Like many women of her generation, the unnamed Japanese American writer at the center of Marie Mutsuki Mockett's bold, erotic "The Tree Doctor," finds herself in midlife, squarely ensconced in the sandwich generation. She's burdened with the double-whammy of childcare and tending to an elderly parent while holding down a job, in this case as an adjunct lecturer.
At novel's start, Mockett's protagonist has flown from her home in Hong Kong for what was supposed to be a brief trip to northern California to help her widowed mother, who has dementia and needs to be placed in long-term care.
Then, the pandemic hits. All nonessential travel is banned; Hong Kong has imposed a strict quarantine for travelers. The woman is stranded in her childhood home, remotely teaching a class on Japanese aesthetics and trying to console her two children and husband through video chats.
This could have been a novel solely about the unfair amount of work that disproportionately fell upon many women during the pandemic, the care-giving while also doing economic labor. But Mockett has something far more sly in mind. And it's not about learning how to bake sourdough bread, like so many pandemic-era memes aimed at women.
As she cares for her mother's long-neglected garden, the woman calls on a man at the local nursery — known as "The Tree Doctor" — and one thing leads to another, as the saying goes. A torrid, graphic, no-holds barred affair ensues.
The woman isn't going to leave her husband or children. She's not looking for a replacement mate. She's intellectually fulfilled by discussing the intricacies of "The Tale of Genji" with her bright college students. No, she's in it for the sex, for re-discovering what her body needs after decades of putting herself dead last on the checklist of things to do.
Mockett is the author of four books, including novel "Picking Bones from Ash" and two works of nonfiction.. Her prose is as lush as the garden in the woman's Carmel home, as Mockett weaves together discussions of flora, dissections of passages from "Genji" and the woman's memories of childhood trips to Japan with her mother.
Marvel, for example, at how Mockett describes the irises: "Late spring was a time of lush color, dominated by violet and blue. The color purple in Japanese was murasaki, she recalled with delight. In the iris bed, there were now five flowers blooming, and the wisteria had, like Rapunzel, sent down its lilac curls."
The title character remains an archetype, an antidote to the life of self-sacrifice that has been unhealthy for the woman. He may be a fantasy of sorts, but it's also unrealistic to expect women, particularly mothers, to fulfill everyone else's needs but their own. As the woman notes, "Someone once said that for every baby a woman has, that's two books she doesn't write."
"Tree Doctor" is a book that says that kind of sacrifice takes its toll.
May-lee Chai is the author of "Useful Phrases for Immigrants," winner of an American Book Award, and "Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories." She is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
The Tree Doctor
By: Marie Mutsuki Mockett.
Publisher: Graywolf, 256 pages, $17.
