“Twisted Tree…its graveled side streets and single café and stoplight, the hulks of reservation racers on cement blocks in dusty front yards, and the stone-pitted ranch pickups banging down the highway. ‘There’s nothing there, really,’ he said.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (SEP 24, 2009)

In this remarkable impressionistic novel, author Kent Meyers focuses not on plot development and not on character analysis (however well developed the characters may be), but on the rippling effects of the death of young Hayley Jo Zimmerman on her community.  Meyers does not dwell on Hayley Jo’s fate for its drama or its sadness but for its seeming inevitability, a main theme throughout the novel.  Hayley Jo’s death, in turn, illuminates the choices the other residents make in their own lives and highlights the inevitability of their own fates.  As Meyers explores his metaphysical themes in earthy, naturalistic detail, Twisted Tree comes alive.  

In this small South Dakota town, everyone lives close to nature and close to the bone, a place where nothing is easy, and even less is certain. Working hard does not guarantee success, religion does not guarantee peace, and random events can make and destroy lives without warning. As Hayley Jo’s abductor himself observes very early in the novel, “Too much coincidence should raise suspicion, but it doesn’t work that way.  People will insist on meaning—in falling stars, rolls of dice, any kind of randomness.  It makes so much possible.”   And it is human nature, of course, for those in the community who have had any contact with Hayley Jo to insist on looking for meaning in the aftermath of her disappearance, often blaming themselves for what they did not do to prevent it, as if they might have changed her fate.

Dividing his novel into sixteen sections narrated by fifteen different characters, author Meyers shows their interrelationships with each other and their connections with Hayley Jo, ignoring the whole concept of time as he alternately explores past and present, shows how the diverse characters have known Hayley Jo, and builds the story of her death obliquely. Hayley Jo was a championship rodeo rider, excelling in barrel races, and she had been working hard to become a long-distance runner, pushing herself to the limit on every practice run. An anorexic, she had decided not to go to college, preferring to pursue her more physical goals instead. Her best friend Laura Mattingly, a running partner, worried about her anorexia but never informed anyone else, and Hayley Jo’s parents seem to have been oblivious to it.

As the novel evolves we meet a wide variety of characters who have had contact with her. A checker at a supermarket saw Hayley Jo and believed that she was “willfully dying.” A woman in her early thirties, who has become mentally disturbed through caring for her speechless, wheelchair-bound father for years, hears about Hayley Jo’s death and connects the details with her own fantasies. Eddie Little Feather knew Hayley Jo through the rodeo, and Shane Valen saw Hayley Jo being born when her parents could not make it to the hospital. Her parents agonize over her death, and her boyfriend, with whom she enjoyed fishing at age thirteen, has still not reconciled her breakup with him many years later.

Each of these characters, many of whom overlap in the shared memories of other characters, contributes to the picture of the community and of Hayley Jo, but just as importantly, Meyers shows how each of these characters also faces random disasters and, in some cases, causes them unwittingly. The characters (and we readers) may have free will to make decisions, but they (and we) have much less ability, if any, to control outcomes. Like life, these stories, though self-contained, are open-ended, their conclusions unpredictable, a point the author makes in the darkly humorous epilogue, which takes place on an Indian reservation on St. Patrick’s Day.

Although the novel requires careful reading and attention to repeating symbols and motifs, it is a finely created—and elegant—novel, despite its firm grounding in raw nature and in the everyday lives of the characters. There is not a cliché to be seen as Meyers, describing the sights, sounds, and smells of Twisted Tree, recreates the context in which the characters operate and try to find meaning in their lives. A house is an “agitation of lumber, an organ of rooms.” A trucker, finding buffalo on the road, believes that “time had leaked through a crack in itself, and the next thing he’d see was Indians on horses, chasing.” A man sleeping in an abandoned house can “hear the buffalo herd in the night, as if the night is softly grunting, the air muttering dark to the grass.” Someone looking at dead trees and tree trunks sees that “the trunks [have] erupted crystalline, spiking, the severed trees turned into mindless, blowsy birds.”

Meyers’s ability to bring the atmosphere to life is so strong that it overcomes whatever limitations one might expect of a novel in which the main character remains relatively unknown—and dead—and in which there is little mystery about her fate. He delves into the essence of life itself, telling stories and creating motifs which allow the reader to connect the themes and unite the characters and their histories. His acceptance of dreams and illusions and his inclusion of characters from both the white and the Native American cultures stretch our imaginations, challenge our thinking, and keep us entertained every step of the way. This is one of my favorite novels of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 24, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Twisted Tree
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kent Meyers
EXTRAS:	An interview with Kent Meyers (not recent, but not much out there about him!)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of The Work of Wolves If you like this one, try: The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle

Bibliography:

• The River Warren (1998)
• The Witness of Combines (1998)
• Light in the Crossing (1999)
• The Work of Wolves (June 2004)
• Twisted Tree (September 2009)

“She felt guilt for her meanness, she didn’t know what was wrong with her and thought, in her tangled mind, she wasn’t made like other women.  There was some softness in her, but it was so deep in a kind of acquired bitter that it took another bitter to divine it, like an auger cuts through solid rock to force the seam.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (APR 29, 2009)

In this assured and evocative debut novel set in rural Kentucky, author C. E. Morgan comes closer to conveying the essence of life, as she sees it, than do most other novelists with generations’ more experience.  Writing about an area in which she still lives, Morgan recreates the bare bones lives of subsistence farmers who are irrevocably tied to the land, a land which is sometimes fickle in its ability to sustain those who so lovingly tend it.  Interminably long days and aching physical labor are not always rewarded here, and despair is often the prevailing mood of whole communities when droughts or floods play havoc with man’s efforts.  Yet each spring offers new opportunities and hope as the resilient farmers renew their back-breaking connection to the land once again.    

Orren Fenton is just out of college when his mother and brother are killed in an accident, leaving him the sole survivor of the family and the inheritor of the family’s Kentucky tobacco farm.  Orren has had no real experience running a farm, but he has been working at a school farm, and his connection to the family’s land is strong.  At the school he has been sharing a passionate relationship with Aloma, a young woman who was orphaned at the age of three and who has been earning a living as a pianist at the mission school where she was educated.  Three weeks after the funerals of Orren’s family, Orren asks Aloma to come with him back to the farm, where, he has assured her, he has a piano.  Seeing this as her chance to begin a whole new life—a real life of her own—Aloma accepts, not really knowing what to expect, though she believes herself  “in love” with Orren.

Aloma and Orren are very young, and the work of running the farm is brutal.  Orren is determined to make everything work, but Aloma is inexperienced, and Orren is unable to afford the time to teach her what she needs to know.  He cannot afford mistakes with the crops or the animals, so he does all the work himself.  Aloma, feeling left out, spends her days trying to make the long-closed home of Orren’s grandparents habitable—scraping the floors, washing the walls, and cleaning out the detritus from years of abandonment.  Orren refuses to move into the newer, more efficient house which his mother built when she was running the farm, announcing that the newer house belongs to “them,” his mother and his dead brother Cash, whose belongings remain inside.  The old house, with its family photographs and unusable piano are Aloma’s responsibility.

Before long, these two very inexperienced young people are at each other’s throats.  Aloma feels abandoned all day, every day.  Orren feels that she does not appreciate all he is doing to save the farm and the land.  She, inexperienced in cooking and other household chores, feels that he does not appreciate all she is doing to make the house habitable.  The fact that she has no place to practice the piano, her one big talent, frustrates her.  Orren’s suggestion that she see if she can use the piano at a church in town leads to her meeting with a local preacher, Bell Johnson, a 36-year-old single man, who is attracted to her and who represents a different way of life.  Her escapes from the farm to play the piano at the church increase as her confusion about Orren grows, and she begins to be attracted to Bell.

Within this simple framework, Morgan explores universal themes–one’s dreams for the future vs. the brutal realities of the present, new life and the hopes it represents for the present vs. the death of loved ones and grief, the feeling that God watches over all vs. the sense that God is more interested in the land than in individuals, and the belief that self-knowledge comes from one’s relationships with the outside world vs. the understanding that self-knowledge grows from within.  Morgan writes with the deeply religious sense that all life is somehow connected, seeing God as part of a continuum that begins with the land, the place where life begins.

The three main characters here—Aloma, Orren, and Bell Johnson—are well developed, and they reveal their inner turmoil through their often unthinking actions.  Morgan does not need to tell us how they feel:  their responses to other people’s actions are so fully realized that the reader knows instinctively how the characters feel and can identify with them even while knowing that they are often naïve and selfish.   

Though some reviewers have emphasized that Morgan is “lyrical,” that term suggests a romantic vision and felicitous description of nature which is not the case here—at least not for long.   Aloma’s hopes for the future—reflected by her first view of the tobacco field completely covered with white blossoms, and her trip up the mountain with Bell—are immediately tempered by the intrusion of reality.  The blossoms need to be topped in order to increase the plants’ yield.  The mountain trip is to a cemetery, where the kudzu covers the oaks. Frequently using nouns as verbs, Morgan compresses her imagery, talking about Aloma “basketing the eggs,” about Bell’s father agreeing “to reverend the church,” and the farm’s rooster “tightroping the empty crib.”  

Morgan does not take the easy way out by tying up all the loose ends in the conclusion.  She reconciles issues as well as Aloma and Orren might be expected to reconcile them, given their youth, but she leaves it up to them, and the reader, to decide if their relationship will be successful and whether they will find self-knowledge as they deal with the challenges of working the farm.  Insightful, philosophical, and mature, this portrait of three characters trying to understand themselves and their roles in the world as they face the hardships of everyday life in rural Kentucky is one of the most accomplished and moving novels of the past year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (March 31, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	All the Living
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	C. E. Morgan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	no

Bibliography:

• All the Living (March 31, 2009)