The Signature of All Things Book Review: Elizabeth Gilbert Wrote a Masterpiece and Nobody Talks About It

Rating: ★★★★★

"The Signature of All Things" Book Review:

I read this book in Bali, riding a motorbike down the same roads Elizabeth Gilbert made famous, and the tropical world she writes about in this novel was literally surrounding me — the humidity, the density of green, the way plants take over everything if you let them. It was the perfect place to fall into this book, and I fell hard.

The Signature of All Things is Elizabeth Gilbert's best novel and one of the most underrated books of the last decade. I don't say that lightly. This is a 500-page novel about a woman who studies mosses, set across the entire nineteenth century, and it is completely riveting.

Alma Whittaker is the daughter of Henry Whittaker, a self-made botanical tycoon who clawed his way from poverty in the slums of Richmond to become one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia. Alma grows up surrounded by the world's leading scientists, explorers, and thinkers, and she inherits her father's ferocious intellect without his ruthlessness. She becomes a bryologist — a moss specialist — and over the course of decades of meticulous observation, she independently arrives at a theory of competitive evolution that parallels Darwin's.

Gilbert's research is staggering. She recreates the world of nineteenth-century natural science with the kind of detail that makes you believe she spent years in botanical archives, which she did. But what makes this a great novel rather than a competent historical one is Alma herself. She is plain, brilliant, sexually frustrated, and absolutely unwilling to be less than honest about what she sees. Her relationship with the ethereal artist Ambrose Pike — a marriage that collapses because they want entirely different things from love and the body — is one of the most painful and precisely observed relationships I've read.

The novel spans continents. Alma travels to Tahiti to investigate what happened to Ambrose after they separated, and what she finds there reframes everything she thought she understood about evolution, God, and the relationship between the two. Reading those Tahiti chapters in Bali — surrounded by the same kind of tropical life Gilbert describes, the same overwhelming green, the same feeling of being swallowed by a landscape that was here long before you and will be here long after — made the book feel less like fiction and more like something happening around me. The final section, in which elderly Alma meets Alfred Russel Wallace in Amsterdam and grapples with the question of altruism — why do organisms sacrifice themselves? — is extraordinary.

Juliet Stevenson narrates the audiobook and delivers one of the finest performances I've encountered. She gives Alma gravitas without stiffness, and her pacing across a fifty-year life feels completely natural.

Five stars. This is a masterpiece disguised as a historical novel about moss.

If You Liked The Signature of All Things, Try:

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton — A different century, similar emotional confinement. Brilliant people trapped by the expectations of their world.

• Barkskins by Annie Proulx — Another multi-generational epic about humanity's relationship with the natural world. Bigger scope, similar ambition.

• Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier — Based on the real Mary Anning, a woman who discovered fossils on the Dorset coast and fought to be taken seriously by men who kept claiming her work as their own.

  
  

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If this book review resonated with you, check out The Stardust Pirates — a story about characters who also had to travel impossible distances to understand something they could have found at home, sharing Alma's discovery that the most important observations require the most patience. Learn More: The Stardust Pirates