Rose City: A Memoir of Work

One August day in 1992, Harper went to work in an Indiana greenhouse cutting roses and spraying insecticides; by October, she had become a researcher, and by the end of her four-month stint, she was a supervisor. From this recollection of her time in the greenhouse, Harper flashes back to 1981, when she was a college senior. She had a crush on her married photography professor, Richard, who over the next decade sent her 80 letters. In 1989, though, Harper married another man and lived a comfortable, upper-middle-class life. Yet three years later, she found herself rereading Richard's letters, and, once she reconnected with him, they began an affair. Harper left her husband, and took off with Richard on a road trip from Indiana to the Southwest and back. On returning, she learned that her family's home in Massachusetts had been seriously damaged by fire and that a month earlier, her mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson's. Harper is a sophisticated stylist, dabbling in the second-person and sliding in and out of the greenhouse months and the surrounding years, but nothing about this pointless, self-absorbed narrative will evoke readers' empathy—not about Harper's discomfort at the gossip the affair provoked, not about roses or the working poor (her colleagues at the greenhouse), not even about insecticides. (Oct.)