Monthly Archives: September 2015

A Famous Life in the South Pacific: Euphoria

28 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Review: Euphoria, by Lily King
Grove/Atlantic, 2014. 257 pp. $25

Suppose that three anthropologists, a husband-and-wife team and another man, cross paths in New Guinea in 1931. The husband, a magnetic, vicious boor, is jealous of his wife’s fame and has myriad ways of expressing it. His animosity grows sharper as he senses the other man attracting her with two qualities he sorely lacks, simple kindness and the ability to play with ideas. But they’re scientists, so their love triangle seethes with conflicting views about human nature, reflecting what they observe about the indigenous peoples they’re studying and how they themselves behave, so that scientific theory becomes practice. And throughout this chillingly tense, enthralling novel, it’s fair to ask what civilization means and whether Westerners have a monopoly on it the way we tell ourselves we do.

King has closely based Nell Stone, the woman of the triangle, on Margaret Mead, and the men, on two of her husbands. But don’t think for a second that their actual history predicts King’s narrative or the themes involved. Yes, she portrays Mead’s exploration of tribal sexual mores and the lives of children, findings controversial then and now, which have, incidentally, influenced American theories of child-rearing. (It was no coincidence that she chose Benjamin Spock to be her daughter’s pediatrician.) But scientific history aside, it’s the relationship between Nell and her husband, Schuyler Fenwick (known as Fen), and how Andrew Bankson comes between them, that give Euphoria its remarkable breadth.

Take, for instance, the differences between Nell and Fen:

Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. . . . It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public. He had a quick mind, a photographic memory, and a gift for both poetry and theory–he had wooed her with these qualities day and night for six weeks on the boat from Singapore to Marseille–but they didn’t seem to give him much pleasure. His interest lay in experiencing, in doing.

For her part, what drives Nell to suffer the hardships of field work is to gather stories about other people and return home to tell them. She hopes to find a loving audience, much as she had wished her parents would pay attention to her when she was little. More important, though, she believes “that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.”

The struggle between them, with Bankson as mediator, sounding board, and, eventually, equal participant and catalyst, plays out in so many facets of life that Euphoria held me spellbound, in awe of King’s breadth of vision. To name only a few themes, the narrative reveals the anthropologists’ conflict while hashing out the nature of science, culture, feminism, violence, sex, power, exploitation, greed, selfishness, and what it means to understand someone else.

And to give you just a hint about the depth of this story, euphoria refers to how gratifying that understanding feels. But, like all euphoria, it’s brief, whether as friend, lover, or scientist. As Nell tells her journal, she loves the start of any new field posting, when she must rely on visual, nonverbal cues to communicate, to which she must pay close attention, or she’ll miss the meaning. Once she gets past that point, though, it’s less exciting and possibly misleading, for in her focus on verbal conversation, what’s really happening may slide by, unnoticed. Words, she remarks, are so often unreliable.

The field work provides a vivid, ever-changing background, in which there’s no such thing as a casual interaction. That’s another of this novel’s pleasures, the window on how anthropologists go about gathering information (or did in the 1930s). As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve always liked good cross-cultural stories. Euphoria is that, and a lot more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Strength Comes in Different Forms: The Land Breakers

21 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Land Breakers, by John Ehle
NY Review of Books, 2014 [reprint of 1964 edition], 345 pp. $18

In 1779, two young Americans of Scotch-Irish ancestry, Imy and Mooney Wright, settle in the North Carolina mountain wilderness and try to make a life for themselves as farmers. This simple premise, which provides no built-in tension between characters and develops as episodes rather than a conventional plot, would seem thin fare, as I’ve just described it.

Blue Ridge Mountains, seen from Deep Gap, western North Carolina (Photo by Ken Thomas, public domain; courtesy singout.org).

Blue Ridge Mountains, seen from Deep Gap, western North Carolina (Photo by Ken Thomas, public domain; courtesy singout.org).

But The Land Breakers is a very satisfying novel indeed, of many pleasures. The first and most obvious is the prose. To say that Ehle has the time and setting in his soul may be no understatement, for he was born in western North Carolina in 1925, and his ancestors numbered among the first white settlers in the area. However, Ehle’s grasp goes even deeper than that, for The Land Breakers contains many beautiful passages of nature writing, like this one, about a mountain autumn:

About them now the woods were changed into a fairyland of color. The buckeye turned yellow and dropped its eye-shaped seeds. The box elder near the spring turned into a bank of yellow leaves and pods; the maple in the valley just to the edge of the clearing got red as fire and beside it a white oak turned into the color of old wine; the sourwood was a rich red, the red oak was orange, and the possums climbed higher every night into the persimmon trees.

But nature can threaten life as well as inspire awe. The Wrights, as with the few other settlers who plunk down on neighboring acreage, struggle with wolves, bears, panthers, poisonous snakes, and mysterious illnesses, one of which kills Imy. Her death at first plunges Mooney into a deep depression, during which he can barely carry on his work, once his great solace. How he manages, and whom he takes up with afterward, changes lives throughout the settlement. As Mooney comes to grips with his loss, he grows as a man.

Along the way, Ehle has much to say about men and women, where true self-image lies, and the pull of what may seem exciting but is actually disastrous. Most of all, I think, The Land Breakers is about strength and weakness. Mooney is tall, physically imposing, and has an insatiable appetite for work, all of which earns respect, if not admiration. But Mooney’s greatest gift, which doesn’t always come easily for him, is the knowledge that emotional flexibility can be a strength in itself. This contrasts with Tinkler Harrison, a wealthy landowner who sees in every difference of opinion a contest he must win, never gives anything for free, and then wonders why his children desert him. When Harrison suffers loss, you sense that he’ll only become more bitter and even less reachable; when Mooney suffers loss, there’s more chance that he’ll rebound.

I also enjoyed The Land Breakers as a study in frontier life. The mind-boggling amount of labor involved in building a weather-worthy house, plowing and sowing, keeping animals, cooking, sewing, raising children–you name it–it’s amazing that anyone managed. Some didn’t, of course, but enough did, and as Ehle tells it, their ingenuity takes the breath away. If you want to know how people of that time cleared and plowed land, put together furniture, made sweet syrup from sorghum, or myriad other acts of craftsmanship, this novel will tell you.

The Land Breakers is the first of Ehle’s seven Mountain Novels. I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Portrait of an Era: Villa America

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Villa America, by Liza Klaussmann
Little, Brown, 2015. 426 pp. $26

Sara and Gerald Murphy, according to one contemporary, “had invented summer on the Riviera,” a remark that would have made them cringe. But for the American expatriate literary set in the 1920s, the Murphys weren’t just the life of the party; they were the party. Their ongoing celebration at Villa America, their splendid house at Cap d’Antibes, was a coveted invitation and, later, itself a literary subject. F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to Sara and Gerald (and thought, mistakenly, he’d written their characters); Ernest Hemingway wrote them into The Garden of Eden, a novel published posthumously; and Archibald MacLeish modeled the main characters of J.B., his verse-drama retelling of the Book of Job, after the Murphys.

Cap d'Antibes, 2006 (Courtesy Gilbert Bochenek via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Cap d’Antibes, 2006 (Courtesy Gilbert Bochenek via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

That last reference tells you that Sara and Gerald suffered great tragedy, a metaphor for the golden years that came to a thudding end. But, as Villa America points out, their story mirrored the time in other ways. The beauty they revealed in the everyday, the ideas and discussions they encouraged, and their generosity toward their guests stimulated both passion and excess, the triumph and ugliness of the Twenties.

Klaussmann bends her considerable talent toward this ambitious subject. She re-creates the setting, the ambience, the devil-may-care, the rivalries, and the outsize personalities, drawing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway with particular zest and color. My favorite part of the book, though, was the story of Sara’s and Gerald’s furtive courtship, and how these two lonely people who knew they were different from their horrible families managed to find one another and overcome parental objections to marry. That section reads like the music of isolation, yearning for connection, and the joy and relief at finding it.

In fact, music plays a role. There’s a splendid scene where Sara and her family attend the London premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which had caused such a scandal in Paris. The ballet makes her realize what it is she’s been missing, what she wants:

She wanted to be down on the stage with the dancers, feel her rib cage meet the planks, feel the sickly ache of having her breath knocked out. She was reminded of the first time she’d tasted blood in her mouth (a skating accident), the surprise that it tasted good, rich, tangy on her tongue, the even more startling revelation that she wanted to taste it again.

Naturally, no one else in Sara’s family understands the ballet or what it was trying to say. But she senses that Gerald would have, and from that moment, she feels less alone.

For me, however, the rest of Villa America went downhill, and I found myself plodding through. From the moment the Murphys settle in on the Riviera, each chapter, which covers a particular year, feels like an episode. Many have tension, some are entertaining, but they seem to go around in circles. There are parties at which the Fitzgeralds behave like spoiled children, enraging everyone. Hemingway, a charismatic lout, repays the Murphys’ generous hospitality by treating Gerald with contempt and trying to seduce Sara. And the cycle repeats.

I like stargazing, to a point. But there has to be a unifying thread, or the narrative never gets beyond that, and the one Klaussmann chose doesn’t work for me. Gerald has doubts about his sexual orientation, and though how he deals with this stunts him, his struggle remains largely isolated. I wish I could say more without giving away too much, but I wanted a confrontation, a reckoning, and there wasn’t one, something of an anticlimax.

As a result, Villa America remains for me a series of social situations that contain both beauty and ugliness, sometimes side by side. That’s life, it’s accurate, but it’s not a novel. The joy in the beginning and the tragedy at the end (unfortunately revealed in a prologue; why?) seem like two towers with no connecting wall. There’s a lot of dancing and drinking and back-stabbing taking place between them, but for me, that wasn’t enough.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Different Southern Belle: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, by Anton DiSclafani
Riverhead, 2013. 390 pp. $30

Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has it made. Her family, which consists of her parents, her twin brother, Sam, and herself, live in a manorial home on a thousand acres in Florida. She has her own pony and is an expert rider, a cool daredevil on horseback. It’s the early 1930s, but the Depression hasn’t touched her; a citrus farm supplements her father’s income as the local physician, the only doctor for miles around.

However, as the story opens, Thea has been banished, with no explanation or negotiation, to a girls’ riding camp in western North Carolina. Something has happened for which she takes the blame, though part of her objects, even as she struggles with her shame. Nevertheless, she believes her punishment to be temporary, for the summer only, yet you sense that she’s kidding herself. There’s a reason two hundred girls have gathered here, and it’s not just to improve their equestrienne skills or learn to become ladies in the Southern style, perfect in posture, manners, and elocution.

That reason, however, is a secret, which DiSclafani skillfully keeps, drawing out the tension. The careful reader may guess, as with much else that happens, but if so, that doesn’t matter. Thea’s story, a coming-of-age with a sharp edge, is well worth following, and she learns some very hard lessons at a young age. The rawness may put some readers off, but the author has much to say worth hearing about sex, gender, families, and the stifling nature of white Southern gentility, though many attitudes she explores are of course not peculiar to the South.

Perhaps to heighten Thea’s sense of dislocation, as if her shameful exile to a different state weren’t enough, DiSclafani has made her a hothouse flower. She has never attended school beyond her father’s lessons and never socialized with anyone her own age except Sam and their cousin, Georgie. Consequently, Thea has no clue how to act when suddenly thrust among hundreds of strangers, and every glance, every gesture, carries the potential for acceptance or ostracism.

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1932 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1936 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

I found this hard to swallow, both as a premise and in the writing. Some emotional transitions feel overwrought, especially when Thea flip-flops from, say, hope to misery within a single sentence, all of it told, none of it earned. That bothered me but was less pervasive than the trouble with her family life, which seems hermetically sealed beyond belief. Has she really never seen anyplace except the homestead? The Great Depression ravaged the South more than any other region of the United States, yet Thea has no sense of it. People still continue to get sick, so her father continues to collect his fees–or so the narrative says, as if they always had the money to pay. There are no shacks, no Hoovervilles, no pellagra, no summonses at midnight for dirt-poor patients who put off getting medical attention until they’re dying. There are no black people, either, or stories of violence, interracial or otherwise. The culture of the riding camp feels lived in and may reflect the time, but the story doesn’t quite feel Depression-era.

What’s true in Yonahlossee, however, is Thea’s hunger for love and acceptance, and how she goes about finding them, sometimes in forbidden ways. She also begins to question her family’s motives and behavior, realizing their dishonesty and selfishness, and, to some extent, how unfair they were to punish her. As the most sympathetic adult character in the book–significantly, from New England, not the South–tells her in confidence:

Parents never trust their children. I don’t know what happened exactly, and you don’t need to tell me. I believed for a long time that I had shamed my family. But it’s in a family’s best interest to make a child believe that.

This passage spoke loudly to me. What Thea does with this notion makes her story important enough to overlook narrative flaws or implausibilities.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.