let’s talk about a tree grows in brooklyn
There are some books you come back to again and again at different points in your life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that kind of book, so imagine my pleasure to see that Harper Perennial’s 2010 book club covered the book for January.
Writing a chapter on ATGIB and Betty Smith was one of the most challenging tasks ahead of me when I set out to write The Heroine’s Bookshelf. It wasn’t just that Betty Smith’s life is so poorly documented overall, it’s that ATGIB is a tome, a weighty book with tons of moving parts. It’s hard to wrap your brain around. Part of that, I think, is because it is a book of myriad intentions. Betty wrote it after an incredibly challenging childhood and adult life, from her roles as a tormented mother, a jilted wife, an uncomfortable harborer of desperate alcoholic men, and a sometimes quite literally starving artist. She also wrote it as an advocate for the poor, a woman who worked for a radical WPA-sponsored theater project and who had gotten her education in poverty firsthand. So I think it makes sense that the readings and comments I’m seeing are grappling with the book as a mother/daughter tale, a family drama, and a kind of anti-poverty social document.
Katie Nolan isn’t the main character of the book per se, but she becomes its core and its focal point, the woman who’s trying to hold her family together even as she drives it apart with her own desperation. On my latest reread, I was astonished at how much nuance and pain Betty was able to give Katie. Sometimes the book is physically hard to read. You see Katie, her body broken and her life prospects completely dashed, covering up the hands that she’s used to drag her family through some semblance of life in shame, and you want to curl up in the fetal position or start drinking or something. Except that that would never, ever fly with hard Katie.
For me, Katie’s uncompromising way of looking at the world pairs perfectly with Betty Smith’s mission in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: to make us look at the sordid, ugly, filthy sides of life alongside the beautiful and uplifting ones and to take all sides into our final reckoning. And with so much nuance and pain, it’s no wonder I come back to the book I first read as a Francie-aged girl every few years, scared but hungry for Betty’s unvarnished look at life.
for some reason, when i read this, i thought of the scene in ATGIB where Francie sees the old man with the dirty feet and fabricates this whole life for him and then panics when she starts thinking about how no one wants him anymore and how he is going to die soon.
i agree that its difficult to properly categorize this book, and when i reviewed it a while back, i remember thinking that it was less about any of the characters and more about all of the important things in life. it’s about life and death, war and peace, love and hate, poverty and greed, and all of the beautifully subtle things in between it all.
I’ve only re-read this once as an adult and I, too, was struck at the time by how painful so much of it was, by how many “big issues” the author had undertaken in what I had later thought of as a “children’s story”. It was such a different feel re-reading this novel from, say, re-reading Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, both of which contain elements of misfortune but there is respite for the heroines. I think I read Betty Smith’sJoy of the Morning but only once, and I have only a vague recollection of struggle for the heroine therein as well…feels like time for re-reading yet again!
have you read joy in the morning, erin? I’ve always wanted to–I think it’s even more autobiographical.
I have read Joy in the Morning, and…I didn’t really like it! It’s kind of like an extended Katie and Johnny Nolan just-married sequence, so it felt like nothing new after ATGIB. I have Maggie-Now sitting on my desk as we speak…I’ll have to check that out!