IN THE ORCHARD

Mere weeks after giving birth, a distracted mother named Maisie Moore visits a pick-your-own farm with her husband and children.

Rapturous in its celebration of fecundity (including plentiful details of breastfeeding and C-sections), of nature and the rhythms of birth and life, Minot’s third novel takes a more laid-back attitude to plot. Instead, her narrative is packed with the considerations of parenting—discussed among women at playgrounds; encouraged by Maisie’s grandmother, whose hard-drinking husband died young; pondered ceaselessly by Maisie herself, both as an inexperienced younger mother and now a more capable one with four children. The novel, focused on a single day in the life of Maisie and her family, is almost action-free while utterly inhabited by thoughts, memories, speculations, dreams, and observations on these themes. The family—including Maisie; kindly husband Neil; 8-year-old Xavier; Harriet, age 6; Romeo, 3; and newborn Esme—does leave home for its annual apple-picking excursion, permitting a change of scene. And Maisie is also preoccupied by one other thing—the family’s precarious finances—although details of this vast debt remain unspecified and unexplained. But at the apple farm, the larger focus remains much the same: the behavior of other parents and passersby, often in reaction to Maisie’s brood; considerations of marriage, birth, healing, and growing, as symbolized by the grafts on the fruit trees; premature deaths of mothers and infants. Looping tirelessly round babies, bodies, love, and money (is life “what emerges out of life?”), Minot’s text is variously descriptive, perceptive, heartfelt, fanciful, banal, and sentimental (“I lub you, Mumma”), concluding, after Maisie has disturbing encounters with two older women, somewhere ethereal and rhapsodic yet tinged with danger.

An obsessive ode to the maternal, simultaneously poetic and stifling.