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Tag Archives: Lily King

This Blog Is One Year Old Today

27 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Andrew W. Taylor, Ann Weisgarber, Colm Toíbín, Geraldine Brooks, Helen Dunmore, historical fiction, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Jerome Charyn, John Spurling, Laila Lalami, Lily King, Mary Morris, Robert Harris

A year ago today, I published my first review as Novelhistorian. My thanks go to all my readers, regular or casual, with a special nod to those who’ve graced their visits with commentary. Without all of you, this blog wouldn’t exist. Thank you again.

When I was growing up in the New York area, a local TV channel broadcast Million Dollar Movie, a program that showed a single film continuously for hours at a stretch. The theme song, as I only found out years later, was from Gone With the Wind; I still think of it as belonging to the TV program. The movies were generally the swash-and-buckle type, like Scaramouche or The Crimson Pirate (Burt Lancaster in a title role he probably preferred to forget). It’s thanks to Million Dollar Movie that I can quote stretches of Duck Soup, without which my education would have been incomplete, or vividly recall James Cagney playing George M. Cohan and Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.

Each showing of a movie closed with the voiceover, “If you missed any part of ________ or would like to see it again, stay tuned after these messages.”

So that’s what I’m offering you today. After reading about a hundred books the past year, the following dozen are the ones that have stayed with me most clearly and probably will for awhile. And if you missed my reviews (or care to read them again), here they are, in recap, with links, following the order in which I published them.

The Lie, by Helen Dunmore, recounts the painful, tragic struggle of an English veteran of the First World War who returns to his village and tries to make a life. The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew W. Taylor, involves an eighteenth-century amateur sleuth who must combat superstition, class prejudice, and political influence to solve a murder–and grows as a person in the process.

The Dream Maker, by Jean-Christophe Rufin, is a gripping tale about Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century French merchant who not only helped Charles VII transform his country but conceived of power as stemming from knowledge, a revolutionary idea. I Am Abraham is Jerome Charyn’s stirring portrayal of Lincoln as a man conscious of his physical ugliness and tortured by loneliness and desire as he tries to find his way.

An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris’s novel about the Dreyfus Affair, is more than an intensely compelling story about the most infamous political scandal in nineteenth-century French history (and there were many). It’s also the gold standard for thrillers. The Ten Thousand Things, John Spurling’s novel about Yuan Dynasty China, explores art, sex, love, justice, and politics–you know, the important stuff. For the record, it won this year’s Walter Scott Prize. Colm Toíbín’s subtle, probing Nora Webster, set in 1960s Ireland, takes a commonplace subject, widowhood, and makes it into literary art of the first order.

Jazz Palace, Mary Morris’s lovely rendition of Chicago jazz during the Twenties, captures the era and two of its walking wounded in a hard-edged, deeply felt romance. In The Promise, Ann Weisgarber spins a keenly observed, taut love story of 1900 Galveston, about two people who can see past surfaces and the jealousies that surround them.

The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami, follows the disastrous sixteenth-century Narváez expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, as viewed by its most adept (but socially and culturally invisible) member. Lily King’s Euphoria follows a love triangle among anthropologists in New Guinea in 1931, based on Margaret Mead’s life, in a retelling of exceptional breadth, psychological insight, and power.

Finally, The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks’s recent novel, recounts the rise of King David, as told by his prophet and trusted adviser, Natan. Like The Dream Maker, I Am Abraham, and An Officer and a Spy, Brooks manages to infuse edge-of-the-seat tension into a narrative whose events are no surprise.

Here’s to another year of good reading.

A Famous Life in the South Pacific: Euphoria

28 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1930s, anthropology, childrearing, feminism, historical fiction, Kirkus Prize, Lily King, love triangle, Margaret Mead, New Guinea, scientific observation, sexual mores, twentieth century

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.

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