Kent Meyers’ “Twisted Tree” Haunts, Paints Picture of Small Town Tragedy

By Jenny Shank, 10-26-09

Twisted Tree
by Kent Meyers
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 289 pages, $24

Kent Meyers’ haunting new novel, Twisted Tree, opens with an invented quote from a police officer speaking in a 2003 article in the fictional Spokane Plain Dealer, entitled “Is There an I-90 Killer?”: “We believe it’s the same man.  Both victims were female, extremely thin.” On the next page Meyers begins his complicated narrative with the first-person voice of a serial killer, a man who targets anorexic women along I-90, kidnaps, rapes, and kills them, and breaks their bones, although as one character chillingly observes, nobody knows in exactly what order he carries out those vile acts.  He researches his victims on pro-anorexia sites on the Internet, and as Twisted Tree opens, he discovers his target, Hayley Jo Zimmerman, or HayJay, at the store where he knows she works in the Rushmore Mall in Rapid City, South Dakota, and entices her into leaving with him.

Meyers brings the chapter to the moment where Hayley Jo realizes what her fate will be, then he leaves her, plunging the reader into the thoughts of the supermarket checkout clerk in Hayley Jo’s hometown of Twisted Tree, South Dakota.  The clerk, Elise Thompson, spent some time as a missionary in South America, and vaguely knew Hayley Jo, as did everyone in this small town.  The book carries on like this, jumping from one character’s first-person narrative or third-person perspective to the next, moving back and forth in time, offering up many sharp, moving passages, such as the story of a poor Native American boy’s brief triumph as an elementary school marble champion.  In this way Meyers fashions a portrait of the town, filled with the large and small tragedies, the frustrated hopes and the minor triumphs of its people.  Meyers brilliantly displays the abuse, the secret loves, and private dreams that form the hidden motivations of this community.

All of it is written in gorgeous prose, and yet Twisted Tree is frustrating at the same time that it is deeply enjoyable.  Every character Meyers includes is three-dimensional and distinctive, every voice he employs is vivid, every word of description is apt.  But the book feels like its intense focus has drifted slightly off-center.  After catching the reader’s attention with that singular opening, Meyers never gives Hayley Jo Zimmerman a chance to take center stage.

The town’s oddball loaner, Shane Valen, holed up in a decrepit house, poaching game on neighbors’ land by night, gets much more space than she does.  We hear briefly from HayJay’s father and her high school best friend, but Hayley Jo is a peripheral figure for most of the voices that speak, which makes the narrative feel off-kilter, as strong as its prose is.  When the town police officer narrates, he talks not about Hayley Jo’s murder but about Shane, and when Meyers depicts a funeral, he shows Shane’s, not Hayley’s.  We hear from Hayley’s murderer twice, but never from her or her mother.

It’s frequently difficult to get one’s bearings each time the narrator changes, perhaps because it usually takes until deep into the chapter for the narrator to reveal how his or her story connects with Hayley Jo’s.  It would be useful to go into Twisted Tree armed with a chart of all the interrelations of the characters and a timeline of key events, so that the shifting facts would be out of the way of the enjoyment of the rich prose.

Twisted Tree is filled with wonderful turns of phrase, such as this one, when Hayley Jo’s father Stanley, who raises buffalo, takes comfort in a chat with a waitress at an airport restaurant, and she says she has never seen a buffalo.  “For a moment Stanley was baffled.  She’d never seen a buffalo?  It seemed an unaccountable deprivation, like a private extinction.” Another tour-de-force chapter is the one from the perspective of the owner of a pawn shop where Hayley Jo sold her rodeo buckle after she quit barrel racing—but like most details about Hayley Jo, this is a minor part of the chapter, which features a psychologically astute stand-off between the owner and a woman trying to pawn her wedding rings.

Twisted Tree is a great but confounding novel, leaving its central figure a mystery but the town she lived in fully revealed.