“It is the blight man was born for/ It is Margaret you mourn for.” So ends Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall: To a Young Child, a poem about a little girl crying over falling leaves and the loss of her innocence. And so begins former Columbia guest lecturer Francine Prose’s newest novel, Goldengrove.
Though Prose only thought of using the poem after she began writing the novel, it is referenced throughout. Using a poem to inspire a book could have just been a clever gimmick, but, in this case, it is done in a manner so effective that one cannot imagine the book written any other way.
The story is told by Nico, a 13-year-old girl whose sister, Margaret, drowns due to heart failure at the end of the first chapter. Glamorous, gorgeous, talented Margaret was about to graduate from high school—scientific, awkward, admiring Nico is left to try to find ways to be haunted by her late sister throughout the summer. She finds the seemingly perfect avenue to do so by hanging out with Aaron, Margaret’s heartbroken boyfriend, and doing Margaret’s favorite activities with him. Over that summer, Nico grapples with grief, family, friendship, love, death, and the beauty of being alive.
Prose is known as a social satirist, and Goldengrove is not spared her razor-sharp sardonic wit. Those comforting the grief-stricken are made to look completely ridiculous. “Don’t make any decisions for a year,” people repeatedly tell Nico. That advice is almost as good as the book Aaron’s mother buys at Nico’s father’s bookstore, which likens the grieving to a confused kitten. Apart from the cynicism, though, are fully developed characters.
Nico seems too mature and articulate for her age. Dialogue between characters is, at times, repetitive. (It doesn’t take long to understand that trailing off is their way of alluding to Margaret’s death). Margaret’s love of all things vintage varies between appearing idiosyncratically cool and a bit too quirky for someone so put together.
Fortunately, none of this keeps the characters from arousing the reader’s empathy.
Most remarkable, though, is the poetry of Prose’s prose. “Margaret, are you grieving/ over Goldengrove unleaving?” is applicable to the book on many levels. There are many literal connections between Hopkins’ poem and the book: the book’s title and the name of Nico’s father’s bookstore come from the second line of the poem, and Margaret is the name of both the poem’s protagonist and of Nico’s sister. But even the idea of the poem—loss of innocence and time forcing greater understanding of the world and oneself—could very well be the spine on which this book was bound. “I hadn’t planned to use the poem until I reached the point—almost the exact point—at which Nico finds it,” Prose said in an interview. “It seemed perfect.” Margaret had already been named and the themes had already been set, and yet the book appears to have sprung from the poem.
“It’s such a brilliant poem,” Prose continued, “and I enjoyed writing the scene in which Nico doesn’t get it—of course, she really does—and doesn’t like it, because it scares her.” Indeed, the poem, and the book itself, are a bit discomforting. They grapple with death, loss, growing old, and growing up. Yet they stay with their readers. This is what makes the poem “brilliant”—another trait it lends to Goldengrove.
