Caleb Johnson’s novel, Treeborne, is a deep dive into a family with serious skeletons in their closets and firm beliefs in their own righteousness. The Treebornes of Elberta, Alabama have always been considered weird by the rest of the town. Hugh Treeborne made weird sculptures from found objects. His daughter Tammy wants to clearcut the family property and has dreams about being in the movie business. His granddaughter, Janie, is probably the strangest Treeborne of all. Janie narrates her story—and her family’s story—to her own grandson. Each chapter takes us further into the dark history of the Treebornes.
Janie, when we first meet her, is a stubborn old woman whose house is about to be flooded when the local dam is finally destroyed. She refuses to move. She fought hard to hold on to her family’s land around Elberta, called the Seven. In 1958, when Janie’s grandmother died, the land was left to Tammy. Tammy wants to sell off the timber from the Seven, ruining what makes the land special to Janie. At 13, Janie still seems like a feral child. She roams the hills in and around Elberta in the company of one of her grandfather’s creations: a “dirt boy” that sometimes speaks and moves, but only when a Janie or another Treeborne is around.
To stop her aunt from clearcutting the Seven, Janie hatches a plan with the other young adolescents in her circle to kidnap Tammy. They have no idea what will happen after that. It’s clear they never thought that far and things quickly get out of hand. Meanwhile, Janie’s chapters alternate with the stories of her grandparents. Hugh Treeborne gets tricked into losing some of his art to a Northerner who takes credit for it and then gets into a macabre entanglement with the Tennessee Valley Authority while building the dam that will eventually be destroyed and flood Janie’s house and land decades later. And all that’s before the storm.
Things keep happening to the various generations of Treebornes. There’s a lot of plot to keep track of, but what I was most interested in Hugh and Janie’s strangeness. They both seem to be under compulsions. For Hugh, it’s his art. For Janie, it’s the woods. Unfortunately, the strangeness wasn’t really explored in the kind of depth I wanted. Without some kind of psychological clarity, Treeborne felt muddled and opaque to me. It felt like a lot of characters doing bad things to each other with no thought for the consequences. I like reading about consequences, but I have a hard time sympathizing with characters when I don’t really understand their motivations.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 5 June 2018.