The Garden

November 1, 2023

Beams's second novel, after The Illness Lesson, navigates between gothic and historical fiction as it explicates how women's bodies are annexed. In 1948, Irene Willard arrives at a remote residential hospital after her fifth miscarriage. There are doctors, a garden of mysterious power, and a great deal on the line. With blurbs from Rachel Yoder, Paul Tremblay, and Kelly Link. Prepub Alert.

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January 29, 2024
Beams follows up her acclaimed novel The Illness Lesson with an atmospheric story of a strange obstetrical clinic in late-1940s Western Massachusetts. Irene is young, in love with her husband George, and pregnant for the sixth time, the first five pregnancies having ended in miscarriage. In hopes of carrying her baby to term, she enters a residential treatment center run by a married doctor couple in the Berkshires. The clinic is housed in an ancestral estate whose depiction by Beams as “a mammoth, patient creature” owes much to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. There, prickly and recalcitrant Irene joins “like-circumstanced women” for a strict regiment of rest. She forms an uneasy alliance with two fellow patients, know-it-all Margaret and amiable Pearl, and together they discover a walled garden on the estate that has supernatural properties, the details of which would be a spoiler to mention. Beams adeptly conjures the clinic’s heightened atmosphere, populated as it is by desperate pregnant women willing to subject themselves to just about anything to birth healthy babies (“The only thing she was more afraid of than staying was leaving”). The author’s fans will delight in this inspired and unsettling work.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
Beams' follow-up to her stellar debut, The Illness Lesson (2020), is set in the Berkshires in the late 1940s at a secluded private hospital run by married doctors who promise to help women who've struggled to carry a child to term. Irene Willard is passionately in love with her husband, George, a WWII vet, and wants to give him the baby he so desperately desires. So after five miscarriages, Irene agrees to put herself in the care of Dr. Bishop and her husband, Dr. Hall, living in their house with a group of other pregnant women and subjecting herself to their treatments in the hopes of carrying this sixth pregnancy to term. But Irene never shies away from speaking her mind, and she's soon clashing with Dr. Bishop during their talk therapy sessions, leading to a growing iciness between them. And then Irene makes a startling discovery in a hidden garden at the house that seems to involve mysterious and troubling powers, a revelation that consumes and haunts her. Beams' second outing is a taut, tense, absorbing Gothic tale that deftly explores the complexity of women's inner lives and their varied relationships to motherhood.

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Starred review from February 15, 2024
In 1948 Massachusetts, a young wife enters a mysterious residential program to help her carry a pregnancy to term. Having suffered five miscarriages, Irene Willard arrives at an estate in the Berkshires that serves as a treatment facility for pregnant women with similar histories. High-spirited and impetuous, Irene isn't thrilled to be so tightly monitored by the married doctors who run the program, but Irene's husband, shaken by his wartime service, desperately wants children. Because of him, Irene endures calisthenics and communal gardening, hormone shots and psychotherapy. Most acutely, she endures Dr. Bishop, the woman who spearheads the program with steely ambition. When Irene discovers an untended walled garden on the back of the property, she realizes it may be the source of the house's unsettling atmosphere, with ramifications for both Irene and Dr. Bishop that are beyond either of their comprehensions. In many ways, this novel is sister to Beams' debut novel, The Illness Lesson (2020); both feature a women-centered community, dubious health treatments, and animal omens. But here Beams leans into horror influences--The Haunting of Hill House, Rosemary's Baby, plant horror, even Stephen King--and into the tropes of the maternal gothic. ("She'd had no idea love could swirl with horror this way," Beams writes of Irene.) While many authors have explored the way the pregnant body is a haunted body, Beams' writing sets her apart, shimmering against the dark subject matter. She also navigates a minefield, as Irene's treatment is based on a synthetic hormone used in the 1940s that caused both birth defects and health risks for the mother; where a lesser writer might have fallen back on ableist tropes of "monstrous" children, Beams treats her subject with a careful moral imagination. Like an overgrown garden--untamable, lush, and wild in ways lovely and terrifying.

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