The Boys In The Trees

I just got back from a 10 day cruise, and I'd like to talk about a book I read on the ship. Here's what I wrote when I finished it:

I recently discovered a book that I know I’m going to be actively reading and thinking about for the rest of my life, which is also how I feel about Proust’s work.

The author is (amazingly) alive, her name is Mary Swan, and (judging from a picture I saw of her) is relatively young, and the title of her first and only novel (which I have no hesitation about calling a work of “towering genius”) is called “The Boys In The Trees”.

I don’t have the vocabulary (or ability) to accurately explain why her work moves me so much. She uses language like a poet in the sense that she’s able to express so much meaning (of both an intellectual and emotional sort) through the use of words, but which transcends the words. Her sentences are beautiful, and at times what I would call “profoundly subtle”.

The plot is on one level simple: a disturbed man kills his family and is hanged for it. But, Swan tells the story from the perspective of many people who knew the man, either directly or indirectly. She takes us inside the minds of many different characters, and vividly relates their psychological stories. I didn’t always know the significance of a sentence or a paragraph as I was reading it - its meaning would become clear later, and this technique, which I’d never seen before, had a strange effect on me. It added a unique flavor to the work. Her sentences also sometimes have a very unusual structure, another fascinating aspect of this book. I can read them over and over again, intrigued by their beauty and originality.

I'd like to write her and tell her that (really!) she's as good as Virginia Woolf (and for me, that's saying something, since Woolf is on my very short list of "all time great writers"). But she probably hears that a lot. She should anyway.

Below is a passage which I think illustrates the exquisite sensitivity and psychological depth of her prose. The “he” of the passage is Eaton, who appears in the book as a young boy, and later as an old man reflecting on his life. Here he’s remembering the death of his wife Jenny.

It was very cold the day Jenny left her life, the wheels of the ambulance crunching along their snow-covered street. Blue light of early morning. The men were as gentle as their voices, but the rattle of the wheeled stretcher scraped the air raw. She couldn’t speak but her eyes told him that she knew, as surely as a condemned criminal, that this was the last trip down the green carpeted stairs, straps drawn tight over the red blanket. Knew that this cold on her face was the last real air she would feel. The winter sky was webbed with trees, wisps of smoke rising, the snow-covered peaks of houses, and he knew that she was filling her eyes with the last of the world.

Later he imagined that she had closed her eyes when the ambulance doors clicked shut, but at the time his mind was swept bare, only able to notice small, discrete things. The tremor in his hand as he turned the key in the lock, the cold plastic smell inside his car. A light flicking on in a house as he turned a corner and the way the big car seemed to glide through the dead gray streets, his own pale hands on the steering wheel. Jenny lingered another whole day, enough time for their children to arrive and stroke her forehead, hold her hands, but she didn’t look at anyone again. Sitting in the hard chair beside the hospital bed, he knew that what he was feeling was the rest of his life without her.