If you want to highlight the selectedNode in the tree use: .dijitTreeRowSelected.
You can set the selectedNode to null when there is a click in the root area of the tree like this:
if(className.indexOf('dijitTreeContainer') !== -1) {
this._objTree.set('selectedItem', null);
}
Also you might want to expand the selected node if you are creating a new node as a child of it:
if(this._objTree.selectedItem) {
this._objTree._expandNode( this._objTree.getNodeFromItem(this._objTree.selectedItem)[0] );
}