A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [2]
Francie’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. And all of this would lapse into stereotype were Smith’s people and situations not seen by the girl in ways that are so undeniably true, simply told but full of the small details and moments that remind us of our own lives: the bank made from an old can Francie’s mother nails inside the closet to save money to buy a bit of land, the starched shirfront her father wears beneath his old tuxedo as he works as a singing waiter, the librarian who never looks up as she stamps the child’s books, the teacher who insists she write only about the beautiful and serene and never about what she really sees around her.
It is not a showy book from a literary point of view. Its pages are not larded with metaphor or simile or the sound of the writer’s voice in love with its own music. Its glory is in the clear-eyed descriptions of its scenes and people. When the Nolans move, their emptied apartment has “that look of a nearsighted man with his glasses off.” When the children watch their father drink, they “pondered how a nightcap could also be an eye opener.” When Francie writes the sort of grand essay her teacher expects, she rereads her own words and concludes: “They sounded like words that came in a can; the freshness was cooked out of them.”
There is little need for embellishment in these stories; their strength is in the simple universal emotion they evoke. Francie must go and be immunized at a public clinic to be allowed to attend school; added to her fear of the needle is the ignominy of listening to the doctor and nurse discuss how dirty she is. Across the broad divide of class that separates her from the well-to-do doctor and the nurse who has risen out of the same environment but turned her back on it, Francie finally says when her arm has been bandaged, “My brother is next. His arm is just as dirty as mine so don’t be surprised. And you don’t have to tell him. You told me.”
“I had no idea she’d understand what I’m saying,” the doctor says afterwards, surprised.
This is one of those children who understands almost everything around her. The description of her passage into adolescence, when she suddenly sees the world as dingy and flawed, her parents as human and not omnipotent, the theater melodramas she had formerly loved as creaky chestnuts, is among the great descriptions in fiction of the turn of the kaleidoscope occasioned by growing older and growing up. Finally she questions the game her mother has created when food runs low, the game in which she and her brother pretend they are explorers at the North Pole trapped by a blizzard in a cave. “When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it’s for a reason,” Francie says. “But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?” Katie Nolan replies sadly, “You found the catch in it.”
Readers have met this sort of girl before in the pages of memorable fiction, the perceptive child who reads indefatigably, writes obsessively, dreams of a future different than what the past and present would portend. Jo March of Little Women is one, the eponymous Anne of Green Gables another, Betsy Ray of the beloved Betsy-Tacy books a third. But Francie Nolan and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reveal the inherent weakness in those stories, a lack of realism that has made them enduring novels for girls while this has as often been a book for adults.
In Francie’s beloved Brooklyn, a rapist stalks the hallways, young women give birth out of wedlock and are reviled and even attacked, the nice old man in the junk store is not someone a child should risk being alone with. The March girls of Little Women are poor, but their poverty is styled a kind of noble blessing; Betsy Ray is bound and determined to be a writer and this is portrayed as an inevitability. But the poverty of Francie’s family is degrading and soul destroying, and the possibility of really becoming a writer a considerable dream, given the need to leave school