A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

How is it that I had never read this book? Wow. I loved every one of its 493 pages. Set in pre-WWI Brooklyn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the complete life and times of the young Francie Nolan. We get to know her through and through. Smith associates us with her heroine by giving us unlimited access to all the people who were part of Francie's life, directly and indirectly.


"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 of these good 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 life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. "

I love the metaphor of the tree as it is used in this novel. It is a very familiar kind of idea--how we are part of a bigger story, a link in a chain of ancestors and posterity, a branch of a family tree. But this book made me think a little deeper. The branch is so independent, yet it is nothing if not connected to the tree. When the wind blows, the branch keeps a rhythm of movement in cadence with its fellow branches. When the snow falls, the branch leans on other branches to support the weight. And I could go all kinds of metaphor-crazy with ideas of grafting branches, and pruning... I think I'll leave that to Zenos (see Jacob 5). The point is, Smith romances her readers to fall in love with the tree so as to better understand the individual branch.

Contemplating this novel has caused me to reflect on my own surrounding branches, as well as the history of my tree as a whole. It is interesting to reflect on how separate my life has become from those of my loved ones while still being so inescapably connected. It is the miracle that allows us to stand on the shoulders of our mentors' experiences to obtain our own personal achievements.