A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [1]
Some critics have argued that many of the characters in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn can be dismissed as stereotypes, exhibiting quaint characteristics or representing pat qualities of either nobility or degeneracy. Is this a fair criticism? Which characters are the most convincing? Which are the least convincing?
Francie observes more than once that women seem to hate other women (“they stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman”), while men, even if they hate each other, stick together against the world. Is this an accurate appraisal of the way things are in the novel?
The women in the Nolan/Rommely clan exhibit most of the strength and, whenever humanly possible, control the family’s destiny. How does Francie continue this legacy?
What might Francie’s obsession with order—from systematically reading the books in the library from A through Z, to trying every flavor of ice cream soda—in turn say about her circumstances and her dreams?
Although it is written in the third person, there can be little argument that the narrative is largely from Francie’s point of view. How would the book differ if it was told from Neeley’s perspective?
How can modern readers reconcile the frequent anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments that characters espouse throughout the novel?
Could it be argued that the main character of the book is not Francie but, in fact, Brooklyn itself?
Foreword
AS MUCH AS ANY OTHER BELOVED BOOK IN THE CANON, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn illustrates the limitations of plot description. In its nearly five hundred pages, nothing much happens. Of course that’s not really accurate: Everything that can happen in life happens, from birth and death to marriage and bigamy. 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.
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. 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.
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. But it is more than that: It is deeply, indelibly true. 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. 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. 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.
All 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