Customer Reviews

Twisted Tree

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

From the first chapter, the reader is put on notice: there is nothing predictable in this novel, but much to be savored. Meyers possesses an acute sensitivity for the complications of human behaviors, the intimate secrets of people battered by life and expectations, from the hard-working father who finds peace of mind tending a buffalo herd on his South Dakota ranch to the reservation Indian ridiculed by classmates in childhood, losing himself as an adult in the solace of intoxication: "He'd learned to crouch through life." The canvas is the vast territory of the Dakotas, where every day is a battle for survival and eccentrics harass well-meaning neighbors seeking to save the land from ruination. In terms of characters, Meyers has created a moonscape of an otherworldly place where loneliness howls at night, but day reveals simple folk who make few demands, an American landscape far removed from big city chaos.

The novel begins with a kidnapping, albeit with a unique twist, and a murder. A short sojourn into the mind of the kidnapper is the first indication that this will be an unusual journey, perhaps a difficult one. The majority of the novel reveals the reactions of the people of small town Twisted Tree, South Dakota, the father of the murdered girl, Haley Jo Zimmerman, a cashier at the local market who knows the buying habits of all the townspeople, a priest whose vows are breached, a step-daughter who finds consolation in daily revenge. There are aberrations: Eddie Little Feather, who meets a sad and gruesome fate one drunken night; Shane Valen, a loner as disturbing as the den of rattlesnakes that inhabits his shabby home- and just as deadly. But for all the waste, the lost dreams, disillusions and grief over the death of a girl already pursuing the destruction of her own body ("Her breath contained the stink of willful dying."), there is a strange poignancy and beauty to Meyer's work.

It is the women who bring grace to the story, gentle ministrations that touch the harsh lives of men who shun comfort other than alcohol. The women bring compassion to an indifferent, often cruel world, while the males stumble around like wounded bulls. In the midst of broken lives and stubborn justification, the women watch, some unable to endure, finally, such a barren existence. The vision of Haley Jo lingers long after her funeral, her long hair whipping in the wind, a promise in a place where most such things of beauty are broken. With Haley Jo as wedge, Meyers burrows into the psyche of Twisted Tree, the savagery and consistency of such a place, the deep roots of perseverance, the oddities and triumphs, a land devoid of pretensions. Meyers explores the remarkable, indelible truth of Twisted Tree, a secret, shocking view into the soul of rural America, where drama strikes then moves on, the prairie wind covering all with a layer of grit. Luan Gaines/2009.

Kent Meyers' Twisted Tree grabbed me immediately. After a few sentences, it is clear that the opening paragraph of this novel is narrated by a twisted serial killer, who slowly lets the reader in on how he chooses his victims. It is a dark, well-written chapter. The novel's format, however, took away from the power of the opening paragraph. Each chapter is narrated by a different member of the small town the victim in the first character is from. The format is a bit disjointed and many times the writing felt too self-conscious to be believable and became a bit disappointing, especially given how compelling the first chapter is. Meyers tries just a bit too hard to capture the different voices in the town of Twisted Tree and dilutes a thought-provoking narrative into something much less powerful.

I would say it is not. It is more of a collection of related short stories, ala Olive Kitteridge. Each of the "chapters" functions as a stand-alone story, some directly involving Hayley Jo, others barely brushing by her. It works as a portrait of place, that place being rural South Dakota with its delicate balance of community-minded and mind-your-own-business. The material concerns of the rural Midwest--weather, crops, livestock-- are interwoven with the private lives and deep secrets of a small town's population. Hayley Jo is not the only resident of Twisted Tree who is hiding in plain sight, and the delving into is fascinating.

Certain stories are brilliant, especially the housewife with the fear of snakes (I literally had to set the book down for a moment after this one to regain my breath) and the stories that show us the interior life of a feral man. The language used to describe the way he sees the world is densely poetic. Other stories fall into the "not quite there" category (the rancher and the waitress, the priest and the accident site), but always, the momentum of discovery is maintained.

Despite the back cover synopsis, there isn't a central "whodunit" mystery to uncover, but the hope of discovering what drove Hayley Jo down her sad path kept me reading. In the end, I don't think this was sufficiently explored, but perhaps it wasn't the point. This is a terrific book about an unbearably sad event, but it is beautifully written and softened with enough dark humor at the end to allow you to leave the book without too much scar tissue.

Southwest South Dakota may be a long way from Ohio, but as far as I can tell TWISTED TREE is just above WINESBURG. I read the latter book when I was in grad school back in 1969. I remember being mildy interested in this classic collection of interrelated stories of a small town in Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, and probably even had to write a paper about it. While I may not have been wildly enthusiastic about the book, it still stands as a kind of standard for that particular kind of book - small town life as depicted by interconnected detailed word portraits of certain of its citizens. There have certainly been countless variations on this theme in the several decades since Winesburg, Ohio was published. One of the most recent successes was Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, OLIVE KITTERIDGE, a book that caught me up. And now I've found TWISTED TREE, Kent Meyers' mesmerizing literary look at a small town in South Dakota, the same town that appeared in his earlier work, The Work of Wolves.

The unifying element here is the brutal rape and murder of Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a young woman from TWISTED TREE. The murderer is a serial killer who victimizes anorexics he finds and 'meets' online. My telling you this is not a spoiler. The murderer is introduced in the first chapter and is perhaps one of the creepiest characters whose head you'll ever get inside of. Reading that first section brought to mind The Silence of the Lambs. I also thought of Frederick Busch's disturbing beautiful novel, GIRLS. And yet Hayley Jo and her murderer are not really central characters. Meyers uses this luridly violent crime only as a catalyst to introduce and develop dozens of other characters you will not soon forget, the victim's family, friends and fellow townspeople. Gradually the secret lives of all these people are revealed, in ways that will keep you turning pages as fast as you can read. Marriages unravel, religion and faith fail, lives fall apart.

There is one particular set of characters, Brock and Angela Morrison, which gave me particular pause. Angela is a city girl who has a difficult time adjusting to the plain and lonely life of a rancher's wife. But Brock is an extremely patient and kind man. I thought of Carson and Rebecca, characters from Meyers' earlier novel, The Work of Wolves, speculating that yes, this is how it might have been for them had that plot line been carried through. Here Angela drifts into an affair with the Catholic priest in town. That same priest, Father Caleb, figures in his own chapter later in the book - a surreal encounter at the scene of a rainswept roadside auto accident. The faith he thought he had lost forever, flickers faintly back to life, when he has a kind of vision, which may or may not have to do with the Sioux legend of the White Buffalo Woman. And if this sounds a little too 'Twilight Zone/Outer Limits' far out, well it didn't seem that way while reading it. It's that well done. It WORKS, and is one of those goose-bumps, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up moments.

TWISTED TREE is a complex, beautifully written book. Meyers is obviously a man at the top of his game. Future graduate students in literature would do well to read this book in tandem with WINESBURG, OHIO. When they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they prefer Meyers. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Reviews of TWISTED TREE will be all over the map because, like a Rorschach inkblot design, it will elicit a wide range of reactions from readers who individually see anything from beautiful art to a lousy ink stain. Comparable to the modern book, OLIVE KITTEREDGE, and to the old classic, WINESBURG, OHIO, Meyers' composite portrait of a small western town where an anorexic girl named Hayley Jo is murdered is like a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle that will delight the patient and exasperate the short-attention spanned who draw sustenance from plot. Meaning? Prepare yourself for multiple points of view, jumps in time, uneven narratives (designed to match personalities of the various speakers), and a lot of poetic prose.

In addition to a creepy opening sequence from the viewpoint of the serial murderer, we get "stories" told by the parents of Hayley Jo, the ex-boyfriend, the checkout woman at the grocery store, old girlfriends, and various other people about Main Street, Twisted Tree. In a small town, after all, everyone knows everyone. Among the more powerful tales is one about a woman who comes home to care for her wheelchair-bound stepfather -- a man who raped her as a child. When this woman visits the grocery store, we get a sample of Meyers' attention to detail and love of language when the checkout lady startles her by asking about her "dad": "Her face breaks up, startled, the way still water breaks when a gust of wind hits it. As if her face momentarily isn't there anymore, it's just reflecting points and waves."

One story midway in this collection ("Draw") is particularly outstanding and typical of Sherwood Anderson's "grotesques." If nothing else, this gem is worth reading as a stand alone. It's the tale of a young woman named Angela Morrison, married to a man named Brock but unable to love him due to her psychological yearnings. She flirts with an affair with a young priest and then, when her mother dies, drives west with her husband Brock sleeping in the back seat. When she discovers a rattlesnake under the clutch at her feet and freezes with her foot hard on the gas pedal, Meyers sustains the suspense and the terror for five "I-didn't-even-realize-I-was-flipping" pages in one of the most arresting and beautifully written descriptions I've enjoyed in a long time. Afraid of snakes or no, you will be spellbound.

Overall, however, the book is uneven and at times difficult. As it lacks a real plot, readers will seek sustenance from character. The problem with that strategy is that no character stays on the page for long as the patchwork mini-narratives hopscotch about. The somber and depressing mood as you read the tales of these people leading lives of "quiet desperation" can take its toll as well. Still, there's no denying that Meyers is a "writer's writer" and that this outing will be worth the effort if you're partial to the craft of confident wordsmiths. Beautiful and flawed, then, TWISTED TREE will bring reward and frustration, the ratio of each depending as much upon personalities of its readers as any content in the book itself.

Though the murder of Hayley Jo Zimmerman provides this book a point of reference (and, indeed, haunts it), TWISTED TREE is less about Hay Jay and her death than about the community of Twisted Tree, South Dakota, its residents, their secrets, and, ultimately, their loneliness. The array of people to whom Meyers gives voice in this book is dizzying and, at times, confusing; as the book unfolds further and further, it becomes more difficult to keep track of the characters and their relationships to one another, especially when chapters are less explicit about whose world the reader has now entered. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in piecing it all together. This is a book that would improve on subsequent readings.

I'd stop short of comparing Meyers's writing to Cormac McCarthy or other great writers, as some have done. But Meyers writes very well and can ratchet up the suspense when he wants to. The Publishers Weekly review mentions the opening, which is intense as well as disturbing. Taking the prize for me, however, is the chapter with the rattlesnake in the car, a moment that Meyers sets up perfectly, forcing the reader at first to wonder whether it's real or imagined, and then describes tautly. The epilogue, which deals with the fate of the car in which Hayley Joe was murdered, felt tacked on and somehow didn't seem to fit, and so the book ended on a note that didn't quite work for me. It would've been better, to my mind, to end with the last chapter. But it's still a good read (3.5 stars, but I'll round up), and I'd recommend it.

The premise of the book sounded very interesting however as I continued to read it, it became more and more confusing. I frequently had to look back and see if the character I was reading about had been mentioned before and if not, what was the connection to the premise or the other characters. Very often, it felt like there was no connection at all. Although the author writes beautifully the novel was very disjointed and ultimately disappointing.

The synopsis of this book made it look like it would really be good and since I live in area where it takes place it made me want to read it all the more. I ordered it on my Kindle and had a hard time identifying with the characters as I couldn't tell who was narrating a certain chapter or why. Some of the chapters were good, but I found myself wondering why they were part of the story as a whole. I kept reading, waiting for everything to come together but it never did. I felt if I was reading it in hardcover I would go back to see who this person was and where they first appeared in the book but it's not so easy to do that with a Kindle. All in all I just wasn't that impressed.

Length:: 3:08 Mins

I really have had a very difficult time with this book for a number of reasons. The opening chapters really gripped me and had me turning page after page. It opened deep inside the mind of a serial killer - a chilling look into the way he thought, the way he worked, the way he found and lured each new victim and justified his actions. An indepth glimpse of how an anorexic mind misfires from normal relations with food and health as it descends into the insanity that allows a person to starve themselves literally to death despite the pleas of their loved ones. Then the look into the small town mentality and how each person brushes against the next one without realizing the effect they can have on each other's lives. I am not sure where I lost interest in this novel or where the novel and the characters in it lost me to be honest, it just sort of happened along the way.

Hayley Jo gradually disappeared from my radar as someone I cared about and maybe that was sort of the author's point? To show that we slip in and out of other's lives in a ripple effect without being aware of it and in the end we really don't matter all that much? I don't know. What I do know is that after several weeks of waffling about what review I would write and what rating to give "Twisted Tree", I'm still not sure. I do know that I came away from the book with a bitter after taste and honestly wish I just had not read it at all. I can say it left me thinking and for that alone I am giving it 3 stars instead of just 1 star - it's pretty rare that a book I did NOT LIKE can make me think and feel something weeks later.