The Orange Tree Book

As in Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters, the characters in Mildred Walker’s Orange Tree search for meaning and happiness in their often uneventful middle-class lives—and yet from such a seemingly ordinary premise, subtle and defining drama ensues. Editing Walker’s last novel, which the author reworked for nearly two decades, Carmen Pearson has found indications that the Chekhov play had in fact been a template that Walker contemporized in The Orange Tree.

The novel centers on two families living in Boston in the 1970s: an older couple, Tiresa and Paulo Romano, and the newlyweds Olive and Ron Fifer. The fragile state of the older woman’s health and the younger woman’s marriage brings these two couples together in their separate and quietly desperate isolation, producing a combination of insight and compassion that only the finest story can evoke. In The Orange Tree, Walker explores the relationships between men and women and offers an absorbing commentary on literature, writing, education, middle-class life, and the nature of friendship and of death.

Publishers Weekly

Known in the mid-20th century for her American chronicles (Winter Wheat; Fireweed), Walker (1905-1998) was unable to publish this 1970s tale of two couples' unlikely friendship during her lifetime. (As Pearson, her editor, notes in the brief introduction, Walker revised it over two decades.) Newlyweds Olive and Ron Fifer live in a Boston apartment adjacent to Tiresa and Paulo Romano, an English professor and eye doctor who are a generation older. Olive tries to fit the mold of a typical housewife, while dull Ron climbs the corporate ladder by day and settles in front of the TV at night. Olive's sense of inarticulate yearning is heightened by her pregnancy, which she considers terminating "if Ron would hear of it." In the elevator, Tiresa, who is in poor health, confesses to Olive that she once lost a child (a confession she regrets almost immediately), initiating an intimacy that soon takes on a life of its own. As the couples come to know each other, their lives and marriages change irrevocably. In a manner reminiscent of Paula Fox (particularly in the dialogue), Walker delineates her characters with surety, unspooling Olive and Tiresa's insights on sex, class, gender roles, age and each other. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.