Twisted Tree - Hardcover

Meyers, Kent

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151013896 ISBN 13: 9780151013890

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009

Synopsis

Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of small-town Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible event—their loss, their place in it, and the secrets they all carry.

In this brilliantly written novel, one girl’s story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her. Among them, a supermarket clerk recalls an encounter with a disturbingly thin Hayley Jo. An ex-priest remembers baptizing Hayley Jo and seeing her with her best friend, Laura, whose mother the priest once loved. And Laura berates herself for all the running they did, how it fed her friend’s addiction, and how there were so many secrets she didn’t see. And so, Hayley Jo’s absence recasts the lives of others and connects them, her death rooting itself into the community in astonishingly violent and tender ways.

Solidly in the company of Aryn Kyle, Kent Haruf, and Peter Matthiessen, Kent Meyers is one of the best contemporary writers on the American West. Here he also takes us into the complexity of community regardless of landscape, and offers a tribute to the powerful effect one person's life can have on everyone she knew.

About this title

About the Author

Kent Meyers is the author of The Work of Wolves, Light in the Crossing,The River Warren, and Witness of Combines. He is a recipient of an ALA Alex Award, two Minnesota Book Awards, and a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award. Meyers has been published in a wide array of prestigious magazines, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Quarterly West, and Black Warrior Review. He lives in South Dakota.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Twisted Tree

"Twisted Tree makes me think of Winesburg, and the fine line between plain folks and grotesques?how one day, through the quirks of circumstance, we find ourselves on the other side of that line, and wonder how long we've been there. Like Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter, Kent Meyers spins out his intimate life stories from the hub of a small-town tragedy and takes us into places we never thought we'd go."

--Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing

"Twisted Tree is a piercing and original book, beautifully written and conceived. In it Kent Meyers has created a lyrical atlas, revealing all that lies beneath his indelible world of freeway towns and bison ranches--a haunted territory of regret, longing and guilt."

-- Jess Walter, author of Citizen Vince

"A master wordsmith and storyteller, Kent Meyers brings us characters who, like so many of us, take years, a lifetime even to face their histories, lying to each other and themselves along the way. I don't come across novels like this very often -- gorgeously written, addictively entertaining, suspenseful, and spirit-full." -- Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer

"In the riveting pages of Twisted Tree, Kent Meyers has expanded the map of his imaginative territory to produce his own brand of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County on the stark Midwestern plains. Present and past collide, exposing the delicate mix of history and dream that shapes the American landscape." -- Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road

"Twisted Tree brings all of the dynamics of rural America to life with vivid prose and true to life characters. Kent Meyers is writing some of the most groundbreaking novels about the West today." --Russell Rowland, author of In Open Spaces

From the Inside Flap

"Meyers, like Faulkner and McCarthy, knows that the smallest corner of the country can contain the universe." --Marjorie Sandor, author of Night Gardner and Portrait of My Mother

Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of small-town Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible event?their loss, their place in it, and the secrets they all carry.

In this brilliantly written novel, one girl s story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her. Among them, a supermarket clerk recalls an encounter with a disturbingly thin Hayley Jo. An ex-priest remembers baptizing Hayley Jo and seeing her with her best friend, Laura, whose mother the priest once loved. And Laura berates herself for all the running they did, how it fed her friend s addiction, and how there were so many secrets she didn t see.

And so, Hayley Jo s absence recasts the lives of others and connects them, her death rooting itself into the community in astonishingly violent and tender ways. And in Twisted Tree, acclaimed novelist Kent Meyers has created a powerful tribute to the effect one person's life can have on everyone she knew.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Molly Gloss Kent Meyers's new novel opens like a chilling murder mystery, with a serial killer stalking and abducting a young woman he has targeted through an Internet chat room for anorexics. His victim, Hayley Jo Zimmerman, is the axis around which the novel loosely revolves, but the chapters that follow are not concerned with the manner of her death. In fact, if she had died from anorexia, rather than at the hands of a murderer, one wonders if the novel would have been substantially different. As the narration moves back and forth in time and into more than a dozen voices, Meyers's attention is on the lesser tragedies and secrets of ordinary lives. These stories, many of which could stand alone, together compose a portrait of the small plains community of Twisted Tree, S.D. This is a somber novel, its characters much visited by sorrows and regrets and the demands of harsh work, but Meyers tells their stories affectingly, warmly, with a keen eye for finely observed detail. Elise Thompson is a grocery clerk who 20 years earlier had been a missionary in South America, naive enough to put herself and others in dangerous circumstances. Hayley Jo's death makes her think about the nature of guilt and innocence, and her own glancing culpability. Sophie Lawrence, who cares for her invalid stepfather, her childhood molester, exacts revenge through myriad small, secret abuses. Audrey Damish's mother, nearing the end of her life, unspools the details of the death of a hired man's child long ago. Stanley Zimmerman, shattered by grief, and with his marriage failing, looks for a connection -- for "a spurt of lightness" -- in a brief encounter with a waitress. Meyers convincingly evokes the separate voices of these friends and neighbors of Hayley Jo's, as well as others in a broader circle: a pawnshop clerk, a long-haul trucker, a county sheriff and, chillingly, the serial killer. But it can take several pages of each new chapter to figure out which of the many characters is speaking, and with so many people and relationships (and secrets) to keep track of, this is a book that prompts a lot of flipping back to earlier scenes. It may not matter much whether you can remember, for instance, that Audrey Damish's family bought part of the Valen place from Shane Valen's grandfather and later sold it to the Zimmermans, but this is a book that probably rewards a second reading. With the relationships finally sorted out, there could be more satisfaction in spotting the many small slipknots that tie all these names together. In "The River Warren," his first novel, Meyers similarly moved back and forth in time and made use of multiple narrative voices, piecing together the how and why of a tragic event in a small plains town. Unlike that novel, though, there is no large mystery to be solved in "Twisted Tree," and the death of Hayley Jo is a thin thread that does not quite bind each story to the whole. Meyers weaves Native American mysticism and Christian images of crucifixion and martyrdom into the narrative, and he returns several times to certain distinct images -- mittens turned inside out, the whorls in a glass marble -- but for a coherent theme, he may be asking us simply to look at the complex web of relationships in which we all live our lives. "The universe itself is a void so vast the stars are tiny things," he writes, "and the planets only guessed at by the deviations they create, the anomalies of orbit. And maybe we're all anomalies in each other's lives, circling stars that may not be of our own choosing, sending codes into the bigness that we hope someone will decipher, to redeem us from coincidence."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. In his beautiful and unsettling new novel, Meyers (The Work of Wolves) examines the effects of a murder on the residents of a small South Dakota town. In an opening sequence that is so disturbing it's difficult to read, teen Hayley Jo Zimmerman is stalked and abducted by a serial killer. The rest of the novel uses the rippling consequences of Hayley Jo's murder to explore the smaller rural tragedies in Twisted Tree, S.D.: Elise, a forlorn grocery clerk, judges everyone by their purchases and hides the secret terrors of her past as a missionary; Sophie Lawrence cares for her invalid stepfather while losing her sanity; Angela Morrison learns to accept the harsh realities of being a rancher's wife; Stanley, Haley Jo's father, channels his grief into a desperate need to connect with a stranger. The novel is brimming with arresting descriptions, and the western setting is employed to surprising effect, as in a sequence contrasting the removal of an invasive salt cedar bush with a father's awareness of his son's first crush. Meyers's small masterpiece deserves comparison to the work of Raymond Carver, Joy Williams and Peter Matthiessen. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151013896
• ISBN 13: 9780151013890
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 289