At the Gentle Mercy Plants

After her equally gifted sistersNew Yorker correspondent Janet and composer Mary Emmaleft the family's Midwestern home for Paris and New York, Flanner, at the time a teenager, and her mother moved to California. The essays here discuss the ideas of home, family and place through such disparate vehicles as the great fire in Berkeley in 1933, which destroyed the Flanners' home and possessions; the growth and transformation of a peculiar cypress-walled garden in Pasadena into a home that lasted 36 years; a rhapsodic cataloguing of the exotic flora of California, most of which was transplanted from other areas; and an argument promoting the spiritual benefits of bamboo. Despite Flanner's reputation as a poet, the poems included here are of dubious literary interest while her prose is luminous and lyrical, observant and sharp-witted. Flanner is everywhere at once, trying to tell us everything she knows and has seen and done in her rich and fulfilling life.(October)