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

expanding the spectrum of possibility

I was happy to learn that President Obama picked up a copy of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr during his pre-Christmas shopping trip at Politics and Prose bookstore. I was also glad to hear that Doerr’s novel was a National Book Award finalist and among The New York Times top 10 list of books for 2014.

Doerr deserves every one of these accolades—and they are no surprise to me. All the Light We Cannot See is my favorite book of the year.

I meant to write about it when I first read it back in May. But honestly, I felt stymied. It is so dazzling, so beautiful, so heart-rending, I felt inadequate to write about it. Still do. But I will try, because this big book (510 pages), 10 years in the making, merits all the attention it can get.

What’s it about? In a tantalizing note on his website, Doerr says it’s about

Radio, propaganda, a cursed diamond, children in Nazi Germany, puzzles, snails, the Natural History Museum in Paris, courage, fear, bombs, the magical seaside town of St. Malo in France, and the ways in which people, against all odds, try to be kind to one another.

On a more mundane level, the basic story describes the experiences of two children who grow into adolescence during World War II.  Marie Laure is a blind girl who loses her beloved father, but gains the courage to participate in the French resistance in the small town of St. Malo. Werner is a German orphan whose brilliance in building and repairing radios saves him from a brutal life in the coal mines. Instead, he rockets through a special Nazi-supported school technical school and soon is deployed as a specialist in triangulating radio transmissions.

The novel is told mostly from the point of view of these two characters, and short chapters move back and forth between France and Germany. The narrative pulls the reader along as wartime developments inevitably bring Marie Laure and Werner closer together.

As readers, we care so much about both the main characters, who are fully realized and appealing. Besides creating memorable characters, Doerr gives us passages of breathtaking beauty and imbues descriptions of everything from radio mechanics to mollusks to miniature landscapes with clarity and power.

All the Light We Cannot See is dense and rich and accessible—altogether, a wonderful book. In fact, I’m planning to re-read it in 2015. I hope you will like it, too.

 P.S. The title has baffled many readers. Doerr explains: “It’s a reference to all the light we cannot see, that is, the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that are beyond the ability of human eyes to detect …it is also a metaphorical suggestion that there are countless invisible stories still buried within World War II…that stories of ordinary children, for example, are a kind of light we do not typically see. Ultimately, the title [suggests] that we spend too much time focused on a small slice of the spectrum of possibility.

One act changes everything

           I anticipated beginning Ian McEwan’s new novel, The Children Act, with some anxiety. I am a huge fan of much of McEwan’s work, especially Atonement and Saturday, both of which I’ve read twice, and some of his shorter novels, like Enduring Love.

            But some of his more recent novels have disappointed me: Sweet Tooth and On Chesil Beach didn’t seem worthy of his talent.

            So, the new book?

            Whew! Loud sigh of relief. Here is the McEwan I have admired, back in form, tackling an important social issue, rendering it compulsively readable through his inimitable style.

            The Children Act echoes a theme of Atonement and Saturday: one unintended act leads to a cascade of consequences, altering the lives of the players in a profound way. Like the protagonists in those earlier novels, Fiona Maye is a basically moral person; she is intelligent, well meaning, blessed with professional and creative gifts. As a British High Court judge overseeing complex family law cases, she dispenses judgment with care and compassion. Her peers admire her crisply written opinions, and she handles controversial cases with aplomb, not wavering in the face of pressure from the media or public. Her life seems perfectly orderly and serene.

            Except, except….An unexpected domestic crisis rattles her confidence and threatens to unravel her comfortable existence. At the same time, she is facing one of her most gut-wrenching cases ever: a dispute over the right of a young man to refuse a life-saving blood transfusion because of his deeply held faith as a Jehovah’s witness.  At 17, Adam Henry is not an adult, hence cannot legally choose to reject treatment. His case comes before the court, and Fiona must render a decision, keeping in mind the Children Act of 1989, which emphasizes the primacy of a child’s welfare. But what is in this child’s best interest? A chance of survival? Or honoring his religious beliefs?

Fiona visits Adam in hospital to try to gauge his true interests. What ensues affects both child and judge in unexpected ways. How their story plays out is a marvel of narrative suspense in a compact (221 pages) novel. The story is both expansive and compressed, as Fiona’s understanding of “the best interests of the child” changes over time.

McEwan has given us a gem of a tale, set in and among the venerable London Royal Courts of Law, and has given us an unforgettable character in Fiona—a judge and a woman who is, after all, only human.

Mutual admiration

Louise Penny stood on the stage, looking out at her audience of 500 + fans.

“Hold up your copies of the book,” she invited.

They did—and she snapped their pictures with her iPhone.

What must it have looked like to her? A sea of faces and people waving blue-jacketed copies of her latest crime novel, The Long Way Home, released just two days ago.

The Canadian author completely won over the audience crowded into The Barn, an event space at Fearrington Village near Chapel Hill, NC. McIntyre’s Books, Fearrington’s independent bookstore, sponsored the author talk and book-signing event, the first stop on Penny’s national book tour.  The fans were ready: people started lining up at 4:30 for the talk, which started at 6:30. Readers came from as far away as West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama. They clutched their copies of the new book, the purchase of which had entitled them to two tickets for the occasion. By 6:00 not a seat was available, and the conversational buzz was deafening.

Right on time, Louise Penny strode—she is tall and she definitely strides—onto the stage at the front of the vast room, preceded by her publisher, Andrew Martin of Minotaur Books. After the applause died down, they settled into plump upholstered chairs and started a spirited conversation. Sometimes, it was a comfortable question-and-answer format, sometimes witty repartee between the two, who are good friends, as well as having an author-and-publisher relationship.

Penny was funny, self-deprecating, smart, honest. She gave every question a thoughtful response. She speaks in articulate paragraphs, and she laughs often. She talked about her famous characters, Armand Gamache, in particular, and the way she shapes the shards of an idea into a fully realized story. She talked about her fears as a child, her insecurities as a writer.

The audience questions demonstrated that Penny has a committed band of followers who read every book and know the community of Three Pines well. They appreciate that Penny’s work “transcends the genre” (a cliché that many mystery writers and readers loathe). They know that she is a fine writer—period. Early reviews of the new novel agree. This morning’s review from The New York Times noted that her books “mix some classic elements of the police procedural with a deep-delving psychology, as well as a sorrowful sense of the precarious nature of human goodness, and the persistence of the opposite, even in rural Edens like Three Pines.”

Although Penny has real star power, she never plays the diva.  During her talk, she mused about the power of having a broad community of readers whose interest and support nourish her. After the standing ovation at the conclusion of her talk, Penny turned the tables—applauding the audience and snapping their picture.

(See also my May 1 post on appreciating Penny...)

Catching up...

Sorry I’ve been absent. The past month has been a jumble of personal and professional challenges, so the blog took an unplanned vacation of sorts.

But I’ve been reading—lots. Here’s a snapshot of what’s caught my attention:

·      Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. (Oddly, another novel with the same title appeared at about the same time last year.) This was a re-read for me, as it was my book group’s selection for July. I’d immersed myself in both the book and unabridged audio CD last year. I’m a huge fan of Atkinson’s work and loved this novel, which seemed more expansive and complex than her Jackson Brodie “mysteries.” (Quote marks because the Brodie books are more existential mysteries than the traditional genre fare.)

Life After Life, with its time shifts and multiple what-if scenarios, requires—and rewards—close reading. Not all books stand up to a second reading, but Life After Life did—in spades. More than ever, I admire Atkinson’s wit and vivid evocation of domestic dynamics. She is a marvel.

·      All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr deserves longer discussion, which I’ll tackle soon. For now, just to note that this is among my favorite books of 2014.

·      Love, Nina: A nanny writes home by Nina Stribbe was a library book, not a purchase—a good deal, as it was a fun, gossipy read, but ultimately forgettable.

And here are the top books in my to-be-read stack:

·      The Stories of Jane Gardam. I love Gardam’s novels (Old Filth, etc) and look forward to dipping into this collection of short stories.

·      Middlemarch by George Eliot. Delicious to anticipate re-reading (again, for my book group) this—perhaps my favorite novel of all time. I’m also planning to read, as a companion piece, My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead.

The New Yorker--towering issues

OK. Confess it: if you’re a New Yorker subscriber, how many unread copies of the magazine do you have piled up around the house?

I love that magazine and can’t imagine not reading it on a regular basis. Yet, yet…sometimes the back issues overwhelm and threaten to topple over the big basket I keep by my favorite reading chair. (On the other hand, the weight of all those issues does make the basket a handy doorstop to prop open the door to the deck.)

Periodically, I root through the basket to find copies to toss in the recycling bin. But of course, I have to dog-ear any articles or stories I’m interested in and might some day want to read. I’d estimate that the ratio of copies set aside to recycle and those set aside to read is about 1:3. And sometimes, I do pluck out an old copy of the magazine and read a short story or a movie review. But too often, the back copies languish, unread and instilling guilt The oldest copies on hand, with stories marked to read, I’m embarrassed to say, date from March 2005 (fiction by William Trevor) and October 2005 (fiction by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala).

There was one period in my life when I did read The New Yorker from cover to cover—I mean everything, from articles about horse racing to economic analyses. The setting for such diligent periodical reading was bizarre, but makes sense, really. We were living in a small rural village in the middle of Tanzania. We had none of the distractions that I take for granted today (television, Internet) and no electricity. At night, we played endless games of Scrabble and gin rummy by the light of our Tilley lamp. We’d glean the news from paper-thin, weeks-old copies of Time or The Economist, and managed to catch only an occasional newscast via our Peace Corps friends’ short-wave radio.

So, we subscribed to The New Yorker. As I said, bizarre. And yet, wonderfully rich and satisfying. No skimming, as I tend to do today, and marking articles to read later on. With so much time to read, I did read—almost everything and within days of receiving our copies. The experience was a luxury, a weird anomalous counterpoint to a pared down life.

I don’t remember when I started reading The New Yorker—probably in college. One of my college roommates, the uber-sophisticated Rebecca, had a theory about attracting guys during travel. She advised getting on a plane with a copy of The New Yorker prominently displayed. Her reasoning: urbane, promising men would recognize your sophistication and strike up a conversation. (That never exactly worked for me, but I avoided traveling with my copy of Glamour, just in case.)

Today, the next generation is falling under the spell of the magazine. My 10-year-old granddaughter Harper loves the cartoons and covers. The other day she commented about a particular social situation: “That would make a great New Yorker cover.” I imagine she’ll be reading movie reviews and Talk of the Town before long.

So, even as I sometimes grumble about how the magazines stack up and determine to cancel my subscription, I know I’ll remain a reader and fan. How could I not?