Verdant Leaves and Apples Red as Blood: Austyn Wohlers’ “Hothouse Bloom” https://ift.tt/Nn56oKf
In her debut novel Hothouse Bloom, Austyn Wohlers explores a millennial pastoral through the story of Anna, a former painter in her late twenties who flees home in search of paradise, only to witness its collapse. When Anna learns that her grandfather, Joe, has left her his orchard, she abandons her painting career and moves to it — longing to “live a painting, for once, instead of making them.” Her dream of blurring the boundaries between nature, animal, and human seems at first attainable through absolute solitude and non-verbalization. However, Anna’s aspirations are interrupted by the arrival of her old friend Jan, a nomadic writer working on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield, who tempts her to abandon her current path and return to painting. Anna’s embodiment with nature recalls the protagonist in The Vegetarian by Han Kang, as Anna lets “her humanity dissolve with her presence in the orchard,” a state ultimately disrupted by male domination, capitalist impulses, and human violence.
Largely narrated in the third person, Hothouse Bloom shows how Jan imposes control over Anna’s mind and body. He evokes the hunter in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” who intrudes upon the female protagonist’s forest home — this time, not with a gun, but with words. “‘Dreaming, dreaming,’ he teased. But his voice was harsh.” Seeing Anna as someone who should “be saved,” Jan persuades her to turn the orchard into a source of profit. Fueled by Jan’s unyielding language of temptation, Anna undertakes the apple harvest as the season approaches — her paradise lost. The invaded garden mirrors Anna’s shattered autonomy and selfhood, both ravaged by Jan’s toxic masculinity. As “the dead orchard was itself leaking blood,” Anna vomits blood, a haunting parallel to her and the orchard’s mutual perishing: the devastated female body and the corrupted natural world.
Jan’s intrusion into Anna’s world also undoes the paradise of her return to painting. Painting, manifested in the pursuit of capturing nature’s aesthetics and beauty — ostensibly free from human greed — becomes infiltrated by Anna’s capitalist impulses and transforms into a ritual through which she “marr[ies] the money-self and the soothed-self.” Near the end, she paints the orchard before the corpses of ducks, applying the colors of the sky amid the stench of decay, signifying the loss of her authentic connection with nature — a loss that erupts into violence: “Violence flooded her. She beat the painting off the easel.” Through this depiction, Wohlers critiques the realm of art, betraying its portrayal as a domain where aesthetic and cultural value outweighs practical or economic interests. This critique extends to the portrayal of Jan as a writer, another form of art.
The novel’s images evoke a painting bathed in summer green: Anna’s dark gray car, the gray-green house with its green roof, and the grass and tree leaves filtered through sunlight. Contrasting colors appear within this verdant scene — red apples and blood. At first, the apples in the garden symbolize Anna’s harmony with the ecosystem, but as they ripen, they manifest the growth of her sense of her capitalist impulses, greed, and corruption: “The apples look like red tumors today.” Once fused with nature in her absolute solitude, Anna now finds herself in the crowded marketplace: “Apples, fresh apples! Come and buy some apples, fresh from the farm!” The phrase “come buy” echoes Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” where commodified fruits allegorize the exploitation of young women’s corporeality and subjectivity within the system of commercialism. Anna’s transformation into a merchant, like the menacing goblins, illustrates how the hypermarket system can numb individuals, even in spaces that seem untouched — the very places the protagonist dreams of as closest to heaven.
Near the end, Anna falls ill and visits a clinic near the orchard. Hungry afterward, she chooses a restaurant, taking in the array of fast-food chains before her: “Arby’s, Burger King, Subway, Cracker Barrel, Wendy’s, Popeyes, McDonald’s.” The novel concludes at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Ordering the food, she observes “a teenager shaking potatoes around in the deep fryer.” This ending, despite the somewhat unexpected and abrupt shift from the orchard scene to the fast-food place, underscores capitalist society’s shaping of people’s unconscious treatment of nature — such as potatoes — as soulless commodities, rapidly consumed, controlled, and dominated without a second thought.
As a reader, one aspect where I wanted more development was the connection between the characters — particularly Anna and Jan. Although the novel focuses primarily on Anna’s consciousness and her reflections, it is somewhat difficult to fully understand why Jan chooses to stay in the orchard for so long and why Anna allows him to, despite her painful emotions and sense of guilt. I would have appreciated more insight into their shared past, which could have clarified the foundations of their friendship and made their relationship more vivid and deeply felt. This, however, is offset by Wohlers’ poetic, thorough, and poignant depiction of Anna’s relationships with nature, other characters, and herself. I also found the author’s use of third-person narration complex, as shifting perspectives between characters can be challenging to do successfully. Yet this intricacy, arising from the movement through different characters’ thoughts, enhances the chaotic tension of the orchard.
In Hothouse Bloom, the author precisely portrays the tension between utopian immersion in nature and the relentless encroachment of money-mindedness. The novel delves into the consequences of commodification — reflected in the natural world and the self — and to question the possibility of authentic human engagement within an ecosystem despite the overwhelming currents of consumerism and the relentless intensity of modern market structures.
FICTION Hothouse Bloom
By Austyn Wohlers
Hub City Press
Published August 26, 2025
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