Reviewed by Adam Goldwyn
5.29.07

Susan Matson’s novel The Tree-Sitter tells a familiar story: a young east coast idealist, tired of climbing the social ladder only to find at the top a decadent materialism, goes west to Oregon in search of sincerity, open spaces and new beginnings. It’s the story Jefferson inaugurated on the Lewis and Clark expedition; the one the pioneers told themselves as their wagon trains descended into the Willamette Valley; it is the one my parents, who fled New York for Oregon in the mid-seventies, told me, and, I presume, themselves; it is the one Oregon’s adopted son Ken Kesey told in the state’s only literary masterpiece, Sometimes a Great Notion; it is the one that Suzanne Matson tells now in her new novel The Tree-Sitter.

The Tree-Sitter is the story of twenty-year old Julie Prince, whose last name epitomizes her life as a self-described “high school valedictorian, Wellesley student, rule-following daughter of Ginnie Prince, who was founding partner of Prince Baylor.” As the story opens, we find Julie having climbed another type of ladder, this time to a place “150 feet in the air…[p]erched on a plywood platform in the branches of an old-growth Douglas Fir tree,” reminiscing about how impressed her mother’s friends were at her hands-off child-rearing style: “Of course, college comes first… [g]raduate school can wait until she’s sure.” From the vantage point of a few years and a few thousand miles, Julie decides that her mother’s own youthful “escapes were not so much rebellions as they were resume-builders, shaped to the academic calendar and underwritten by family money.”

This is the life the daughter has sought to escape, following new love Neil-– an endangered species himself, that rare breed of man: the suave, impassioned, handsome environmentalist– from the East Coast frat-party where they met to the pristine wilderness of Oregon’s pine forests, where they cast off their old identities and names and adopt new ones (he, River; she, Emerald) and where she comes to this necessary, if somewhat forced realization: “I realized I’d never been in love before. I thought I had.”

This relationship forms the emotional core of the novel, even more so than the primary love affair between Julie and Neil, which plays itself out along fairly predictable lines. When Matson writes of life among the environmentalists, it sometimes feels as though it is derived from observation, but when she writes of the complications of the mother-daughter relationship, it feels somehow truer, somehow more lived and less researched. Matson excels in eliciting the subtle meanings which simmer just beneath the surface of every parent-child relationship, and is adept at recreating those meaningless everyday activities which, when seen through the prism of intergenerational conflict, assume profound significance. A game of phone tag, in Matson’s steady hands, becomes a battle for control, independence, respect and frustration between two people who, though they disagree, have a close and loving bond.

At the same time, this relationship represents two paradigms of femininity: Julie, who gives up her own life to follow and support the man she loves, and Ginny, the high-powered lawyer who needs no man, not even for procreation: Julie, it turns out, is the result of artificial insemination. Julie’s nickname for her mother Ginnie (full name Virginia) is the “Virgin Prince.” Thus complicated relationship enriches the psychological depth of the novel immeasurably by forcing the reader to read all of Julie’s actions against the backdrop of her mother.

What saves this novel from falling into a saccharine-melodrama-of-first-love novel or from the equally dangerous youth-in-revolt-against-generational-oppression novel is the backdrop against which these themes play themselves out. Neil’s ever more zealous involvement with radical environmentalists forces Julie, a far more recalcitrant convert, to confront the moral and ethical issues involved, not just in the logging industry (the perennial uber-villain of Oregonian literature), but in the environmentalist’s response to it. Like Sometimes a Great Notion, which also describes a hard-scrabble life in the timber industry, Matson refuses to glorify or condemn: she merely describes, leaving it up to the reader to judge her characters not only by their lofty and laudable intentions, but also by forcing the reader to confront the real life (and death) consequences of the actions taken in the name of those intentions: “When you plant bombs,” Julie tells Neil, “It doesn’t matter what your intentions are. Bombs have a habit of going off. And not always as planned.” As the novel shifts to a darker and more violent tone, Matson skillfully backgrounds 9/11, forcing a reconsideration of the distinction between an “activist” and a “terrorist,” to which Neil replies: “Terrorist is just a word. Action, movement, protest, resistance, self-defense– those are words, too. I could argue that they’re more accurate ones.”

The power of this novel is its harmonious balance of what is really a relatively formulaic romantic coming-of-age novel with a politically engaged, socially conscious morality tale. Matson never loses sight of these two movements, and her real achievement is producing a work that weaves these two threads together in such a way that they become intertwined.