Hannah Versus the Tree

De la Durantaye’s debut novel (after Beckett’s Art of Mismaking), about one young woman’s revenge against her own family, misses the mark. Narrated by an unnamed young man to an unnamed familial matriarch, the story begins with the narrator promising to tell the matriarch how her granddaughter Hannah brought about the downfall of their esteemed family, the Syrls. The narrator meets Hannah at age six in Northern Michigan, and the two form an immediate bond after Hannah’s father and the narrator’s mother have an affair. Hannah and the narrator grow up together reading myths and traveling around the world. As a young woman, Hannah opposes her uncle Sixten when he proposes a mining venture in Ecuador, and an ensuing moment of violence changes Hannah. It becomes clear to the narrator, who helps Hannah with her plan to bring down the Syrls, that Hannah possesses a talent for vengeance. The narrator seeks to imbue Hannah’s revenge with a mythical cadence and scale; the numerous asides about The Odyssey, Achilles, Hannibal Barca, and more drive this thematic through line home repeatedly. But the mannered prose slows and obscures the plot and provides an unnecessary, distancing layer to the novel. There are some good lines and intriguing thoughts (“You should be true to your strongest feeling, not your oldest bond”), but readers have to sift through too much to find them.[em] (Nov.) [/em]