Love Affair in the Garden of Milton

In this moving memoir, appeals to the work of John Milton, especially Paradise Lost, become uncanny conduits for managing marital discord. Like an embedded reporter, the bard sings from the front lines of uncoupling and unbelief. Mintz teaches us to read as if our lives were at stake. And they are. In Love Affair in the Garden of Milton, Mintz seamlessly maps Milton's great epic onto the small, craggy contours of private grief. A marriage dissolving, a pet missing, an atheist longing for meaning: all of these struggles find their unique telling through the studious (but never distant) love Mintz exhibits for the great English poet, who is also the focus of her academic life. Add to that her insights into (and at times frustrations with) practicing Buddhism and mindfulness, and you have one of the more nuanced displays of a complex intelligence, at once playful and joyous to read, but dead serious, too. This book exemplifies the rigor, energy, and ranginess that I have come to crave from the best literary nonfiction.