The Green Bay Tree

By Louis Bromfield

What a waste of time this novel was. Completely pointless, as far as I could tell. It's mainly about a beautiful, rich woman, Lily. Is the reader supposed to admire this character? Because there really wasn't anything to admire. She is lazy, willful and she does nothing interesting. Her main attribute is her beauty. She gets pregnant and refuses to marry the father. Are we supposed to admire her because she decides to go it alone and stand on her own two feet? Big Deal! It's easy to stand on your own two feet when you have a big fat bank account. Towards the end of the book she shoots a couple of German soldiers (during WW I) but that scene was completely unbelievable.
Are we supposed to admire her cold, arrogant mother? Frankly, I can't admire a woman who won't acknowledge another person because that man is, to quote the book, "a dirty Jew." That isn't the only racial epithet used in the book, where some of the mill workers are called Dagos and Hunkies. I wasn't familiar with the term Hunky but, from reading the novel, I think a Hunky was a word for a person from Russia. Maybe we are supposed to admire the mother because she put up with an abusive husband? That doesn't make her admirable, that just makes her stupid.
I know the reader is not supposed to admire Lily's younger sister, Irene. She is portrayed as an unbalanced religious fanatic. What's completely unbelievable is that Irene became unbalanced when she discovered Lily had taken a lover. I know this book was written in the 1920s but how could finding out your sister is a slut knock anyone off balance?
There wasn't a single character that I liked or cared about in the entire novel.
When I first wrote this review, I didn't understand why the novel was titled The Green Bay Tree. I just found out recently that it is from the Bible: Psalm 37:35 "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree." So apparently, the sexually liberated Lily is the wicked and flourishing green bay tree. This is nice to know because it was a puzzle.