Euphoria

What a wonderful book Lily King has given us. You could almost say that I am euphoric over it.

My dictionary defines euphoria as “a feeling of great happiness and wellbeing.” Nell Stone, the novel’s protagonist, an anthropologist working in New Guinea in the 1930s, describes it as a turning point, a transcendent moment in her field research:

It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly, it falls 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 feel entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.

I think this passage perfectly captures the sense of professional joy that Nell—a stand-in for anthropologist Margaret Mead—feels. As imagined by author Lily King, Nell/Margaret is a gifted anthropologist, gracious and easy with the native people she lives among, a skilled listener, a demon worker, and brilliant at making connections, seeing patterns of culture. King brings alive the quotidian details of field work, the hardships, and the frustrations—as well as the thrilling breakthroughs. Almost immediately, the reader is immersed in the world of the Sepik River tribes and the anthropologists who try to understand their lives.

At one level, Euphoria is a great love story, a triangle with tensions intensified by the claustrophobic environment in which three anthropologists work. The tale is based on a period in Mead’s life when she was doing fieldwork with her second husband, Reo Fortune (Schuyler Fenwick, or Fen, in the novel). The couple developed a professional and personal relationship with English anthropologist Gregory Bateson (Bankson in the book).

Fen is brash, confident, desperate to make a scientific breakthrough and thus a name for himself. Jealous of his  wife’s success in the field, he treats her badly and, eventually, pushes way beyond professional boundaries in his quest to win fame.

Nell, gifted and hardworking, yearns for a kindred spirit and someone who cares for her. Bankson meets both those needs, and, inevitably, they are drawn together.

The story’s ending is not unexpected, yet the real-life ending is more felicitous. (Not to throw in a spoiler, but it is well known that Mead did divorce Fortune and marry Bateson.)

Euphoria is meticulously researched, and King is clear about what specifics are fictional. But she surely has captured the essence of this period in Mead’s life. Mead’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, herself an anthropologist, says that her parents “[fell] in love in an intense fever of conversation and theory building near the shores of the Sepik River in New Guinea.” In her book, With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, she says that the three anthropologists “talked for hundreds of hours” in the claustrophobic space of an eight-square foot “mosquito room,”  adding, “It is hard to visualize the kind of feverish atmosphere that must have characterized that interval.”

But King does visualize the claustrophobia, the intensity, the tensions. With language spare and affecting, she brings us readers into a world where brilliant social scientists strive to make sense of the societies they were observing—and to make sense of their own tangled relationships.

Euphoria works on so many levels. Reading it really does evoke “a feeling of happiness and wellbeing.”

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Apologies for letting this blog lapse for so long. A pile-up of life events kept me preoccupied this winter and spring. But I’m re-energized, and new posts are in the pipeline

—Katie Baer