A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

I'm not sure how I avoided reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn the past many years, or why I always assumed it was one of those sentimental kids' books about plucky orphans (no offense, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Whatever was going on in my warped and biased little mind, it was wrong. I received a copy of the book as a going-away present from Serena--and I should have figured out then that if my smart, cynical, "I'm from Queens, bitch!" friend loved the book, maybe it was a little edgier than I'd supposed.

It's probably appropriate that this was the first full book I read after moving to Brooklyn. As much as I love my new neighborhood, it was nice to get a sense of a Brooklyn not overrun with free trade coffee places and yuppie strollers. The Brooklyn of Smith's narrative is pre-WWI Williamsburg, where the working class Irish, Italians, and Jews share the uneasy bond of just barely scraping by. No hipsters, thankfully.

The titular tree is technically growing in a concrete yard, but the fancy literary trick is that it's really Francie Nolan, whom we first meet as an eleven-year-old. Francie is a little like Lisa Simpson: underappreciated by her family, she's pretty much on her own for advancement. It's not that she lacks love or care or anything that would tragify her in a Dickens novel; it's more that no one around her is equipped to provide anything more than low-grade physical support. Her father, Johnny, is a singing waiter who's well-liked, but always drunk. The mother, Katie, works several janitorial jobs to provide the basics for the family. Relatives come and go, but mostly on an anecdotal basis. No one's around to provide much mentorship. So Francie haunts the library (despite weekly disses from a snotty librarian), writes down everything that comes into her mind, and struggles along in a school that favors attractive kids with money. All the elements are there for the requisite social commentary, but the book never really gets around to pitying Francie, or her circumstances. Smith presents it more as a chronicle. It reminded me of a lot of the stories I've heard from my dad about his own childhood. It never occurs to him to milk them for pity points--it's just how things were.

As with most coming-of-age novels, the plot is episodic and almost secondary. While much of the narrative is told from Francie's point of view as she goes through childhood and adolescence, the points where it switches to her mother's perspective are more striking, and give the book its depth. Where Francie is forgiving and childlike, Katie Nolan is unsentimental. Her assessments of the family's poverty, and her own culpability in the raw deal given to Francie, are surprisingly frank. She's the head of the family in virtually every way, and takes on the guilt for having married a charming guy at 17 and started a family too early. Katie also introduces a thematic element that makes the book more interesting: she loves Neely, her second child and only son, more than Francie. It's a simply stated fact, and it complicates the relationships. This made me want to call my mom and challenge her historical assertion that she loves me and Sam exactly equally.

I guess I was just struck by the honesty and sophistication of the relationships. I (naively) expected that kind of whitewashed, memoir style, particularly given the 1910-ish setting and the 1940s publication date.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an entertaining story told in clear, honest language. I couldn't think of a better introduction to my new hometown, or a more effective antidote to my own petty financial and social worries.

Here are some passages I particularly liked:

"Lately, she had been given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists. Katie was annoyed at this tendency and kept warning Francie to tell the plain truth and to stop romancing. But Francie just couldn't tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it. Although Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their children. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it. Perhaps Katie thought that if they did not have this faculty, they would be clearer-minded; see things as they really were, and seeing them loathe them and somehow find a way to make them better."

"Again the lonely evenings. Francie roamed the Brooklyn streets in the lovely nights of fall and thought of Ben. ('If you ever need me, write and I'll manage to see you.') Yes, she needed him but she was sure he'd never come if she wrote: 'I'm lonely. Please come and walk with me and talk to me.' In his firm schedule of life, there was no heading labeled 'Loneliness.'"

On how women are about as screwy as everyone thinks they are:
"If she never had any lovers, she kicks herself around when the change comes, thinking of all the fun she could have had, didn't have, and now can't have. If she had a lot of lovers, she argues herself into believing that she did wrong and she' s sorry now. She carries on that way because she knows that soon all her woman-ness will be lost. And if she makes believe being with a man was never any good in the first place, she can get comfort out of her change."

"She looked out over Brooklyn. The starlight half revealed, half concealed. She looked out over the flat roofs, uneven in height, broken once in a while by a slanting roof from a house left over from older times. The chimney pots on the roofs...and on some, the shadowing looming of pigeon cotes...the twin spires of the Church, remotely brooding over the dark tenements...And at the end of their street, the great Bridge that threw itself like a sigh across the East River and was lost...lost...on the other shore."