But all those things are setting, really, and the themes are farther-reaching: the fabric of family, the limits of love, the loss of innocence, and the birth of knowledge.Īll of this takes place in the life of Francie Nolan, who is eleven years old when her story opens in the summer of 1912, in a third-floor walk-up apartment in the shadow of the hardy urban ailanthus tree, the “only tree that grew out of cement,” a tree “that liked poor people.” The scene is set immediately in the first few pages, of a hectic, vivid, hard-scrabble neighborhood where the children sell junk for pennies, spending half on petty indulgences and bringing half home to parents who can barely make the rent or pay for bread, even the stale next-day sort sold at the local wholesaler.įrancie’s mother is small and pretty but steely and tough her father is warm and charming but feckless and, above all, a prisoner of his need for drink. Early on in its explosive success it was described as a book about city life, a story about grinding poverty, a tale of the struggles of immigrants in America. Honesty is casting bright light on your own experience truth is casting it on the experiences of all, which is why, six decades after it was published and became an instant bestseller, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn continues to be read by people from all countries and all circumstances. But it is more than that: It is deeply, indelibly true.
When it first appeared, in 1943, it was called, by those critics who liked it, an honest book, and that is accurate as far as it goes. The best anyone can say is that it is a story about what it means to be human. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not the sort of book that can be reduced to its plot line.
#A tree grows in brooklyn series#
If, afterwards, someone asked, “What is the book about?”-surely one of the most irritating and reductionist questions in the world for reader and writer alike-you would not say, well, it’s about the pedophile who grabs a little girl in the hall, or about the time a man went on a bender and lost his job, or about a woman who works as the janitor in a series of tenement buildings. But those things happen in the slow, sure, meandering way that they happen in the slow, sure, meandering river of real existence, not as the clanking “and then” that lends itself easily to event synopsis. Of course that’s not really accurate: Everything that can happen in life happens, from birth and death to marriage and bigamy. In its nearly five hundred pages, nothing much happens. A S MUCH AS ANY OTHER BELOVED BOOK IN THE CANON, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn illustrates the limitations of plot description.
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