Marie Mutsuki Mockett might no longer live in Carmel, but her thoughts return there regularly.
“Even though I love cities and I live in a city, there’s something about me that is probably more attuned to an environment that has a lot of natural wildlife and a lot of vegetation,” she says. “Maybe one day I’ll write about cities, but that area, the Monterey Peninsula, is so beautiful and so vibrant, and I’ve never met anybody who grew up there who didn’t feel that way about it.
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Mockett turned to Carmel for the setting of her latest novel, “The Tree Doctor.” The book follows an unnamed narrator who returns to the town from Hong Kong to care for her mother, who is suffering from dementia. She moves her mother into an assisted living facility, but the advent of a pandemic has made it difficult to rejoin her family in Hong Kong, so she stays at her mother’s house, tending to her beloved garden.
That’s how she meets Dean, the titular tree doctor, who she enlists to help save some of the ailing plants and trees. The two embark on a torrid affair as the narrator struggles to figure out who she is and who she wants to be.
Mockett answered questions about “The Tree Doctor” via Zoom from Tokyo, where she lives. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’ve written about agriculture before, in “American Harvest.” Is that an interest you had growing up, or was it something that developed more recently?
It’s probably a reflection of my upbringing. My father had this wheat farm in Nebraska, which belongs to me now. I always heard him on the phone talking to farmers, and then in the summertime, he would always go for harvest, and when I was really young, I always went to harvest with him. My summers were split between going to Japan in the early part of the summer with my mother, and then hopefully getting back in time to go to harvest.
So farming and conversation about farming were constantly a part of my life, and he was a very broad thinker, so he was always relating what was going on in the world to our farm. We also had a little plot of land and we had a vegetable garden. My mom had an incredible green thumb, and so they were always growing plants and vegetables and eating out of the garden. That’s just sort of how I grew up.
Q: The narrator’s mother’s garden is described in great detail. Was there a particular garden that served as an inspiration for it?
It’s the garden that I grew up with. It was actually really fun because it was mostly inspired by an actual physical garden, but I made some things up, and when the copy editor was going through this novel with an incredible fine-tooth comb, she actually drew a picture of what the garden looked like. She would say, “On Page 5, you say this, but then on Page 7 you say this.” And I would say, “Well, actually it’s two different trees and they’re in different places, I can show you where they are.” It was interesting. She tried to map it out, but the placement of most things matches this garden in Carmel.
Q: This book takes place during a pandemic. Did you start writing it after COVID hit?
“American Harvest” came out in April of 2020, [right after the] lockdown in California. March. I think I had a trip to Los Angeles that February to record the audiobook for “American Harvest,” and the virus was already circulating in the news. I heeded the warnings really carefully. When I would go to Japan, I would always visit places that have been affected by a plague in history. So when I started to hear about this virus, I thought, “It’s like that event in history, only now it’s here.” I was somebody who was very early on uncomfortable sending my son to school, and I was somebody who bought that the pandemic was going to be a real thing that was going to affect our lives. So the tour and the number of activities that were planned for “American Harvest” fell apart, which is devastating for a writer. Almost right away, I began to think, “I have to do something. I’ve got to entertain myself.” Then I had this idea for a novel, and I think I started writing it in early May.
Q: The narrator’s husband, Thomas, is in denial about the pandemic, and the narrator seems to be having some trouble accepting her mother’s illness. Was that a theme you wanted to tackle, this wishful thinking about bad news hoping that things will go away?
Absolutely. That’s one of the fundamental questions about how to live, and how to live well, and how to live well over a long period of time: How do you live well with bad news? How do you make every day count, and how do you feel joy, etcetera? Even right now, I feel like there’s so much bad news that’s circulating all the time. Sometimes I have conversations with friends who will say, “It was hard to enjoy the holidays because of the war. It was hard to enjoy my son’s birthday. It was hard to enjoy the weekend with the news.” There’s all of this understandable intrusion in our thinking and in what we see because there is so much bad news. There’s so much horror in the world. So is it OK to experience joy? At what point do you go back to being happy? Or is that wrong? So this is a book about somebody who is surrounded by a lot of illness and bad news, and she’s wondering, “How do I survive and is it OK to be happy sometimes?” And there are a couple of quotes in the book where she comes across these ancient texts from Japan, where writers write about this particular problem. So it’s an old question.
Q: Celeste Ng called your book a “coming-of-middle-age novel.” Do you think that’s underrepresented in fiction?
Yeah, I think that that’s not necessarily represented. So many novels or first novels are coming-of-age stories because it’s so exciting: How does a person become a person? A long time ago, I remember my father saying to me, “Wait until you’re 50. The fifties are when it gets really good, and you start to understand a lot that you couldn’t understand when you were younger.” I think there’s something to that. One of the things that’s wonderful about writing is it is an art form where one can continue to age. It’s a lot harder for performers. We read all the time about women of a certain age who can no longer get cast in roles because the exciting story is how they land the guy or find their inner strength or whatever. But that’s not actually the only story about human experience, and I think it’s not helpful to people to sort of continuously pound that one tale over and over again.
