GardenofEden
A Novel
By Justin Viola
Some gardens do not die.
They are left.
Back Cover · Garden of Eden
By the time Mira Halász understood what she had built, someone was already dead because of it.
For fifteen years, a pediatric oncologist watches death. Children. Animals. The slow accumulation of everything a careful mind can no longer reconcile. And one ordinary afternoon, against everything she was raised to believe, she understands what she has been looking at all along: that the silence is not a test, and not a mystery, and not a mercy. The sentence becomes an essay. The essay becomes a movement. And somewhere at the edge of that movement, a young man begins to read her work the way scripture is read, slowly, exactly, without the small mercies she allowed herself.
He understands her better than her husband. He understands her better than she does. And the question he eventually asks her, in a letter she should have burned, is the only honest question her argument ever left open:
“If it’s all true, why are you still being careful?”
Garden of Eden is a novel about the woman who looked at the world and refused to lie about what she saw. About the philosopher who turned her grief into a blade. About the husband who watched the woman he married disappear into the woman the world wanted. And about the boy who took her at her word, and acted in her name, on the conclusion she was too afraid draw.
It is not a book about doubt. It is a book about what comes after you can no longer pretend not to know.
It will not console you.
It will leave you holding the question, and refusing page after page, to take it from you.
“The silence was not absence.
It was the room
the question lived in.”
— From the novel
Garden of Eden
A novel
by
Justin Viola
Forthcoming · MMXXVI
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