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Summary
Summary
A startling, erotic novel about the need to balance care for others with care for one's self
When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett's stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother's garden--convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle--and the dormant cherry tree within it.
Caught between tending to an unwell parent and the weight of obligation to her distant daughters and husband, she becomes isolated and unmoored. She soon starts a torrid affair with an arborist who is equally fascinated by her mother's garden, and together they embark on reviving it. Increasingly engrossed by the garden, and by the awakening of her own body, she comes to see her mother's illness as part of a natural order in which things are perpetually living and dying, consuming and being consumed. All the while, she struggles to teach (remotely) Lady Murasaki's eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which turns out to resonate eerily with the conditions of contemporary society in the grip of a pandemic .
The Tree Doctor is a powerful, beautifully written novel full of bodily pleasure, intense observation of nature, and a profound reckoning with the passage of time both within ourselves and in the world we inhabit.
Author Notes
Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a previous novel, Picking Bones from Ash , and two books of nonfiction, American Harvest , which won the Nebraska Book Award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye , which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mockett (Picking Bones from Ash) brings forth a fertile tale of sex and gardening set in the early days of Covid-19. The unnamed protagonist is a married Japanese American writer stranded in Carmel Valley, Calif., where she's traveled alone from Hong Kong to see her mother, who has dementia. The nursing home where her mother lives won't let her visit due to quarantine restrictions. While staying at her mother's empty house, she teaches an online literature class and tends to the garden. At the local nursery she encounters a mysterious man known as the Tree Doctor, with whom she begins an affair. Unnerved by the pandemic ("The sickness was a worldwide pressure, like a storm front") and unhappy in her marriage, she finds solace only in sex with the Tree Doctor. This opaque character serves as a rather convenient enigma for the story, but Mockett's loamy language describing her characters' erotic liaisons is often quite moving ("She felt herself unfolding and in her mind she thought of water running, of tree sap oozing out of a crack of bark"). This portrayal of a woman's emotional courage and restoration makes the lockdown worth revisiting, if only for a moment. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Mar.)
Kirkus Review
A stifled Japanese American writer, separated from her family during the pandemic, finds unexpected intimacy with an arborist. When an unnamed middle-aged writer and professor learns her mother has been diagnosed with dementia, she returns to her Northern California childhood home, leaving her two daughters and husband behind in Hong Kong. This decision coincides with the onset of the pandemic--referred to coyly as "the sickness"--and suddenly what was supposed to be a short stay has no end in sight. Having placed her mother in a care facility, the narrator splits her time between teaching an online college course on Japanese aesthetics; video calling her husband, who is preoccupied by work; and tending to her mother's expansive but struggling garden. A local nursery recommends she consult with a man known as the Tree Doctor, whose body immediately enthralls her: His eyes "suggested to her something molten whirling around at his core"; his "hands were like the branches of an oak." What follows is a raw, passionate affair spent between the garden and the bedroom, where the Tree Doctor uncovers a desire the writer is unaccustomed to, and where she pushes herself toward the overlap of pleasure and pain. Isolated from society, she rediscovers herself in her body, invigorated by the idea that she is at her core a piece of nature. "Can you wake up a body the way you can wake up a tree?" she asks, and indeed that seems to be the case. Through a yearning first-person narration, the protagonist's trials evoke difficult but vital questions about survival and endurance: When does a person admit that a loved one's declining health can't be reversed? When does a society concede the fact that "there would never again be a 'normal'" and learn to adapt? These interrogations are threaded seamlessly into the narrator's pursuit of her own power, a pursuit that reveals just how liberating the decision to dismantle and reassemble one's self can be. An affecting story of personal transformation, as broody as it is erotic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
COVID-19 has stranded Mockett's narrator in her childhood home in Northern California, unable to see her adored Japanese mother in her new care facility or to return to her husband and two daughters in Hong Kong. But her isolation takes place in an Edenic setting; her property is alive with cherry and plum trees, flowers, and birds and anchored by a pond full of goldfish. This voluptuous sanctuary was her often-ill mother's passion and it becomes so for the narrator, too, as she begins a highly erotic affair with the enigmatic Tree Doctor. He is a horticulturalist and arborist wholly comfortable with and committed to sensuality; she is tense with conflict and frustration, a long-blocked writer teaching a course online about the Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji. This ancient epic of desire, nature, and poetry written by a woman is juxtaposed with the narrator's empowering sexual explorations and deep contemplations of nature which offer telling contrasts to the flattened, under-glass screen world. Mockett has written a ravishing and astute tale of solitude and family bonds, distance and intimacy, disruption and healing.