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This book traces a seemingly uneventful summer in
the adolescence of narrator Timmy, a sort of “everyboy” who has just the right mix of
irreverence, curiosity, obsession, loyalty, lust, anger, and decency to resemble a real
human being. Beneath the uneventful surface of the novel, important events and
significant changes take place in Timmy’s life and perception.
There is
much that is familiar to readers who lived through the book’s
mid-1970s suburban
America setting. Pope has a memoirist’s eye for detail. Timmy revels in all the minutia
that dominate a young boy’s observations–from popular music to movies to TV, all the way
to lusty adult neighbors and the quirks of his own siblings and parents. Unlike memoir
writers, Pope brings no adult filter to Timmy’s voice. That an adult writer can so
thoroughly allow readers to experience life through the perspective of his young narrator
is quite a feat of
literary dexterity.
In addition to his skill at
capturing just the right details, Pope is simply
a terrific crafter of the written
word. Even through the adolescent narrator’s
voice, his language moves beautifully
through moments that approach poetry to
other equally satisfying moments of near
reportage as Timmy enumerates his
countless observations. The book’s great humor
comes both from the tragicomic situations that Timmy experiences and the delightful way
he narrates these experiences. Pope is so stylistically skilled that it sometimes hardly
matters what is actually occurring as the novel unfolds.
“Stuff” certainly
happens in the book. Pets die, parents argue, youngsters
and adults have carnal
adventures, and people show their positive and
disturbing personality traits in a
variety of minor and major ways. But don’t come to this book looking for the “action”
that often overwhelms traditional boy-moving-toward-manhood books. Pope works on a more
sophisticated plane. Timmy
experiences no psychological earthquakes–just a subtle
erosion of his emotional landscape. Friends and family (and ultimately Timmy himself)
change. These are not the melodramatic changes of lesser coming-of-age novels. Just as
people do in the real world, the characters of Pope’s In The Cherry Tree arrive at
the end of
this fragment of their life story changed just enough to inhabit the world
in a slightly different place.
And thanks to Pope’s encyclopedic but
precise choice of detail, his delightful style, and his subtle hand in shaping his
protagonist, readers can find a place in that world as well.
