Review: 'The Poet's House,' by Jean Thompson

When we meet Carla at the opening of "The Poet's House," the latest literary charmer from fictionista Jean Thompson, she's 21 years old and just a few pages away from quitting her job working for a Northern California landscaper named Rick. She's an ornery one, that Carla, prone to taking her own quirky stock of a situation, freaking out and storming off into the sunset. Many times, right up to the very end of the book, the reader wants to say — What? No! Wait a cotton-pickin' minute!

That's the problem with being a reader: You never can change what these damn characters do.

Fortunately, the person who does have some say in these matters, i.e. author Jean Thompson, has arranged for Carla to meet the client who changes her life before her employment-ending hissy fit. It's a beautiful older woman who goes by the name Viridian — one of the "pew-ets" (poets) who will come to fill up Carla's mind and her social calendar, to the bemusement of her boyfriend Aaron.

Though initially she admits she knows nothing about poetry — "or maybe less" — she happens on a poster for a reading by Viridian at a local college campus, goes to it, and has a surprisingly profound experience. "It changed and rearranged something needful in me."

Because Carla has a learning disability that makes reading difficult, she has never deeply connected with literature before — and one of the joys of this novel is getting to watch her become obsessed with poetry. Thompson supplies some more-than-serviceable stanzas for her to fall in love with, too, some "by" Viridian, some by her friend the Portuguese-Jewish poet Oscar Branco, and some by a dead writer named Mathias whom everyone is obsessed with and who seems to have been Viridian's boyfriend before he killed himself back in the day.

Thompson gets it all right — the real poets, the wannabes, the hangers-on; the self-important literary magazine editor, the crude commercial novelist, the hard-nosed money guy. She sends the entire gaggle of them into the woods for a literary conference known as "Into the Woods" (because no one can remember the real name, "Imagination and Environment: Intersections.")

There some hilarious events transpire, as well as a climactic one. For an example of the former, a poet named Tomas Rasz gives his group a writing prompt as follows: He draws a cross on the blackboard, stands in front of it with arms extended for 10 minutes, then plays his harmonica. The students suspect he's making fun of them.

Carla is working the conference as an assistant and, by the time the major developments that end the book unfold, has become quite the insider in the Bay Area poetry scene. You know you've met a believable character when three days after you finish the book you're still thinking, She did what? and Why, again? Couldn't she have called me and gotten my advice first?

I guess the next best thing is to argue about it in book club.

Marion Winik is a writer and professor in Baltimore.

The Poet's House

By: Jean Thompson.

Publisher: Algonquin, 320 pages, $26.95.