The Tree Doctor
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
