondrous, long and winding sentence without any commas, a marvel really how Paul moves so subtly from the present to her imagined future:

One sheet is her own and she will put it on her narrow bed in her small clean room tonight before lying down to sleep and it will feel crisp and clean and smell clean and good in the heat and she will open a window to let the fresh air in and it will feel so good and she will miss her mother and her dad and her sisters and her brothers so much that the comforts of the sheets and open window and lonesomeness of missing her family will make her cry herself to a dreamless sleep. 

This sentence accretes in a tumult of emotion she feels and knows she will feel. Staving off these increasingly strong, disconcerting feelings, Bridget once again retreats to the task at hand:

She reaches the sheet on the last line and discovers that the side facing the open meadow is covered with flecks of hay and dust from the mowing. Foolish girl, she thinks. You should’ve known such a thing would happen today. Scolding herself comforts her because she hears her mother’s voice when she does. She hears her mother’s voice and she tries to see if she can shake out the sheet by taking it in from the bottom and stepping back and drawing it out and snapping it so the hay will come off. She begins to sing. 

Swift, decisive action and thought has brought us here to the paragraph’s conclusion, in which Bridget being moved to express her feelings by singing.

Throughout the book, Paul painstakingly renders human complexity in countless moments just like these––living, breathing paintings in prose––to construct this powerhouse novel.

J. Greg Phelan was a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He’s the co-founder and board chair of Project Write Now, a writing center providing classes and outreach for all ages. In 2020, he launched  book inc., a writing community for memoir and novel writers.