A Review of Caleb Johnson’s “Treeborne”
Selective Memories
Caleb Johnson — not to be confused with an American Idol winner — may be only a debut author, but he has delivered a lasting, impressionable novel with Treeborne. Set in the Deep South of the 1920s and ’50s, this family saga takes a little bit of warming up to, but, once the reader manages to find their way through the dense, lilting Southern prose, the rewards are immense. This is a novel about family and community, and how the two are intertwined. It is also a book about the magic of art, and how transportive it may be. And it is a novel about failed justice, about people being convicted of the wrong things and people having their claims stolen from them. But, mostly, this is a book about what happens when a community dies and what happens to the people who are so tied to it that they refuse to leave.
Narrated from the present day, the novel’s framing story is about Janie Treeborne, an elderly woman being interviewed by a reporter she mistakes for being kin; she is one of a handful of people that refuses to leave the town of Elberta, Alabama, as a nearby 80-year-old dam reaches the end of its natural life. This means that the dam needs to be imploded and people evacuated in advance of the event to prevent a bigger, unforeseen disaster from occurring. Janie narrates, in the third person, stories from her youth in the 1950s — when her aunt Tammy mysteriously is kidnapped, though the locals think she’s gone to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune — and also stories from her grandfather’s era of the late ’20s, as he was one of the builders of the dam. The novel is largely plotless, so these stories are really vignettes in a sense; some are connected while others are not — or at least don’t appear to be on the surface.
There is a wide cast of supporting characters, including a black musician named Lee Malone who ebbs in and out of the Treeborne family’s life in both the roaring twenties and the fabulous fifties. At first, it is hard to keep tabs on who’s who because the author unspools the story as though these town people are merely old friends that we already know, so you have to get a bit deep into the book before things start to click and the purposes of these bit players becomes clear. As such, Treeborne is a novel about a town and its people as much as it is about the Treebornes themselves.
There are elements of magic realism in the book, which might have some readers thinking that this is an Americanized version of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The family patriarch Hugh Treeborne creates folk art called “assemblies” that he’s fashioned with whatever is at his fingertips, and one of his creations is a clay and mud statue that magically comes to life at certain moments, and is carried around by a young, impressionable Janie Treeborne during the 1950s setting of the story.
Given its peculiarities, this is a novel that is about language and the cadence and rhythm of the Deep South. Characters speak in the local dialect, and even some of the narration is told that way too. As much as the book is about a lot of things, this is a story that soaks the reader in a time and a place and is a soppy love letter to a bygone era. The novel doesn’t necessarily romanticize the South, though, which is a danger of books such as these in this era of Confederate flags being removed from state legislatures and sweeping changes to how racism persists along the Gulf Coast states. In fact, Lee is as much a part of the Treeborne family as his white counterparts. In a way, this is a novel about reshaping the legacy of the South, even as it is covered up by water in an act befitting of the Bible.
The way these stories are told overall feel Biblical as well. There are miracles and great natural disasters in equal measure, which ties this work into a larger framework. The Bible, after all, is the story of a family and the way we relate to such superstitious things such as the act of Creation is akin to the way families tell stories about themselves and how they came to be. Johnson slyly knows this, and, in writing this tale, has really crafted a piece about what it means to be family — whether through blood lines or other means. For instance, an abandoned cemetery is found along the dam site, and Hugh makes it is mission to take the bodies and bury them on higher ground, presumably so they won’t be forgotten about. When the bones are rediscovered later, it is noted that they date back to the early 1800s, long before Alabama was recognized as a state. To that end, Treeborne is a novel about how we come to be, how we settle on a particular land, and how the land and its community binds us all together throughout countless generations.
I suppose, then, that Treeborne is about memory, too, but this book shows how selective it can be — Hugh’s death goes largely unreported save for a line near the end of the tale, but his wife’s death in the woods that make up the Treebornes’ land is given an almost Rashomon treatment. Janie runs away from home in the ’50s portion of the book, but the reasons for it are largely unexplained. You might call that a fault of the novel, but this is really a book about the stories we tell others for we cannot articulate them ourselves. To that end, Treeborne is a rich, layered work. It’ll take some time before you’re aware of what the novel is doing, but, once again, one’s patience with this supple and commanding piece of fiction will be well worth it. This is a book that I eagerly got lost in, even though it meanders and sometimes frustrates. Treeborne is a highly commanding work of American fiction and is ultimately a stunning work from a first-time writer. Author Caleb Johnson may well be an American Idol of a different sort, and you’ll be glad to discover him — most of all because Treeborne is high art of the finest order.
Caleb Johnson’s Treeborne was published by Picador on June 5, 2018.
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