Book Review : Making Mashed Potatoes of a Marriage

The Potato Baron by John Thorndike (Villard Books: $17.95; 284 pp.)

Making the hero of this story of modern marriage a Harvard-educated potato farmer helps put spin on what is essentially the generic American novel of the decade, but even this unhackneyed occupation can’t entirely revitalize a strip-mined theme.

While the rigors of potato farming in Maine have the advantage of novelty, readers may have trouble understanding exactly why Austin Pooler is so adamantly opposed to a mid-life career change. That, in fact, is precisely why his wife, Fay, has left him, and why our sympathies are with her from the start.

Lords of All They Survey

Married in their early 20s, Fay and Austin have lived on the Pooler acreage in northern Maine since the honeymoon. There are two children: Maggie, now away at Rhode Island School of Design, and Blake, a remarkably self-possessed 8-year-old. Theirs is no hard-scrabble life--the Poolers are lords of all they survey; their house is a custard-yellow landmark. Austin is a one-man dynasty--a member of the National Potato Council, a stalwart of the Maine Potato Board, and the fourth generation to live and work in Aroostook County. While not adverse to an occasional short holiday away from the ancestral acres, he cannot really imagine an existence not governed by the planting, nurturing, harvesting and shipping of potatoes.

She’s Had Enough

Fay, on the other hand, has not only been imagining but discussing the possibility of a move for years. After two decades in an extremely small, cold, remote corner of the United States, she’s had enough of the bitter winters, the enforced isolation, the cultural limitations, and the social occasions when the topics of conversation are ring rot, blight, and the threat of cheap spuds from Canada.

Don’t get her wrong. At first, Fay actually relished the role of potato-farmer’s wife--bringing coffee and doughnuts out to the field at dawn, devising increasingly imaginative potato recipes (three times a day, because Austin is convinced the potato is God’s perfect food), gamely making every effort to charm the potato gentry.

When all that finally palled, she went to work teaching school, but now, at 42, Fay has completely and utterly exhausted the possibilities of White Pine. After 20 years, she feels her turn has come. Her mother-in-law understands completely. A widow in her mid-’60s, she’s about to marry a Long Island grower who has long since abandoned hands-on farming for potato brokerage, an aspect of the business offering considerably more scope for a balanced life.

Fay has already departed with son Blake when the novel opens, leaving Austin an unequivocal note stating that she’s spent her last winter in Aroostook County. His first reaction is to paint one of the potato sheds purple, but when that flamboyant gesture fails to change Fay’s mind, he’s at a loss. Though Fay is temporarily staying nearby, she soon moves on for parts unknown. When, after dogged sleuthing, Austin succeeds in tracking her down, she vanishes again.

Thereafter, the action consists of hide-and-seek, each meeting enlivened by passionate lovemaking, which merely serves to remind Fay why she wound up in White Pine in the first place. Surprisingly creative, these sexual exercises seem curiously out of character for a potato farmer who considers Portland, Maine, a hotbed of depravity and the Massachusetts Turnpike the highway to perdition.

Exasperating but Memorable

A farmer himself, Thorndike excels at conveying the emotional pull of the land and a man’s need for continuity and meaning in life. Austin is exasperating and stubborn, but memorable. Fay is a less successful creation, her personality clouded by ambivalence. Though the author struggles valiantly to present Fay’s point of view, he seems saddened and bewildered by her rejection of a life she once found so satisfactory.

When the novel ends in reconciliation, the tone established in the first 270 pages makes the facile solution seem abrupt and temporary. Can this tractable Austin Pooler really be the same fellow who lived on potatoes and milk for 40 days to prove they’re the only nourishment a man needs? We wish him luck in his new venture, but wonder how long he’ll be able to resist the siren song of those Katahdins.