At the opening of Pamela Holm’s new novel, "The Night Garden," Dawn, a 33- year-old exterminator, and her daughter, Jewel, have moved into a house overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It has a small apartment downstairs that the single mom plans to rent out and a backyard in a state of botanical disarray. While Dawn is sure she did the right thing by leaving her overbearing boyfriend, David, she realizes it might not have been the best move for 9-year-old Jewel, who has never even met her biological father (Dawn and he met at a Halloween party and slept together only once).

Meanwhile, across town, Harlan and Macie have been trying to conceive a child for what seems like forever. For both partners (but Harlan, in particular), sex has become mechanical, a means to an end. When Macie summons Harlan from work at moments of peak fertility, he does his best to make light of the situation: "Seems my stud services are required across town," he tells his business partner. One night, Harlan meets blue-eyed birdcage dancer Sophia, and the temptation for sex without an agenda is too great to resist. Alas, his indiscretions get the best of him, and he admits the affair to his wife. Soon after, Harlan responds to (no surprise here) Dawn’s "Roommate Wanted" poster at a Laundromat nearby.

Holm’s astute observations lend some texture and depth to an otherwise tepid tale of urban and sexual angst. She captures Harlan’s torment upon receiving a phone call from Macie in the midst of his tryst: "Hearing his wife’s voice while feeling his girlfriend’s body had merged the two worlds he’d been struggling to keep separate," Holm writes. "It was easier to believe that what he was doing had some shred of integrity when the lines between husband and lover were blurred with distance and denial."

Holm also describes the despondency of Dawn, a former science textbook illustrator, as she finds a semblance of solace with her sketchpad and paint: "Whole evenings could disappear. … With the brush in her hand and her thoughts focused on the color blue, the heaviness of her heart would become watery and dissipate, absorbing like paint into the paper."

The reader even feels a pinch of sympathy for Sophia. "It’s easy for you, " she tells Harlan. "You have two relationships, I have half of one."

Holm, a San Francisco essayist and author of the memoir "The Toaster Broke, So We’re Getting Married," is a perceptive writer who renders believable characters in straightforward prose. In "The Night Garden," Harlan, Dawn and Jewel’s lives intertwine as they transform their jungle of weeds into a garden of delights. Each cultivates a patch of peace with their small plot of earth. While Holm’s novel may not be profound, it’s not entirely predictable either; romance materializes for Dawn but not in the way jaded readers might expect. And the novel’s message is heartfelt: From the seeds of despair can blossom beauty, even hope.

Allison Block is a writer in San Diego County.

BOOKMARK
Don’t look to ‘Night Garden’ for fairy-tale ending

By Michelle Rupe Eubanks
Staff Writer

Pamela Holm is relatively new to the fiction genre. As the author of "The Toaster Broke, So We’re Getting Married: A Memoir," she knows, of course, how to tell a story, especially one with a cohesive narrative thread.

But fiction can be a tough game, especially for one who has had her first literary foray with the forgiving nature of the memoir. But Holm sails through the test with the ease and grace of a seasoned author. In "The Night Garden," she takes the reader to San Francisco’s less touristy side, introducing her to tiny enclaves and much lesser known areas of town. Trust me, you won’t be reading about trolley tours to the Golden Gate Bridge or down the famous and winding Lombard Street.

What you will get, however, is a well-told tale of Dawn and her eccentric and fascinating 10-year-old daughter, Jewel, that’s gradually intertwined with the story of Harlan, the frustrated documentary filmmaker whose marriage to Macie is all but washed up after years of failed attempts at-conception.

Initially, Holm seems tentative in her ability to bring the two stories together, but an apartment for rent below Dawn and Jewel sets the stage for the characters to begin their journeys toward-reconciliation.
 
For Dawn, it’s a matter of getting over her own failed relationship with David. For Harlan, it’s trying to understand how he fell so in love with a go-go dancer while still in love with his wife.
 
The thread that keeps each of them connected is their work on the garden, which quickly becomes a metaphor for all of the weeds that had encroached into their personal lives and now must be destroyed in order to move forward.
 
Dawn spends time in the garden at night, digging, planting, weeding — whatever will take her mind off her pain.
 
For Harlan, the pride he feels at getting something to grow, in this case a flower instead of a child, takes on a life of its own.
 
Holm weaves each piece together with skill, always keeping in mind the outcome. If you’re looking for a happily-ever-after story, "The Night Garden" may not be the answer.
 
If you’re looking, instead, for a story that reverberates with honesty and reality, it will definitely resound deeply with you.
 
Michelle Rupe Eubanks can be reached at 740-5745 or michelle.eubanks@timesdaily.com.

“…distinguished by delicious, sharply observed scenes of San Francisco’s various neighborhoods and inimitable seasons.”
– Kirkus

"More than anything else, one leaves her first novel, The Night Garden, with the clear sense of her knowledge of and affection for the city she and her characters call home."
– smallspiralboundnotebook.com

“Pamela Holm weaves a truly lovely story of love and lust.  The Night Garden characters are at times heartbreakingly real.  Struggling through the seasons of true love, single parenting and the therapy of working a garden.”
– Beth Plattner, Fishing With Your Mind Bookstore

Six peoples’ lives intersect while dealing with, love, relationships, betrayal, motherhood, wishing for parenthood and, best of all, a garden.  I enjoyed the author’s ability to spin all these people and elements into a satisfying tale.”
– Jeanne Regentin, Between The Covers Bookstore

Toughing it out in  San Francisco, single mother Dawn and her nine-year-old daughter, Jewel, prove a sympathetic pair in Holm’s fresh first novel (after her memoir The Toaster Broke, So We’re Getting Married). After years of ambivalence about her relationship with David, an overbearing artist, Dawn (an exterminator by profession, illustrator by ambition) finally calls it quits and moves into a new house with a view of the  San Francisco  Bay and a downstairs studio she plans to rent out. Enter Harlan, a 30-something video producer at loose ends since his marriage with Macie fell apart under the strain of trying unsuccessfully to conceive a baby. Holm deftly and humorously brings Harlan and Dawn together when he responds to Dawn and Jewel’s ad for their basement flat, finds a warm reception in their home and helps to reconstruct the overgrown garden. In a refreshingly unpredictable outcome, Dawn and Harlan become good friends while Harlan’s best friend and business partner, Jason, serves as Dawn’s love interest. With a quirky protagonist who likes bugs and her spunky daughter who keeps a rat, Holm has fashioned a charming urban tale of heartbreak and survival. Agent, Stephanie Rostan. (May)

After two miscarriages, Macie and her husband, Harlan, no have mechanical sex timed to the results of her ovulation tests.  “The firecracker he’d married, with the scathing wit and the survivalist’s demeanor, seemed to be disappearing in front of him,” Harlan thinks. Ergo, the formula goes, he’s a sitting duck for a sluttily dressed “birdcage dancer” named Sophia, who brings him home to her mirrored apartment in a converted firehouse and brings just back into his life.  Before long, Harlan has ‘fessed up to Macie, moved out and found his own place.  His landlady, Dawn, is a single mom who has recently split up with a long-time partner and moved into a house on a hill with her nine-year-old daughter, Jewel.  Harlan tries to write a screenplay.  Macie continues her quest to become a mother by trying artificial insemination.  Sophia takes a string of ridiculous gigs, like standing on street corners in Vegas-style costumes to be picked up by busloads of Japanese tourists.  Dawn transforms her talent for drawing bugs into a paying job in pest control and tries to keep up with Jewel, a delightful, vividly drawn character who walks away with most of the story.  Harlan helps Dawn and Jewel transform the messy backyard into a garden with exotic plants.  Dawn’s ex gets engaged, reviving her own ambiguity about the state of marriage (Jewel is the result of a drunken one-nigh stand with a  man who was in costume at the time).  Then Macie becomes pregnant, and—guess what?—Harlan begins to find Sophia not so seductive after all.

Awfully trite, but distinguished by delicious, sharply observed scenes of San Francisco’s various neighborhoods and inimitable seasons. (Agent: Stephanie Kip Rostan/Levine Greenberg Literary Agency)

Pamela Holm loves San Francisco, and she knows the city. More than anything else, one leaves her first novel, The Night Garden, with the clear sense of her knowledge of and affection for the city she and her characters call home. The novel deals with lust and its destructive consequences, the minute attentions of curious people, art, the effect of geography, and more, told in direct prose and at such a good clip that it is a quick and generally satisfying read.

 Dawn Mackenzie and her daughter, Jewel, move into an apartment building with a lower floor they can rent. They need the money. Having lived for five years with Dawn’s former boyfriend, the irrepressible and charming David, they are now on their own. As they try to move on, they meet Harlan after, having cheated on his wife, Macie, with a dancer, Sofia, is thrown out. Harlan rents the bottom floor of Dawn’s house, and the three become friends and confidantes in the process of reclaiming the weedy garden in the backyard. The total relationship helps each of them—Dawn, Harlan, and Jewel—move on from the events that have, in different ways, devastated their lives.

 Holm moves skillfully between the several stories, moving from one character’s perspective to another without contrivance or a missed beat. She has real strength as a manipulator of scene, at maintaining the interdependence of the stories. As well, the end makes use of the various strands the novel presents and concludes with a sense that the story goes on, while wrapping up the narrative fairly well.

 While the skill at managing scene and drive is very much on display, the characters feel stuck at times in a surface wittiness that pervades even their inner thoughts. While it is quite credible that, given their situations, they would be absorbed in their own shortcomings and fickle self-regard, the witty and sardonic tone of so many of their observations comes off as insincere, even glib. Early in the novel, Dawn, dripping with woe, looks for a parking space so that she can drop her precocious and grim daughter, Jewel, at a dance. Her inner monologue runs, “Dawn Mackenzie, ex-girlfriend of David. Died of a self-inflicted wound to the heart. The deceased is survived by a morbid child of nine.” That said, in a later scene when Macie wallows in hurt by playing her estranged husband’s saddest records, the moment is poignant with her decision to inflict as much pain on herself as she can.

 These characters are talkers; they are frank, funny, sometimes treacherous. But they are also often caught in moments of preaching. Sofia, an unlikely moralist, delivers the single person’s mystification at the doings of strange marrieds: “I don’t know why you people do it . . . I mean what’s in it for you anyway.” Harlan’s pious response is something predictable about stability, and they go on with their discussion. It’s not as though people don’t have these conversations. Rather, they are so typical of what passes for conversation that they do not merit the full-on respect of dialogue, of scene, of making them into such a prominent feature of the book.

 When she is at her best, Holm gives us characters stumbling over the consequences of their decisions, mulling the specific aspects of a past that still haunts them, in the way the seasonal shifts of the city haunt and affect the lives of the people who love there. They may be able to ignore the city moment to moment, but its cumulative effect, like the effects of their past, makes of them products of a region. And Holm has made the fog and chill summers, the multiple hues of pedestrians and the swell of hills part of a lovely and crafted homage to her city and home, creating the most affecting part of the novel.

March 2, 2003, Sunday
NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS
BOOKS IN BRIEF: NONFICTION

The smell of burning toast inspired Pamela Holm’s boyfriend to suggest marriage; surely they could count on a new toaster as a wedding present. In her loosely written collection of essays, Holm explains that one divorce and several soured relationships made her shrug off Denzil Meyers’s casual proposal.

She pictured herself supporting her teenage daughter, Cara, through high school, becoming a solitary artist and writer — although those plans could change if Meyers offered ‘’a ring and a date.’’ When he did, she entered a "weird bridal vortex" that caused her to abandon, briefly, her iconoclastic attitudes. Trying on wedding gowns, she felt like ‘’another middle-class white girl who wants to be a princess.’’ But she compensated by regretting her new consumerism and panicking about marrying Meyers. He was fussy, straightening spoons in the dishwasher; she enjoyed throwing wet towels on the bed. He was insensitive, planning their honeymoon at a resort where he’d spent a weekend with another woman: ‘’It was such a nice place, and I want to go there with you.’’ Would she understand or remain jealous? Not until she walked down the aisle and saw Meyers waiting for her did Holm become deliriously happy, knowing ‘’he’s my future.’’ But they didn’t end up with a new toaster — the couple had asked guests to send gifts to charities. The writing in ‘’The Toaster Broke, So We’re Getting married’’ can be naive, reinforcing Holm’s goofy, hippie-wannabe persona. She can also be humorous and touching as she probes everyday fears about raising a teenager, being alone or committing herself to a partner for life.

Margaret VanDagens

This addition to the crowded memoir shelves offers an entertaining look behind the scenes as Holm plans her San Francisco wedding. Her second trip to the altar 16 years after her first "short, sweet blur" of a wedding is complicated by the presence of her 15-year-old daughter and the usual family issues that arise when wedding bells ring. Chapters titled "The Dress" ("I’ve been seduced with frightening ease into the white wedding I didn’t think I wanted") and "The Registry" ("I can’t help it, it just feels creepy and greedy") cover with wit the various hurdles every bride faces. Holm’s reflections on a woman’s transformation from autonomous individual to blushing bride are dead on, as when she realizes, "it’s so much easier to think about whether or not to use rhinestone zippers for the bridesmaids’ dresses and whether to serve sea bass or sole than it is to contemplate the leap of faith we are about to take, and the depth of the fall should we miss our mark." The author is at her best depicting the strong, healthy relationship with her kindhearted fiance, which will assure readers that Holm has as good a chance as anyone can to make a marriage work, long after the wedding hoopla is over. Her charming style will amuse those who are immersed in the wedding planning process.

A Memoir By Pamela Holm In this insightful memoir, Holm writes candidly about her fears as she prepares to walk down the aisle for the second time. As a jaded 38-year old artist with a teenage daughter, she is surprised to find herself seduced by traditional wedding accouterments such as tulle-wrapped bubbles and $4000 Audrey Hepburn-style gowns. Her pre-nuptial dramas — she forgets to print the time on the invitations and delicately has to tell friends they can’t bring dates — are both amusing and comforting.

Indiebride Books