THE TREE DOCTOR
A startling, erotic novel about the need to balance care for others with care for one’s self.
When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother’s garden–convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle–and the dormant cherry tree within it.
Caught between tending to an unwell parent and the weight of obligation to her distant daughters and husband,
A startling, erotic novel about the need to balance care for others with care for one’s self.
When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother’s garden–convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle–and the dormant cherry tree within it.
Caught between tending to an unwell parent and the weight of obligation to her distant daughters and husband, she becomes isolated and unmoored. She soon starts a torrid affair with an arborist who is equally fascinated by her mother’s garden, and together they embark on reviving it. Increasingly engrossed by the garden, and by the awakening of her own body, she comes to see her mother’s illness as part of a natural order in which things are perpetually living and dying, consuming and being consumed. All the while, she struggles to teach (remotely) Lady Murasaki’s eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which turns out to resonate eerily with the conditions of contemporary society in the grip of a pandemic.
The Tree Doctor is a powerful, beautifully written novel full of bodily pleasure, intense observation of nature, and a profound reckoning with the passage of time both within ourselves and in the world we inhabit.
- Graywolf Press
- Paperback
- March 2024
- 256 Pages
- 9781644452776
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$17.00
About Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Praise
“Mesmerizing . . . . The Tree Doctor explores one woman’s sexuality at a time of life rarely written about, during a time in history that we are only now beginning to process. A beautiful and evocative, necessary book.” —Marcy Dermansky
“This is a gorgeous and completely unique novel, bristling with life like the garden it describes. It is melancholy, erotic, hopeful, meditative, frightening, and even funny–a book about solitude that is never lonely, a book that is both timeless and utterly contemporary. I finished it grateful to Marie Mutsuki Mockett for this orgy of sensory pleasures, and this opportunity to pause and consider life in a time of collective fear and uncertainty. A balm to the spirit and a lovely work of art.” —Lydia Kiesling
“Like the best of literature, The Tree Doctor allows us to see ourselves, but reading this beautifully honed story is also an act of healing. Every page brought new color, feeling, and wisdom into my life, changing me, not unlike the narrator’s mended cherry tree with its surprising spring blooms. Marie Mutsuki Mockett is an exquisite writer.” —Alan Heathcock
“Sex, death, rebirth, and literature–it’s all here, in one astonishing book. The Tree Doctor made me want to go have an affair!” —Gish Jen
“This finely-calibrated, groundbreaking chronicle of one woman’s midlife awakening captivated me from the very first sentence. With deadpan humor and deep compassion, Marie Mutsuki Mockett perfectly captures the vast social, political, and cultural changes wrought by the pandemic, spinning them into a gorgeous, utterly original novel. I loved it.” —Joanna Rakoff
“The Tree Doctor is a remarkable novel: sexy and profound, cerebral and corporeal. Never before have I been so turned on by trees and flowers, or laughed so much about the mysteries of sex and sexual desire. Marie Mutsuki Mockett depicts grief and self-discovery with such beauty and restrained vulnerability. I loved being in the singular world of this book.” —Edan Lepucki
Discussion Questions
1. From the first pages of The Tree Doctor, the COVID-19 pandemic is a vivid presence. Why does the narrator refer to it as “the disease” without mentioning COVID specifically? What do you think she is trying to achieve with her depiction of that moment?
2. How does the disease affect her characters’ sense of time, place, and interpersonal connection? What is the importance of setting and landscape in the novel? Why are Carmel, and Northern California, significant?
3. What role does The Tale of Genji play in the book? Discuss the protagonist’s attitude toward the novel, as well as her students’ attitudes. Why does the author feel that it is newly relevant now? What does the protagonist conclude about the relation between beauty and death?
4. Some novelists are more explicit writing about sex than others. What is distinctive for you about Mockett’s depiction of sex, and why is being so graphic significant? An author focusing on a passionate love affair might choose to avoid both heavier topics (such as death) and less glamorous realities (such as urinary tract infections). How does this fuller picture inform the narrative?
5. The protagonist seems to be returning to her marriage at the end of the novel. Has the affair changed her? Does she regret it? Was it a real romance in the end or was it something else?
6. Discuss the book’s maternal figures. How does the protagonist’s relationship with her mother change over time? How is her relationship to her own daughters informed by her relationship to her ill mother? How does she view the relationship between motherhood and writing? Are there other figures who could be seen as “maternal” in the novel?
7. Two questions emerge on page 164: “What happened with trees that could not bloom? Did they feel this pressure, too?” Why does Mockett’s narrator want to compare trees and people here? What does nature teach the protagonist about people?
8. The narrator talks about a “volunteer” in the garden—a plant or tree that was not planted but that rather seeded itself. What significance does this concept have in The Tree Doctor?
9. How do the protagonist’s feelings about her mother’s neglected garden change by the end of the novel?
10. “Mono no aware” means “an awareness of things,” but as the narrator explains in the book, it more specifically means “an awareness of the passing of things” and it is a core principle of Japanese aesthetics to try to find the beauty in the passing of things and in an awareness of their ephemerality. Which incidents in the book seem to illustrate this awareness, and what is the emotional payoff for that awareness? Is the protagonist, in the end, helped in any way by being aware of mono no aware?