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The Trauma of Time

Author: Elizabeth A. Tucker

Her earliest memories are of the tree: its majestic beauty and the terrifying, exhilarating day when her father simultaneously bullied and cajoled her into climbing it to place the rope for the tire swing. It was a moment that defined their relationship – strong, chaotically loving, yet also toxic, filled with the unsaid, the inappropriate, and the broken. It was also the moment that set the stage for her father’s death. The rope she hung was the very rope which, years later, he would use to tie around his own neck.

As the years after the suicide pass, everyone in the Hawkins family reacts differently. Layla grows from a broken-hearted child, blaming herself, to a sarcastic angry teen, to a searching and fragile young woman. Layla’s mother finds hope first in memories, and then in a semblance of moving on. Layla’s brutal grandmother, who looks out at the tree in her front yard every day, sees into her past and her present. Together the three generations of women move around each other and the settling weight of grief; the tree grounds them all, its gnarled branches stretching through time and memory and back again.

The Pale Flesh of Wood starts strong with young Layla. Already, through her eyes, we see a brokenness in her father, a WWII survivor who has returned fractured from the front. There are secrets behind his eyes and in his heart, and it may be more than the PTSD. Layla’s mother is also fractured and distracted by her own loss. We see a family on a precipice and a young girl who doesn’t know it but somehow senses the agitation and starts to blame herself.

This is the part of the story that resonates. This is where we interact with the characters the most, where we see them for who they are, and where their complexities and relationships intertwine like fine, delicate roots, broken and yet so interwoven that they are unshakable, even in death and decay.

But afterwards, once Layla’s father is gone and the years start to pass, The Pale Flesh of Wood loses its grounding. We oscillate in time, in story, and even on the focus character. Is this about Layla growing up in the shadow of her father’s suicide, condemning herself, working through a difficult relationship with her mother? Or is this the story of Layla’s mother, now in a new relationship, who doesn’t know how to suddenly deal with a stereotypical, textbook angry teenager? The subtle emotional beauty is lost as the melodrama escalates and the scenes shift to a family at dinner with food fights and choking dogs and a mother questioning her ability to parent a teenager. But this too is ultimately unimportant, because we will never come back here.

Image by Daniel R from Pixabay

For a moment then, it becomes the grandmother’s story, a hard-nosed woman who briefly sermonizes to teenage Layla and then fades into the background, a mystery. She created a monster, sure, but we don’t get much about her or her relationship with her dead son, other than that she was a bad mother, not there, not loving. And then, we’re off with grown-up Layla in weird relationship land, and we spend a lot of time there as she dates a man (and kind of his sister in a weird way) and tries her hand at being a cowgirl.

By this point, the strand of the narrative has grown thin, and I was tired. Was the father’s suicide just a plot device? Was the tree and all its centrality just a backdrop for a woman-finding-herself or a bad relationship novel? Or was this a story of multiple women who cannot connect with the only family they have left? Or something else? The roots have branched and branched and there is no cohesion now, and the fine art of telling and not showing is gone. We’re in far flung territory, and everyone here is very rough-cut, with no finer artistry drawing out their emotions.

Finally, we come back to the mystery of the suicide and the tree and there is an attempt to make the middle segways into something, but it ultimately fails. What is this story really about? What does it want to be? A family story? A grief story? A slice of someone’s life and what they went through story? A “finding yourself” story? A relationship story? It’s hard to tell, and in the end, my initial love had faded to barely contained boredom and a desire to stop reading. The characters who were so vibrant in the beginning were all just caricatures by the end, with everyone’s thinking and speaking scripted, and the message about grief and moving on that we finally got was the trite one that was expected all along. So much potential, but not enough delivery here and not enough narrative cohesion to one throughline. Not recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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