how is the garden
A novel. Forthcoming.
A young man in Minnesota, a grief that won't move, and what gets handed down between generations, and what doesn't.
One email when the book is out. Nothing else.
Eli Holm is twenty-seven, slicing ham at a deli counter in Minnesota and trying to write something he can't yet name. His father—a meteorologist who could look at the sky over the river and tell you what the wind would do in two hours—is gone. So is the grandfather who taught him everything he remembers knowing.
The person he talks to most is someone he has never met in person: a woman in Tokyo he plays video games with late into the night.
In the winter when everything stops, Eli goes.
how is the garden is a novel about inheritance: what the dead leave us, what they forgot to, and what we have to learn anyway.
Read the opening
Zero
There is a stretch of the Crow, in early summer, just upstream from where it gives itself up to the Mississippi, where the river forgets it is going somewhere. The big river further down runs high that time of year and pushes back up into the smaller one, and there the Crow goes slack and wide and brown-gold and seems to hold still, not stopped, the way a held breath is not stopped. Just waiting.
The current is a thing you feel in the paddle more than see, a slow insistence under everything, and the canoe sits in it the way a leaf sits, turning a little if you let it. Eli is in the bow. He is small enough that the seat is too big for him and he has not yet learned not to grip the gunwales when the boat rocks. Papa is in the stern, and Papa is not paddling. Papa has the paddle laid across his knees, dripping, and he is letting the river have them.
It is the kind of afternoon that does not happen so much as accumulate. The light comes down through the cottonwoods in pieces. There are dragonflies working the surface near the bank, blue ones, the kind that hang in the air and then are six feet away without seeming to have crossed the space between. A heron stands in the shallows on the far side being patient in a way Eli does not have the word for yet but will spend years trying to find.
He has been paddling hard. He has been paddling the way a boy paddles, which is against everything, digging at the water like the water is the problem, and the canoe has been swinging its nose back and forth and going crooked and Eli has been getting that hot feeling behind his eyes that comes before the afternoon goes wrong.
Easy, Papa says. Not sharp. Just the word, floated to him on the air.
Eli digs in again. The nose swings.
Papa lets it. He does not reach his paddle in to fix it, which he could, which Eli half wants him to. He lets the boat go crooked and lets it come back on its own, because a canoe on flat water will come back on its own if you stop telling it what to do, and after a while it does, the nose drifting level again like a compass settling, and Eli does not notice that he has stopped paddling.
About the author
Gary Arlen is the pen name of Gary Koelling. He spent a decade writing advertising and two more building products, and has published three books on product and AI. how is the garden is his first novel.
Hear when it's out.
One email when the book is out. Nothing else.