Review: 'Euphoria'

Euphoria
By Lily King
Literary fiction
June 2014
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 978-0802122551

It doesn't take big events or historical movements for individuals to feel they don't understand the rest of the human race. People are rather curious creatures, after all, prone to actions that seem counter-intuitive, endeavors that seem hopeless or cruel, emotions that appear more at home in left field than in the heart.

These things happen every day, from the normally cheerful person who one day scowls at everyone to the oddball actions drivers take on the road.

And they happen to all sorts of people. That's one of the graces of Lily King's Euphoria. It's a novel inspired by Margaret Mead, her second husband Reo Fortune and her future husband Gregory Bateson, all anthropologists who were involved in a love triangle and professional collaboration while researching in Papua New Guinea. These highly intelligent people who are trained to observe others do some of the damnedest things.

The characters in King's novel, which was short-listed for the National Book Award, resemble what is easily found via Google search about the real people. Reo Fortune, Mead's husband when the three met, appears jealous of his wife. He tried to discredit his wife's work after their divorce. Nell, like Mead, makes a name for herself writing her observations of the gender and sexual roles of women and children.

It's easy to see that the characters Bankson and Nell are going to fall for each other. And it's easy to see that Fen feels jealous and yet wants to keep an unsteady equilibrium going. The physical and emotional aspects of the novel are probably paramount to most readers. And boy, does King ever deliver. Despite the somewhat clumsy set-up to the romantic climax, the emotions are genuine and bittersweet is the prominent tone. That there is delicate storytelling following a narrative fascinated with graphic swapping of traditional Western culture sexual and gender roles is something unexpected and all the more powerful for it.

Nell describes the moment when an anthropologist gets the feeling that she is at the right place doing the right thing. What she says applies to a relationship between two people as well:

It's that moment two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion -- you've only been there eight weeks -- and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

King's Nell and Fen, married anthropologists who run into Bankson, another professional in their fairly new field, don't have the same outcome as the real people.

It's their feelings, professional ideas and aspirations, and, by implication as the work of all literary writers is, the wider ramifications of what these things tell us about human beings, that are more important to King's work than rehashing of old scandalous acts.

In the respect of looking at individuals to reach a conclusion about a group, the work of a novelist and an anthropologist are similar. King noted this in an interview with Vogue. It's something I noted when first reading Barbara Pym; many of the characters in her novels are involved with anthropology or fascinated by anthropologists. They study each other and it's quite obvious many times that they belong to different tribes, just as Nell, Fen and Bankson belong to different tribes. Their professional work is an attempt to differentiate people and subsets of people into larger groupings.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," wrote Joan Didion. We also tell ourselves stories to make sense of the world and, often, to try to bring order to it. Putting people into categories or tribes is one way to do that.

That word "tribes" in and of itself can provoke a squeamish reaction. Just who are any of us to be studying others as if they were inferior? In King's novel, Fen obviously regards the peoples he studies as inferior. Nell is the character who acts most like someone who believes in equality, and yet as a woman in 1930s Western culture she is not treated with equality. Early on, she says that "For me, other people are the point." She lives as she thinks.

As Nell writes in her journal:

Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our 'progress,' so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? ...

 

I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Someone'

Someone
By Alice McDermott
Literary fiction
November 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 978-0374281090

Life has the capacity, even if we don't seek thrills and constant activity, to be hectic and stressful. Personal, professional and societal/cultural concerns can all add up to a cacophony of discord that can crowd out the accomplishments, the positive interactions, the planning for something better.

Which is partly why fiction is so important today. It can put the reader in another world, in another viewpoint, in another situation. Often, just that ability to step out of the ongoing noise and think about something else can be restful. Sometimes it can even be invigorating.

Reading Alice McDermott is downright peaceful. Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner, is the work of a powerful observer of the small moments in life that matter. Her latest novel, Someone, is not a wild rollercoaster ride of a read. Thankfully.

Marie goes back and forth in time to recount vignettes of her family from her childhood to old age. As a child in between the two world wars in an Irish-American neighborhood of Brooklyn, Marie has bad eyesight, a beloved father who drinks, a mother who appears stern but is filled with love and a brother destined for the priesthood. She has a lifelong friend, Gerty, whose mother is expecting yet another child in middle age, and talks to a neighborhood teenager who laughs at her own clumsiness.

The teenager, Pegeen, was born of parents with a lovely story -- a woman from Ireland and a man from Syria managed to find themselves in an American bakery and married. She's not a beautiful girl, she has a bit of the hunchback to her and always seems to be coming undone. She's always leaving things behind and calls herself "amadan" -- a fool.

In the midst of her scraps, Pegeen, says, she's not alone:

"But there's always someone nice," she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. "Someone always helps me up."

After a first-love heartbreak, Marie and her older brother, Gabe, now a failed priest, walk for miles in the summer heat:

"Who will love me?" I said. The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers. "Someone," he told me. "Someone will."

And that's all this book is about -- someone. Marie lives a quiet life that makes no waves. She is there for others in small, quiet ways just as others are there for her. Other characters take on importance because they are noted, because they are always where they belong, such as blind Bill Corrigan. A young WWI veteran, his mother irons his white shirts and escorts him down to the street every day. They walk arm in arm as a couple would. Bill sits in a chair on the street and settles streetball arguments as a referee whose authority is not questioned.

Bill does not perform other actions that make him the nexus of anything, yet he is one of the vital threads that hold the community and the story together.

This is the quiet brilliance of McDermott's work. The characters weave in and out of the narrative as their lives go on. What was noted as it happened earlier is recalled in passing later, and the world remains connected. McDermott also is masterful at making the small moments count, because they are such a large part of life, as when young Marie is slipped an extra sugar cube by her father and she puts it in her evening tea:

I listened (to her brother reciting poetry), my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, the desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger.

Whenever "the sand of Syria" is mentioned again in the novel, I go back to that dining room table and the girl Marie was, because it says so much about the woman she became.

And while he is not the focus, or the sole focus, of the novel, her brother Gabe is, like Marie, a character who in other hands would have a far more dramatic arc with huge episodes and long-winded speeches. McDermott's restraint in showing how life turned out for Gabe makes his journey all the more realistic and worthy of consideration.

All the characters in McDermott's fiction have such lives. And so do people we know -- the ones who won't be memorialized in New York Times obits, who won't be the subject of biographies, unless we make them ourselves. Which is what one family does for a son killed in World War II:

They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond andd what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.

Not remarkable at all, Florence, not remarkable at all. There should always be someone who knows.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission