The long and the short: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn & The House on the Hill

The long and the short in the 1940s.

The long was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which took several weeks. The short is The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese, which I'm halfway through in a day. The tree, mentioned at judicious intervals, is ailanthus or tree of heaven; enough said. The house on the hill is outside Turin in 1943; enough said. I have read other Pavese and recognise these houses, these hills, these women, his ghosts.

This is an ungainly tango. Forget blind Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman; Betty Smith and Cesare Pavese are more serendipitous, less felicitous. First published in 1944 as The Tree in the Yard, later Penguin 834, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in 1951. I can read a bestseller from 1944 and 1951 but not a bestseller from 2025 (sauf a Graham Norton novel a couple of years ago; special pleading there). I like slim Italian literature from the 1940s and 1950s, much of it written by depressives. With a fascist state in your history, you're barely able to look ahead.

Now that the land is bare, I've resumed my wanderings; I go up and down the hillside and think of the long illusion that gave rise to this story of my life.

A tree grows in Brooklyn is the whole four hundred and some pages; the tree grows out of New York tenements towards heaven. The house on the hill is only that. Any house. Any hill. No growing to be seen.