Review of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Somehow, I missed out on this book until now.  When I read the first chapter I had the same feeling I had all those years ago when I first read Little House in the Big Woods.  I’ve always loved books that transport me to another time and place and show me what life was like for people whose lives were so different from my own.  It’s all in the details—the little things that would seem ordinary and inconsequential at the time, but are interesting to me because things are so different now and because they represent the wonderful ingenuity and indomitable spirit of human beings.  Reading the description of how Francie’s Mama turned six loaves of stale bread into a week’s worth of meals was just as fascinating to me as reading how Laura’s Ma made head cheese.  (Not that I would want to eat head cheese, but the grossness makes it that much more thrilling!)  What do I do that will someday be a lost art and someone from the future will find interesting?  As Francie would say, “I wonder.” 

These kinds of books don’t really have a central plot line, but that doesn’t mean that nothing happens.  In fact, just about everything happens in this book:  birth; death; marriage; alcoholism; bigamy; pedophilia; political corruption; war; hunger; etc.   As Anna Quindlen says in her Foreword:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not the sort of book that can be reduced to its plot line.  The best anyone can say is that it is a story about what it means to be human.

But the book is not heavy or depressing.  Francie is one of those children who pays attention to everything around her, but in her innocence, she presents her observations in a non-judgmental way.   So even though some people would call her father a “drunk” and her aunt a “floozy,”  Francie loves them both and presents them to us with their dignity still intact.  

Francie and her great attention to detail (especially in the passage when she reads the headline, “WAR DECLARED” on April 6, 1917 and pauses in her day to look around her and absorb the scene, right down to the patterned grain of the wood on her desk and the sound her purse’s catch made as she clicked it open) made me think of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.  You know the scene after she dies and is allowed to come back for one more day and she can’t stand it because no one is looking at her or one another.  As she leaves to go back to the cemetery she says,

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa.. Good-by to clocks ticking.. and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths… sleeping and waking up. Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it- every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No. (Pause.) The saints and poets, maybe--they do some.

Francie realizes life while she lives it.  She doesn’t have money or prestige or even enough to eat, but she has the ability to pay attention to her life and that is enough.  It’s really all any of us can hope for.  It allows her to find beauty and happiness in the midst of her difficult life in the tenements:

People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get.  Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains—a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone—just to be with someone you love.  Those things make happiness.

As Granma Mary Rommely would say, “To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time:  Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”  This is the gift that Betty Smith and Laura Ingalls Wilder bring to their readers.  Their books give us the chance to take a peek into the life of someone who lived long ago and far away, but as we journey through the experiences of these beloved characters, we eventually find ourselves.  That’s why their books withstand the test of time.