The Tree of Life by Hugh Nissenson
Published 1918 · 190 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Tree of Life to read?
The Tree of Life scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Nissenson writes in the plain diction of an actual frontier diary — farm tools, crop names, and scripture-inflected phrases left over from Keene's abandoned ministry — rather than showy vocabulary. It sits below a stylist like Fitzgerald in ornamentation but above a plain contemporary novel, since period terminology and Biblical cadence still require some unpacking.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sentences run short and declarative, mimicking real nineteenth-century diary entries, but the compression is severe: clauses are dropped rather than elaborated, so readers do more inferential work per sentence than the plain syntax suggests, closer to a terse ledger than to conversational prose.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Entries alternate between concrete farm accounting — bushels, debts, weather — and sudden lurches into Keene's abstract wrestling with providence and the existence of God. The difficulty comes from the whiplash between registers rather than from sustained philosophical argument.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- A single dated entry can carry a grain price, a scrap of frontier news about Tecumseh's confederacy, and a line of private confession, compressed with no transition between them — dense the way an actual diary is dense, not the way an expository novel is.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Keene reports what happened and rarely what he felt about it; readers must infer his interior state from what he records and what he skips between dated entries, much as a biased narrator's silences shape a novel without ever stating a judgment outright.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The title's echo of Eden's tree of life plays against Keene's daily labor of felling trees to clear his farm, and the Great Comet of 1811 and the New Madrid earthquake recur as omens he can't stop reading for meaning even after renouncing belief in a God who would send them.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Keene records violence and desire in the same flat, ledger-like voice he uses for crop yields, producing a documentary irony closer to tonal discipline than to deliberate satire — the gap opens in what the flatness withholds, not in authorial mockery.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The year's journal ends without granting Keene, or the reader, any resolution to the crisis of faith that opens the book — an unresolved haunting rather than a novel that answers its own theological question.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- The dated-journal form is chronological rather than fragmented, but it braids ledger entries, scripture, and reflection into a single structure, and Nissenson's own woodcut illustrations add a second, wordless layer of narration running alongside the prose.
How The Tree of Life is regarded
The Tree of Life holds a literary regard score of 41 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.