The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories — Book Summary & Review

In The Troll Garden, Cather keeps the collection’s “selected stories” idea front and center by stacking sharply different relationship dramas—public manners versus private hungers—until you start seeing her real framework: people act polite while their inner lives do the actual work. The title story, “The Troll Garden,” is the standout hinge for the book’s emotional logic. It’s about caretaking and control, but Cather refuses to make it simple; she shows how tenderness can curdle into surveillance, how a “garden” can function like a social contract with rules you never agreed to. In “Eric Hermannson’s Soul,” she shifts gears into a quieter, more interior tragedy: a man’s work and status become a substitute for meaning, and when his inner world finally speaks, it sounds like grief dressed as practicality. Then “Paul’s Case - A Study In Temperament” turns that same interest toward performance and escape. Paul doesn’t merely want a different life—he wants a different self, and Cather tracks the specific mechanics of that craving: aesthetic hunger, resentment toward ordinary limits, and the moment when self-invention stops being playful and becomes catastrophic.

Across these stories, Cather’s craft is less about plot twists than about the slow tightening of cause and effect: a conversation that lands wrong, a choice defended as “necessary,” a romance that reveals its terms after the fact. If you read the way Cather writes—attentive to tone, to what’s withheld—you’ll feel the collection’s unity. Still, there’s a limitation: this is not a single cohesive narrative, and some readers will find the shorter pieces—especially the more mannered ones like “A Wagner Matinee”—less emotionally urgent than the big psychological portraits.