Reviews

In the Cherry Tree by Dan Pope

Commonweal

You have to admire a writer who gets mileage from the word "the." That's one of the sly coups that up-and-coming author Dan Pope pulls in In the Cherry Tree, his witty and affecting novel about coming of age in 1970s suburbia. Twelve-year-old Timmy, the book's narrator, is just another unruly boy sharing a Connecticut summer with his unruly pals, masturbating, flipping baseball cards, listening to Elton John, playing Stratego, making flatulence jokes--did I say masturbating?--and climbing the eponymous cherry tree, which grows on his front lawn.

But Timmy has developed a linguistic strategy that allows him to distance himself from his bickering parents, and it involves slapping the definite article in front of their names. In his version of reality, Mom becomes The Mom. Dad becomes The Dad. And Timmy himself becomes a more intriguing character, because as readers we can see him struggling, via this tiny trick of wording, to define the parameters of relationships and acquire an ironic perspective on life. It's the same impulse as the one behind the nickname game he and his best friend Stev
invent: as Timmy explains it, "We had a rule against having an e at the end of your first name. E's were not allowed. Therefore we called Steve Stev." With these little rhetorical eccentricities, Timmy seems to lash out at the sensations of powerlessness that are the mortification of childhood and adult life. As soon as that e gets lopped off, or that parental the crops up, Timmy's story becomes at once more distinctive and more universal.

Such shrewd, idiosyncratic uses of language lend piquancy to In the Cherry Tree, which recounts Timmy's good-humored solidarity with his older brother Albert, his sexual awakening, and his eagle-eyed monitoring of considerable adult naughtiness. Arching through the short chapters is the story of the separation and grudging reconciliation of The Dad, an easygoing, philandering construction engineer who loves to golf, and The Mom, a snobbish perfectionist whose ability to sense her children's misdoings leads Timmy to compare her to "Mr. Spock doing a Vulcan mind meld."

If you get right down to it, nothing much happens in In the Cherry Tree that has not happened in myriad coming-of-age novels and myriad lives--it's the narrative voice that makes the book compelling. As Timmy relates the revelations and peccadilloes that fill this little stretch of the 1970s, his deadpan tone manages to capture both the wonder and frustration of the moment and a certain amused nostalgia. In one of many anecdotes that trace the falling-out between his parents, for example, he describes a watershed evening:

Dinner came and went and The Dad didn't come home.
The Mom said, "Your father is a liar."
I said, "Do you think he's playing golf?"
... The Mom was strangely calm. She was the calm before the storm.
She was like the SS Poseidon floating happily along on New Year's Eve
before the tidal wave struck and capsized the ship and all hell broke
loose and the enormous fake Christmas tree fell over, crushing
numerous passengers, and the purser screamed, "Stay where you are, for
God's sake," and some panic-stricken weasel screamed back, "We're
going to die ..."


As this excerpt indicates via that marvelously ingenuous run-on sentence, Pope has a knack for meting out his grammatical units so that they amplify the book's overall mood of bemusement. Cleverly breaking a cardinal law of good writing (and proving yet again that rules exist only to be broken), he sticks the same subject-verb structure at the start of nearly every sentence, building up an almost hypnotic rhythm.
The intentionally monotonous cadences almost seem to echo the stoicism of Timmy, whose summer brings him a host of ordeals, including his alienation from Stev, the death of the family dog, a marathon clothes-shopping session ("more exhausting than playing a game of badminton to 500"), and a fight between The Mom and The Dad as to whether the kids will be brought up Catholic (like The Dad) or Protestant (like The Mom). The kids opt for "Neither."

Not all of these episodes will be to everyone's taste--the fastidious, for example, may find the chapter devoted to flatulence jokes somewhat long. Readers are more likely to see In the Cherry Tree as an endearing tribute to family love and to the resilience of youth. Pope discovers a wry metaphor for the latter in the figure of Evel Knievel, whom Timmy and Albert attempt to imitate on their bikes. Timmy recalls:

I hopped on the World's Greatest Bicycle otherwise known as the
Chopper otherwise known as the Green Machine ... went up the takeoff
ramp and flew in dead silence over the garbage can for approximately
one second that seemed a lot longer and touched down in a perfect
two-wheel landing and skidded to a stop in a skid shaped like a
fishhook.


The casual virtuosity of this daredevil leap seems on a par with the subtle deftness of In the Cherry Tree itself, so, in conclusion, it feels appropriate to award Pope's book the succinct praise that Albert gives his brother after those bike wheels have stopped spinning: "Cool."
By Celia Wren, April 23, 2004
 

Penthouse
December 2003 (Holiday issue)

The small beats of everyday life, the ones that first get obliterated by
memory, are given pride of place in Dan Pope's finely tooled coming-of-age novel, In the Cherry Tree. It is the summer of 1974. Yaz is playing left
field for the Red Sox, Richard Nixon is sweating bullets and swearing he's not a crook, and Timmy (he's never given a last name) is approaching his
thirteenth birthday in suburban Connecticut.

Male rites passage are already pretty well covered by pop culture, in movies like Stand by Me and This Boy's Life, in books such as Tony Earley's fine Jim the Boy and, lest we forget, Catcher in the Rye. What are the early seventies like for Pope's narrator? It turns out they are a lot like the fifties. Women wear bullet bras and teenaged boys moon over breast enlargement ads in the back of movie mags.

Ask people what the early seventies were about, and dope, Watergate and the Vietnam War will top most lists. Not Timmy of Apple Hill Road. Dope is mentioned twice in passing in Cherry Tree, Watergate two or three times, Vietnam not once. The grand sweep of history misses Timmy almost completely.  This was the summer his dog died, the summer his parents broke up and got back together, the summer nothing much happened. The event he most looks forward to is Evel Knievel's jump across Snake River Canyon.

But the quotidian tempo of Pope's narrative gets under your skin. Timmy makes a lot of lists, like Nick Hornby's narrator Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. Timmy doesn't have esoteric tastes: his favorite singer is Elton John. His sensibility is conditioned by the movies and TV of the period, from The Poseidon Adventure to Kung Fu. Pope produces mannered, writer's
workshop prose, sometimes overly precious (Timmy never fails to refer to his parents as "The Mom" and "The Dad") but at times also very funny. Some of the best fart jokes on record are in In the Cherry Tree, and that's about all a teenaged boy could ask.
 

Booklist
Watergate hearings are in full swing. Evil Knievel is traveling the country. And in an East Coast suburb, 12-year-old Timmy is surviving a summer that's both tumultuous and commonplace.  His best friend starts hanging out with older kids; his parents fight aggressively and even temporarily split apart; the neighborhood bully beats up his mother with an almost impossible lack of conscience ("Yeah, well.  What the fuck, right?" the bully says in response). Narrated by Timmy, Pope's accomplished first novel perfectly captures the shadowy, charged age of early adolescence.  Orange-peel wars, tree houses, and baseball cards coexist with nearly constant "boners" and dramatic masturbation techniques (one involves a dog's assistance; in another, Timmy secretly rubs his penis over a glass before heading it to a neighbor). Pope's dialogue is heartbreaking and real; his characters sympathetic in their gross imperfections. But best is Timmy's voice--detached and never too self-aware. Pope never tells too much, and the clipped, spare descriptions will draw readers straight into Timmy's unspoken loneliness, confusion, and sweet, wild joy.
Gillian Engberg (Booklist, Sept. 1, 2003, p. 60)


Library Journal (starred review)
For a 12-year-old boy, summers can still be magical-an endless vista of unscheduled days ready to be explored. So it seems, at least, to Timmy. He expects his summer to be filled with making lists, hanging out with friends, and watching TV. What he doesn't expect is a summer filled with change and loss. Over the course of this summer, Timmy will see his parents separate and his dog die; he will be betrayed by his best friend and terrified by the onset of puberty. Being the kind of child who keeps notebooks full of lists on weekly music favorites and TV trivia and possessing the standard self-centeredness of a 12-year-old, Timmy is as much concerned about getting a list right as he is about any of his battles. As events unfold in his corner of 1970s suburbia, he bobs along, slowly losing pieces of his innocence but never his hope. What makes this coming-of-age novel (Pope's first) appealing is Timmy's voice, which is not overly innocent or wise but aptly low-key and ordinary. While the 1970s background will appeal to nostalgic adult readers, teenagers will also enjoy this book. Recommended for public library collections.
Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
 

Hartford Courant - "The Boys In The 'Hood"
September 14, 2003 - By Carole Goldberg, Courant Books Editor

If you crossed "The Wonder Years" with "The Ice Storm," you might find yourself up "In the Cherry Tree," Dan Pope's novel about a boy awkwardly climbing out of the comforts of childhood into the far more perilous world of adolescence....Its goofy escapades and lively dialogue will have you laughing out loud -- that is, when you're not wincing at the pain of marriages going sour and friendships withering away.

The story is told by Timmy, the youngest, at 12-going-on-13, of three kids in a family where the parents, Betty and Bob, are constantly at war, hurling plates, threats and volleys of verbal abuse. She's a Protestant who has come to loathe her husband's Italian Catholic heritage and pals. It seems as though the icy waters of her native Nova Scotia are forever surging through her veins. He's a World War II vet in the construction business who's more into golfing than working and a bit too cavalier about family finances and responsibilities. The only thing he takes really seriously is keeping his late-model Lincoln Continental Mark IV in tip-top shape....

Timmy's a boy's boy -- you can almost smell the funk of sweaty socks and pork 'n' beans-fueled flatulence that hovers over him and his pals.

He's close to his slightly older brother Albert; he's usually at war with his older sister Daphne, she of the zit-bedeviled face. Timmy's best friend is Stev Mandelbaum, son of The Myra. That's right: Stev. The boys have a rule: no one should have a name that ends in an "e." They have lots and lots of rules involving favorite records and Top 10 lists and TV shows and their tree house and baseball cards. They're big on quoting dialogue from TV shows and movies, including "The Poseidon Adventure." They take an inordinate interest in the magazine illustrations for Mark Eden bust developer ads.

Also part of the gang on Apple Hill Road are momma's boy Tony "The Tiger" Papadakis and gross Mik -- yup, no "e" -- Cosgrove, whose dad is spiraling tragically downward. Mik has one of the most hilarious scenes in the book, in which he generously demonstrates the mysteries of self-abuse for his astonished pals....

Pope is particularly good at capturing the heartbreaking moment at which one kid suddenly outgrows another and with hardly so much as a shrug, leaves his old friend and their elaborate world of games and rules and shared secrets behind. Pope excels in capturing such moments.

"In the Cherry Tree" nails the events and atmosphere of a summer in which nothing much happens but everything changes, when a boy begins, without really knowing it, to take his first, hesitant steps toward becoming a man.


Kirkus Reviews
A boy's turbulent coming-of-age in suburban Connecticut during the 1970s. It's not easy to be nostalgic about the era of Watergate, Gerald Ford, and the leisure suit, but when you're 12 the world can look exciting no matter where you meet it....Pope gives us a portrait of an age as much as anything else, and the daily referents in Timmy's life-Elton John, The Poseidon Adventure, Happy Days, Richard Nixon-suffuse the story like water in an aquarium.....An appealing debut..."


Publisher's Weekly
[A]ppealingly homely, this first novel has the feel of an old family album. In a series of grainy snapshots, Pope chronicles the coming of age of 12-year-old Timmy during the summer of 1974 in suburban Connecticut. Timmy's father ("The Dad") is a boozing, gambling, happy-go-lucky Italian-American builder; his mother ("The Mom") is a no-nonsense Nova Scotia WASP. Timmy spends his time hanging out with his cronies, climbing cherry trees, listening to Elton John, going to movies, masturbating, discovering girls, teasing his older brother and sister and observing the neighborhood's idiosyncrasies. Egged on by his sadistic best pal, Stev (the friends drop the "e" at the end of names", Timmy torments feckless Tony, another neighborhood kid, but draws the line at killing frogs, another of Stev's favorite pastimes. As his parents' marriage slowly disintegrates -- mainly because the Mom incessantly nags the Dad about his habit of playing golf and boozing during business hours -- Timmy is jarred from his idyllic idling. There is a warmth and an authenticity to Timmy's interactions with his parents and siblings.
 

Hartford Advocate
by Lisa Gates - October 23, 2003

For anyone who was a boy, is raising a boy, or just living with someone who used to be a boy, Dan Pope's first novel, In the Cherry Tree is an inviting and eye-opening trip into the world of boys on the cusp of adolescence. This is a territory not yet overly mined in literary fiction, and Pope is particularly adept at fleshing out the chaos and the excitement of this time. If you remember the seventh grade, you get the picture.

Set in a middle-class West Hartford neighborhood of split-levels and tidy lawns, Pope's novel chronicles the events of summer 1974 in the life of 12-year-old Timmy and his friends. Readers who grew up in this area and in this era, in particular, will appreciate Pope's strong evocation of place, but even more affecting is his exploration of the interstices between childhood and adolescence.

This is a place and time familiar to Pope. He grew up in West Hartford and after some years away, lives there again. Many of the characters and events were distilled from his childhood memories, but Pope is careful to stress that "the parts are false, but the sum is true." The inspiration for the novel, Pope said in an interview, initially came from a journal entry he made at the age of 12: "Stev and I ate 308 cherries. It was the best cherry-eating day in history." It's a line that reappears in the book, and at least in the fictional world, that particular victory is rewarded with a serious case of the runs.

Like many novels set in the suburban landscape, In the Cherry Tree peels back the neat exterior and observes the sticky underside of family life.
In this particular neighborhood, the functional nuclear family is only an artfully maintained façade. The stay-at-home moms are left to their Pall Malls and bottles of J&B. The dads disappear into their other lives
-- at the office, on the golf course, or into the embrace of infidelity.

In Timmy's home, this is the summer when his dad moves out for a while and "divorce" becomes his mother's favorite word. And his family problems turn out to be relatively minor compared to others that erupt during the summer.

Despite the household turmoil brewing in the summer heat, Timmy's world remains largely constant. This is a time before bike helmets and packed summer schedules, and Timmy and his best pal Stev -- no cool name can end in the letter "e," Timmy tells us -- are left to their own devices on these long summer days. As they wander through the neighborhood, in and out of each other's houses, doing stuff and doing nothing in particular, Pope fashions a credible image of a boy's world.

The boys -- and the novel -- are steeped in pop culture and games of their own invention. Timmy and Stev obsessively track pop music charts, quiz each other on TV trivia, root for the Red Sox and follow Evel Knievel's stunts. They trade baseball cards, pull boyish pranks, climb trees and -- girls, be warned -- they spend an inordinate amount of time perfecting various farting techniques, using highly-potent food combinations as well as the mechanical assistance of "the most unbelievable farting machine." (Odds are you've got one of these in your garage!).

Boners are another prominent feature in this landscape -- it's a boy's world, after all -- and once Timmy learns from his weird neighbor Mik that ejaculation is not a sign of cancer, masturbation becomes one of his new hobbies. His eyes are increasingly riveted on incarnations of the female form: the shapely bosoms in the bust-enhancer ads in his mother's magazines, Stev's mother's cone-like breasts, the tightly rounded shapes of his 14-year-old sister's friends.

Through this exploration of young adolescent sexuality, farting games, and the boyish pranks, Pope draws a fascinating model of boyhood relationships, with fragile friendships and fun that almost always comes at someone's expense. Bullying is an integral part of even "friendly"
encounters, and the line between victim and victimizer shifts with the least amount of warning. Timmy experiences this first-hand during the summer of 1974, when Stev changes his name back to Steve and leaves the obsession with TV trivia, the Big D Sound Surveys, and Timmy behind.

Through all of these Timmy's voice remains uninflected and unreflective.
There are no emotions in this adolescent summer, just actions and reactions. Disturbed by one very awful masturbation scene (involving a dog, a weird neighbor, and a jar of mayonnaise), Timmy and Stev flee the scene. Missing his father after his parent's separation, Timmy rides his bike to the pizza parlor, the liquor store, his dad's office, looking for signs of his whereabouts. This portrayal, Pope says, was largely intentional. He wants Timmy to

function largely as a blank slate, recording rather than interpreting.
"The things he sees and experiences in the book," says Pope, "need time to sink in and register. For now, he is an observer in his own life, but the comprehension will come in due time."

This is not a plot-driven book, despite the fact that some fairly serious and traumatic things happen along the way. Rather it is like opening a curtain onto a boy's world, and even without the heavy reliance on pop culture -- the Saturday night TV lineup, the musical landscape -- what we see is a place with no real moral compass, and no real guidance. The adults are as unhappy and isolated as their children.
Absorbed by their own problems and betrayals, they have no ability to see the difficulties in their children's lives, let alone help them.
Hermetically sealed off from adults, Timmy's world becomes a strange sort of crucible, where the boys are left to figure things out for themselves. The results, predictably, are not always positive.

I asked Pope what drew him to this particular time in a boy's life, and he described it as a profoundly formative period. "I don't know if you ever escape the impression of yourself from junior high." Indeed, Pope is onto something here. Though some readers may find Pope's account of early adolescence funny in parts, what is memorable above all is his sensitive portrayal of this world. This is a hard time in any life -- real or invented. In Timmy, we find a very honest voice and a hardy soul that suggests it may indeed be possible to move beyond the difficult world of junior high.

"This is why we come to books," says Pope, "to discover that we're not alone in our experiences." Readers who pick up In the Cherry Tree may well appreciate the journey back to their own 12-year-old self. Like Pope says, the parts may be false, but the sum is true.
 

Montreal Mirror
by Juliete Waters

Far From Heaven
In the Cherry Tree is a poignant trip through '70's suburban hell

Somewhere outside the world of the 12-year-old narrator of Dan Pope's first novel, In The Cherry Tree, people are reading I'm OK - You're OK. The year is 1974 and pop psychology is in its infancy. Those people, however, aren't living on the same middle-American street as Timmy. The folks on Apple Hill Road talk and treat each other with a brutal and often hilarious disregard for concepts like self-esteem, dignity and empathy. It's not that they don't care - it's much more that they just don't have a clue.

Timmy and his friends gleefully abuse each other and small animals with an abandon that these days would land them on a list of potential highschool assassins. Meanwhile, they worship Elton John, and know the lyrics of "The Night Chicago Died" by heart. When Timmy has problems falling asleep because of a particularly disturbing fight between his parents, he mentally replays his favourite movie, Killdozer, the story of a demonically possessed bulldozer that chases its victims around a Pacific island. Throughout the book, he refers to his parents only as The Mom and The Dad, as though they were B-movie monsters.

In a certain sense they are. His sharp-tempered WASP mother and extravagant, self-indulgent Italian father are a textbook case of opposites attracting. As they and their friends knock back the afternoon Scotches, they torture each other in a cruel theatrical banter that sounds like an uncensored episode of an ABC after-school special. It's debatable whether this is how his parents really are, or if this is how Timmy's emotionally stunted mind is remembering them. Either way, the point is made: these people are not going to be much help to him in figuring out the highs and lows of adolescence.

When Timmy's mother gathers the kids together to tell them that she's kicked their father out of the house, it's pretty clear she's never considered buying a book on how to help kids through divorce. "This isn't your father's decision," she tells them when they want to know what he has to say about it. "He has no choice in the matter whatsoever. I'm sorry but that's the way it is. He's going to have to move out of the house. From now on, it'll be just the four of us. We'll get along fine without him. It'll be like an adventure, you'll see."

Pope's achievement is to simultaneously capture the brutality and the normality of this setting. The ineptitude of these characters is so perfectly understandable in the culture they're living in. Still, when neighbours stand idly by as a bully kicks his middle-aged mother in the stomach and when Timmy's mother confiscates a child-porn magazine left by a stranger in his tree house and does little but admonish Timmy for looking at "filth," Pope reminds us that this era is not especially worthy of nostalgia.

In the Cherry Tree is an extremely clever and unexpectedly poignant mood piece. If Todd Haynes is looking for a sequel to Far From Heaven, he should take a serious look at this novel. Beneath the melodrama and the bright, kitschy memories, Pope taps into some very real wounds. This is not, however, the kind of novel that will move every reader. There's a hopelessness to Timmy's life that's ultimately pretty depressing, and the irony often creates a distance that undermines the emotional punch. As to whether this novel will appeal to anyone who didn't hit puberty in the mid-'70s, it's hard to say. Puberty isn't exactly a problem that's been solved. Ten years ago Anne Lamott wondered "how on earth anyone can bring a child into this world knowing full well that he or she is eventually going to have to go through the seventh and eighth grades," a point that seems just as funny and just as true today.