Rose City: A Memoir of Work (review)

Rose City: A Memoir of Work offers readers many pleasures—the close observation of workplace skills and behaviors, the vibrant depiction of an engaging cast of characters, the calm and inviting voice of its narrator, the tactful yet candid presentation of painful personal memories. All these make the book engaging and involving, but it accomplishes its ends so quietly and honestly that it’s possible to overlook the rich complexity of its achievement. The book also inadvertently answers some issues that have arisen about memoir.

Two major strands of narrative intertwine in the book. The first follows the trajectory of the author’s employment over several months in a rose greenhouse in Richmond, Indiana, a rust-belt locale nicknamed “the Rose City.” This is minimum-wage work, without benefits, among high-school dropouts and manual laborers with few employment options. Like a good reporter or immersion journalist, Jean Harper takes us completely into this world as she learns the rose cutter’s craft and the demands of this work life. Woven into this strand is another, about the personal circumstances that have brought the author back to Richmond, where she had gotten her college degree and met the married college professor, 25 years her senior, for whom she would return 11 years later. Their courtship, tentative, uncertain, and largely unspoken, has seemed so impossible that she has married someone else; when they finally decide to be together, they have to break up two marriages. She leaves Massachusetts and returns to Indiana, and they set up a household. In the aftermath, she finds herself labeled a home-wrecker and a gold digger and worse, and the couple is, in essence, shunned by former friends and colleagues.

This second strand is a tricky bit of business, fraught with pitfalls and difficult to pull off without seeming self-justifying or insensitive or self-absorbed. The author succeeds by presenting the back-story, the events prior to their starting their life together, in second person and only shifting into first-person narrative, the voice of the work strand, once the two of them have made their commitment to one another. It is as if the narrator has not been herself until this moment and, by the time she is integrated with the persona of the work strand a third of the way through the book, the reader is comfortable with that persona and more willing to ride out the aftermath with her.

It’s a sign of Jean Harper’s artistry that material that might have veered toward the polemical on the one hand or the self-serving on the other stays aptly integrated and well balanced. As in that moment when second person dissolves into first person, there are deft touches throughout. For example, early in the book, just after the opening scene among the roses in the greenhouse, she flashes back to her then-husband’s confusion trying to locate the rosebushes in front of which he’s been directed to park the car by an innkeeper. Or later, when she is unable to find work in Richmond and begins training as a rose cutter, she briefly acknowledges her sense of guilt by imagining the greenhouse as “a vocational purgatory” for “women like” her and is given the stoical reassurance by her trainer, “You’re here because you’re here.” Throughout the book her portraits of her coworkers are neither patronizing, sentimental, nor judgmental; one subplot involves a pregnant young woman who refuses to give up working in surroundings tainted with hazardous chemical sprays because she needs the money, and Harper is able to raise our concerns without melodrama or bias. The discovery that the author’s disapproving mother has Parkinson’s disease is similarly handled ably, and a scene in a restaurant where her mother makes her repeat, ever louder, her reason for coming back east—to go to court to finalize her divorce—is both memorable and restrained.

Rereading Rose City a few weeks after the major news...