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Book review: “Second Nature” by Michael Pollan 19 June 2007 6:13 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Michael Pollan, books, garden, identity, politics, reviews, school, seasonality , trackback

Tracy is on vacation. You can read all about it at Van Boothe Tandem Adventures. Regularly-scheduled non-vacation TracyFood posts will be back on Monday, July 9. Meanwhile….

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From Second Nature by Michael Pollan:

Of course, a real green thumb would have done everything I did without having to think about it so much. But you have to start somewhere…. Only much later does it become second nature. Now, I get it — indeed, can no longer imagine not getting it — and from here on I’ll probably grow fine carrots without a moment’s reflection, no bigger a deal than riding a bike. So maybe that is what a green thumb is, a particular form of memory: a compendium of little stories that have been distilled to the point where the gardener can draw on their lessons without even thinking about it — the morals of these stories (most of which are about his own experiences, but some of which may be secondhand) are always at his fingertips.

The above passage is a good starting point for my thoughts about Second Nature, because it includes the book’s title phrase and central theme, and what I found to be its single biggest problem — the author’s disconcerting tendency to always refer to “the gardener” as male. Michael Pollan also always refers to nature as female, and that bothers me, too. So, before I go any further, a little rant about language, gender, and in particular the masculine generic.

I hate the masculine generic. It really gets on my tits. And considering the subject in question, that’s a remarkably apt turn of phrase. To me, default use of male pronouns, “man” instead “person”, “men” rather than “people,” “humans,” or “humanity” — all these smack of thoughtless, or at best lazy writing, because the fact is these are pretty easy choices, and the masculine generic really isn’t all that hard to avoid, once you know better than to use it. Here is one of my favorite rants on the subject. In the case of Second Nature, I chose to read Pollan’s use of the masculine generic pronoun for “the gardener” as follows: homeboy didn’t know better, genuinely didn’t realize how distracting it would be to read, and was genuinely blind to the fact that he was doing it except for maybe of course how his pronouns were a deliberate choice because, being a dude, and a gardener, he’s of course talking about himself whenever he refers to “the gardener” — and so, male. Which is all very well and good except for how as a lady, and a gardener, for similar reasons, it throws me for a loop every time he writes about “the gardener” like he’s writing about a dude, because I’m not. And then when you throw in the fact that Pollan is a heterosexual male and insists on referring to nature as female, which of course inserts all kind of weird sexual tension into “her” relationship with “the gardener” — well, for me the effect is distracting as all hell. But the worst part is that all that weird sexual tension, just like the utterly avoidable masculine generic, is all kinds of gratuituous and unnecessary, because despite those very problematic elements, Second Nature is still a damn good book.

So. With that in mind, let’s continue — but don’t forget to read all my praise for this book as “pretty good for all the weird gendered language,” just like you should always read the word “poetess” as “pretty good poet, for a girl,” and “chairman” as “ack! bad writing! who’s to say it’s always a dude in the chair?” Right.

Second Nature, subtitled A Gardener’s Education, is the story of Michael Pollan’s life as a gardener, and what those experiences have taught him, which is quite a bit. In particular, gardening has provided Pollan with many opportunities to meditate on how humans interact with nature, and the autobiographical parts of the book are balanced by, and deftly interwoven with, the author’s digressions into the history, philosophy, and politics of such interactions (I prefer to think of them as interactions rather than refer to their sum as “a relationship,” because the latter involves a little too much personification for my taste. But I digress.) The result makes for some very good reading: both entertaining and thought-provoking, but in a subtle, rather than heavy-handed way.

The book is organized chronologically in two ways: one timeline is that of Pollan’s life, and the other is the four seasons of a gardening year, starting with spring. The seasonal structure helps organize unrelated-seeming chapters into the sections that make up the unified whole of the book; in the hands of a lesser writer this device could easily have been forced or awkward, but Pollan pulls it off. A note in fine print at the very beginning of the book confirms that versions of several chapters first appeared as articles in Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Magazine, which supports my sense that Second Nature grew out of shorter, stand-alone essays — not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I actually really like it when a book offers chapters or sections or any kind of subdivisions that provide convenient stopping points mid-read (although Second Nature is so engaging that it can be hard to stop reading, even at one of Pollan’s satisfying conclusions, or just to take notes).

Before Second Nature begins the larger sections named for the seasons, an opening chapter, “Two Gardens,” introduces the author and his life experiences with gardens, both real and imagined. My favorite parts of the book were devoted to the second kind of garden, which is of course the second nature of the book’s title, and as a writer I cannot help but envy the facility with which Pollan expands on that theme and that phrase. He writes with both respect and humor about the fantasies gardeners create about what our work will achieve (and how those can contrast or even conflict with reality), as well as broader, more philosophical discussions of what gardening means to people and the planet we inhabit (although of course, as a person, I’m inclined to the former point of view). I enjoyed the Spring chapters of the book, with their entertaining stories about Pollan’s garden mishaps, the history and biology of grass lawns (in many ways the beginnings of the “grass farming” sections of Pollan’s later book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and the unique moralization that surrounds gardening in the United States, especially organics. However, the book really grabbed me around mid-Summer, after the chapter about roses, with “Weeds Are Us,” which led into “Green Thumb” and the Fall section, “Harvest,” “Planting a Tree,” and perhaps my very favorite chapter, “The Idea of a Garden.” For the remainder of this review, I will quote and respond to a few passages from those chapters, which are so good they inspire me not just to overlook their flaws, but to look past them and imagine that I am reading the best gardening book ever, one which I will now describe in greater detail.

Writing this review has made me think a great deal about the gardening book of my dreams, the one Second Nature makes me imagine even during the parts that frustrate me. Such a book would combines Pollan’s skillful writing with the humble awareness of privilege expressed by David Mas Masumoto in Epitaph For a Peach, the do-it-yourself encouragement of Gayla Trail’s You Grow Girl and maybe some of the recipes in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (just to list the other books I finished on my way to finally writing my review about this one). Above all, the very best gardening book in the world — the one that might only exist in my mind, along with all my dreams about the perfect garden — I am sure that my ideal gardening book would be suffused with optimism, just like Michael Pollan’s Second Nature.