Why the Tree Loves the Ax

December 29, 1997
"I was 27 years old and I had lost my way," confesses Caroline Harrison, the seductive, shape-shifting narrator of Lewis's second novel (after Sister), minutes before totaling her car outside the remote city of Sugartown, Tex. Thus begins a hallucinatory tale of violence and disguises, spiritual disorientation and wanderlust that will eventually carry Caroline from a troubled marriage in Manhattan across the country and back. In chapters framed as responses to the interrogations of a voice whose identity is concealed until the last chapter, Caroline gradually reveals, in an affectless manner, the patterns of self-destruction and self-invention that define her life. Recovering from her injuries in a hospital in Sugartown, she forges an application for a job as an orderly at a retirement home called Eden View, a haunted purgatory of aging transients. She soon befriends two Sugartown loners, Bonnie, a free-spirited bartender, and Billy, a violently deranged Eden View denizen, who presents Caroline with a shoebox he asks her to deliver to friends on the outside while forbidding her to look at its contents. When a riot erupts in Sugartown, Caroline hears imaginary voices directing her to kill a policeman with a baseball bat; when Bonnie dies in the ensuing violence, Caroline assumes her identity and flees north towards a showdown with Billy's circle--three fugitives and an angelic child printing counterfeit money in upstate New York. Lewis's fluid evocation of the shattered lives and landscapes Caroline traverses is occasionally upset by passages of overheated sex and baffling dream visions; and what seems a gradual, suspenseful build-up to the real story behind Caroline's madness remains frustratingly unrealized. But the story line's very unreliability, and what it suggests about how we view our lives, is certainly as much Lewis's point as his protagonist's sad odyssey through the perdition of contemporary America.

December 2, 1997
Caroline has been wandering from city to city trying to find a place to settle. Literally crashing into Sugartown, Texas, she decides to stay. She takes a job in a nursing home and meets Billy, a mean old man who nevertheless intrigues her. She also befriends Bonnie, who like Caroline is wandering through life. During a Labor Day celebration that turns into a riot, Caroline kills a policeman. Before skipping town, she pays one last visit to Billy, who gives her a mysterious box to deliver to an address in upstate New York. Arriving at a house in the woods, Caroline discovers three men and a boy who are up to something. Are they friendly or not? Is she responsible for the policeman's death? Part mystery, part psychological sketch, this intriguing novel from the author of Sister (Graywolf, 1993) is slow to start, but the narrative soon picks up, taking the reader through the many mental twists and turns of the life of a very disturbed woman. For larger collections.--Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., Ohio

January 1, 1998
During a random drive across the country, an automobile accident lands Caroline Harrison in a hospital in a small Texas town. Once recovered, she gets a job at a nursing home and befriends Billy, an elderly resident. A race riot breaks out and, afraid that she accidentally killed a policeman during the melee, Caroline heads back to New York to confront her ex-husband about why he deserted her and to fulfill Billy's request that she deliver a mysterious box to an address in upstate New York. After meeting with her ex-husband, she leaves the city to find the recipient of Billy's box. What she discovers at the address is a group of men clearly engaged in some shady deal, who refuse to let her leave the house. Once their project--high-class counterfeiting--is over, everyone leaves the area, but not before Caroline becomes pregnant by one of the men, who turns out to be Billy's son. The prose is beautiful, but Lewis leaves so many large and small points unexplained that the patience of the majority of readers may wear thin. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)