The Tree Doctor

Mockett (Picking Bones from Ash) brings forth a fertile tale of sex and gardening set in the early days of Covid-19. The unnamed protagonist is a married Japanese American writer stranded in Carmel Valley, Calif., where she’s traveled alone from Hong Kong to see her mother, who has dementia. The nursing home where her mother lives won’t let her visit due to quarantine restrictions. While staying at her mother’s empty house, she teaches an online literature class and tends to the garden. At the local nursery she encounters a mysterious man known as the Tree Doctor, with whom she begins an affair. Unnerved by the pandemic (“The sickness was a worldwide pressure, like a storm front”) and unhappy in her marriage, she finds solace only in sex with the Tree Doctor. This opaque character serves as a rather convenient enigma for the story, but Mockett’s loamy language describing her characters’ erotic liaisons is often quite moving (“She felt herself unfolding and in her mind she thought of water running, of tree sap oozing out of a crack of bark”). This portrayal of a woman’s emotional courage and restoration makes the lockdown worth revisiting, if only for a moment. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Mar.)