It's Friday, Issue #63

summer reading

I want to write about two books from my summer reading, one old, one new.

I first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith when I was in elementary school, and I remembered nothing about the novel except that I loved it. I decided to re-read it this summer. Is it a re-read if you don’t recall a single thing from a book?

Originally published in 1943, the novel tells the story of Francie Nolan, a poor girl growing up in Brooklyn. It begins in 1912, when Francie is eleven, and it follows her until she’s about seventeen or eighteen…I think? I read it last month and already the details are dissolving!

It took me a little while to get into A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The first 52 pages are episodic, slice-of-life chapters that feel like walking through a historical house—here’s how they made the coffee, here’s how they traded scrap metal for money. It’s neat, if a touch dull. It wasn’t until Part II got going, rewinding twelve years to show Francie’s parents courtship, that the story got some edge, felt deep, turned cinematic.

I was stunned again and again by the story’s matter of fact style. Here’s an example, in a passage about Francie’s slutty aunt Sissy who ends up marrying when she’s fourteen:

“They went to City Hall, where Sissy swore that she was eighteen, and were married by one of the clerks. The neighbors were shocked but Mary [Sissy’s mother] knew that the marriage was the best thing that could happen to her highly sexed daughter.”

HER HIGHLY SEXED DAUGHTER. I think I found a new name for your band!

The simple, straightforward prose quality also leaves room for subdued beauty. Here is Betty Smith on what our heroin has inherited:

And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely’s mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely’s cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy’s talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan’s possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy’s love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny’s sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie’s soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all these good things and these bad things.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her was life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved deeply. She was Katie’s secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.

Read that aloud, and notice the pleasant rhythm. Notice the poetry of, “She was the flower in the brown bowl.” Notice the intensity of that sentence about being partly made by your mom’s secret crying! Notice that unexpected adverb: rankly. Notice the quiet authority of this elevated third person perspective. It’s a reminder of how deft at telling this kind of narrator can be.

The passage continues, talking about how Francie was also made of “the reading, the observing, the living from day to day” and something else, imprinted by God, maybe, that makes her a specific soul. An idea of secret specialness that, no doubt, appeals to any young person reading this book.

Over nearly 500 pages we witness Francie and her family struggle with poverty in a borough she loves. They don’t rise in social class so much as luck into more money via a convenient marriage. Some nutty drama happens along the way—for instance, her mom shoots and kills a man who’s exposing himself to Francie in an apartment hallway!—but mostly it’s a low key coming of age story about class and family. There’s a lot about Francie’s alcoholic father, and the grief and love that’s tied up in that relationship.

The last hundred pages are an absolute banger. Francie’s job as, basically, a human Google search (reading newspapers for specific mentions of people!), is fascinating, and a late episode of unexpected romantic heartbreak hurt so good to read. I loved it.

Near the end, Smith writes, “The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.”

I hope kids continue to read this book only to forget it. That way, they’ll get to read it again as adults and feel as moved as I did.

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The second book is a contemporary novel, published in the season I read it, and it’s one of the trendy divorce books of the moment: Liars by Sarah Manguso.