Invisible Gardens

by Julie Shigekuni

In this long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut novel, A Bridge Between Us, Julie Shigekuni offers a beautiful and disturbing look at the intimacy and isolation, desire and despair that haunt a young woman's life. "Invisible Gardens" is the story of Lily Soto, a thirty-five-year-old Japanese-American woman, who, despite two young children, a stable marriage, and a teaching career based on a book she has finally completed, feels her life is falling...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312311834
• ISBN13: 9780312311834
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Not Afraid of Choices

I'm surprised that none of the reviewers on this site have mentioned what is truly remarkable about this book, which is that the protagonist, Lily Soto is a full fledged character who makes her own reality. Unlike conventional heroines who you are asked to sympathize with because they are victims, Lily chooses her path. She's a successful woman with a career, a family and a marriage that many would see as enviable, yet she enters into an affair. Obviously, readers are threatened by this character and the author's bravado in creating her! But I think it's about time someone came up with a character you can sink your teeth into. My guess from reading the angry reviews is that some people are too scared to really read this book and take it on for what it's doing, which is pretty brilliant when you think about it.

a solidly good book

Too many reviewers of Shigekuni's fine book have lashed and caned Lily Soto for the ultimately human behavior of finding herself caught between responsibility and desire, as if the two were always mutually exclusive. What I like and find most credible about this character is that Lily both remains responsible to her family AND pursues her affair with a colleague, and what I find most effective about the way the character is written is that Shigekuni places her in a personal limbo and suspends her there for the duration. That the writing doesn't moralize about Lily's limbo means that I as a reader am not expected to take a moral stance either. Thus, I choose not to. Nevertheless, color me mightily perplexed at other reviewers' needs to strap on puritanical ideology in place of objective assessments of this book's qualities: Why punish the character for her desire? And by extension, why criticize the author for writing a character who recognizes and pursues and lives her desire, doomed though it might seem from the outset? After all, fiction writing teachers and how-to books harp on the importance of creating a main character with a desire and then placing him/her in conflict. Doesn't Shigekuni do just that?But enough already about the characters!I would like to commend this book and its author for two effects that are especially well-turned. One is its sexual bravery. As I began reading, I worried that Shigekuni might back down from a full illustration of Lily's affair with Perish, but that concern didn't last long. While I'm still not wholly certain what magnetized these two characters to each other (and thus would like to have seen this part of the novel painted more clearly), I understood their tie implicitly as the affair unfolded. I sometimes wanted to know more about Perish, but the story belonged to Lily and remained in her perspective, a difficult feat for a novel-length work and one that Shigekuni pulled off well. The sexual bravery of the book existed in much more than the affair at its center, though: Lily's continuing, though strained, sexual relations with her husband, her interpretation of her husband's handling of a body during an autopsy, and the portrayal of her aging father's sexual confusion all contribute to my satisfaction and admiration on this point.The other noteworthy feature of this novel is Shigekuni's elegant movement through narrative time, interlacing key moments from Lily's past with scenes from her present-day life. The reader never experiences a sense of unsettled interruption; rather, the effect is seamless.While Lily Soto faces a commonplace dilemma, Julie Shigekuni's approach is not in the least commonplace. Clearly the author understands that The Scarlet Letter has already been written. That she spared her character from being branded with a bright red A in turn spared this reader from the call to judgment. For me, that's one of the book's assets. Instead, I got to meet a credible character li

complex, engaging, and thankfully no moralizing

... It is amazing--and appalling--to me that readers of 2003 criticize a novel not as a novel but on the basis of moralizing about a character. Lily's character is carefully drawn and believable enough to spark quite a bit of controversy, apparently. One of the reasons I was moved by this book was because of how true-to-life Lily seemed. People have affairs, and often their reasons for having them seem vague even to them. Yet once Lily has entered into this affair, the novel becomes even more moving, because Shigekuni was able to skillfully show the tricky balance her character had to walk: balancing her love for and responsibility to her family and her own desire and longing, perhaps, for a different life. What is moving about this book is that as in real life, there are no easy answers, and Shigekuni does not provide us with any. Nor does she moralize. While we see the characters struggling with the consequences of their actions, there is little judgement in this novel, and that is as it should be. For the readers so quick to make judgements about these fictional characters, I'd remind you that not everyone shares your moral universe--I never thought of Lily was a bad person for her affair, nor did I find her passive, though there were moments when she seemed depressed and overwhelmed, but that was part of what moved me about the book. Lily acted on her own desire, and whether we agree with that or not, I found it quite appealing to have a character choose to ignore moralizers and express her own sexual nature. ... but I too have been drawn into a discussion of these characters as if they are real people. They are not, but the controversy this novel has engendered speaks for the skill of this very talented writer: she has created complex characters that we are moved by, whether that is through recognition and sympathy or fear and judgement. What more of a compliment than that: that we believe in these characters. And finally, as another reviewer noted, this book is just beautiful on a sentence level. I read fast to see what happened, but I often went back to mark particularly lovely lines. And I agree, also, that in many ways this book is not about the love affair at all, but is about relationships and responsibility, and the sense of death that haunts us all. A lovely book!

Shigekuni has outdone herself!!!

We can all see that Julie Shigekuni's Invisible Gardens has received a wide range of reviews, from bordering nasty to more than raving. When you come across a work like this, one that can elicit both praise and disgust, you know it has to be pretty darn good. Perhaps Lily Soto is "bland," "passive," and "engorged in breast milk." And perhaps this has enraged the feminists, those readers looking for someone who must take responsibility for her actions. But let's stop attacking the protagonist for a moment. As the reader from New Mexico observed, the book is about "how little of life can show up on the most visible layer of living." Clearly, this reader gets it, and as a result, she was able to enjoy the author's story, the way SHE wanted to convey this message. Shigekuni's critics are so wrapped up in what Lily should have done and how things should have turned out that they've ended up writing character reviews instead of book reviews. One reviewer even went so far as to say that the "text should have been corrected or made to go away entirely." Corrected, as in correcting a student's exam? We aren't here to correct works of art. Say all you want, but please, put away the red markers and try to appreciate the elegant language, the delving into Lily's psyche, the complex motivations of this very real character. Or perhaps appreciate the fact that it enraged you enough to submit a review. What did I think? I yearned for more. I even skipped some of the slower-moving sections to find out what happened. And then when I went back to read the slower-moving sections, I allowed myself to revel in the poetry and delicate, precise language. "The mother with barren breasts, flesh torn away by hungry insects, dissipated by time." Or "In the same intangible way that a person might miss color, it is possible for a part of oneself to become blind and not even know what's been lost?" I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. I marveled at Shigekuni's ability to be artistic AND engaging. I wondered how many other people in the world could examine their lives the way Lily did. I thought about the lost feather. I thought about Lily's dead mother. I thought about visiting New Mexico after reading such rich details of the land. The book stayed with me, and that's when I knew I had read a pretty darn good book.I'm actually happy to see all this anger. And at the same time, rhapsody. Keep it all coming, because the more anger and rhapsody we see, the more interest this awe-inspiring book will evoke. Five-plus stars all the way.