Review of Euphoria by Lily King

[shadowkat]

Euphoria by Lily King


Difficult to rate this one, it is admittedly better than your average bear, whoops I mean book. So, 3.5 stars?

First a caveat, I'm a frustrated cultural anthropology major, who actually studied Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and Reo Fortune once upon a time, way back in the 1980s. And aspired to be Mead, until I realized that I had no facility for languages, sort of required, and felt that there was something slightly skeevy about studying someone else's culture like a scientist would a form of bacteria, beneath a microscope. I remember when this dawned on me - it was a discussion with a woman in Wales. I was traveling around Wales, studying the culture, folk traditions, and mythology on a college grant. And one woman that I met asked ' wouldn't my time be better spent solving the problems in my own backyard than being nosey in hers'. I thought she had a point, and off I went to law school, my burgeoing cultural anthropology career left in the dust.

So, I related to the subject matter and found the bits about the anthropological process rather fascinating. It was, from my perspective, the road not taken. Also, King does an excellent job of validating my reasons for not journeying down that road. Although, I think Maria Doria Russell in her science fiction novel The Sparrow, did a slightly better job of it. As too, did Sherri Tepper in Grass, in which both showed the dangers of not respecting a culture foreign to your own, and the assumptions we often make in our clumsy and somewhat presumptive attempts to study it. King's writing in of itself is good, but alas, it is also quite passive. And I felt as if most of the action happened off the page, whereupon the narrators took turns telling us about it like someone might in a journal or blog entry or around a campfire long after the fact. Not that there is anything wrong with that -- but it does leave a few gaps here and there, and sense of dissatisfaction in the reader. Most readers want to feel immersed in the action, not removed from it, and the danger, I think, in telling what happened after the fact as opposed to showing it while it occurs...is that you remove your reader from it. Also, there's the unreliable narrator, do we believe what we are being told? Hard to say.

King loosely based her story on a rather intriguing romantic interlude in anthropological lore - the physical meetup of renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson in Papua, New Guinea in the early 1930s, at the beginning of their careers. Mead had just recently married her second husband, Reo Fortune, a swarthy New Zealand anthropologist. Reo was not quite as successful as Mead, but a brilliant linguist. He also was prone to violent rages and beat her on occasion. Bateson, a tall English anthropologist, who hailed from a family of scientists, was the exact opposite of Reo.
Bateson and Mead apparently fell in love. Mead much later separated from Fortune and eventually married the love of her life, Bateson, who later divorced her and remarried. They had a daughter, who also became an anthropologist. Euphoria is loosely based on this meeting, which is referred to in Mead's writings and others. But it is by no means their story, if anything, it veers wildly from it, and Nell Stone, Fen, and Bankson are not the real life counterparts. If only they had been, for as often is the case with historical fiction based on actual people (or what I like to call real person fanfic), the truth is often far more interesting and complex than our fictional representation of it.

While I enjoyed the novel a great deal, and found it to be compelling, I felt that the writer never quite delivered what she promised, and when it was delivered...it fell flat. The ending did not work for me. In some respects, I found the real ending - what really happened more interesting, albeit less dramatic. King went for the melodrama, and the tragedy, which I felt was self-indulgent and the wrong choice. It just felt wrong. And that she was hammering home a point that she'd made several times previously. In short overkill, leaving a bitter aftertaste and souring me on the novel.

It's odd, I read this book after reading quite a few romance novels, and it in some respects falls into the same niggling formulaic traps that romance novels do. The focus is on the love triangle, but nothing really happens there until you're almost done with the book.
They skirt around it. So the climatic point is almost at the very end leaving little time for resolution. Also, as previously noted, there's this sense that everything interesting is happening off the page. Except of course for the romance. Even the sex happens off the page.
In addition, there is a great deal of navel-gazing in this novel and by a character that I have difficulty seeing doing that much navel gazing - Bankson, who is based on Gregory Bateson. Bateson doesn't strike me as the sort who would analyze his feelings about things to the degree Bankson does. Although I admittedly enjoyed it, I'm not sure it worked. Neither Mead nor Bateson strike me as the navel-gazing sort. But King is allowed to take liberties since these characters, Nell and Bankson, are loosely based on their real-life counterparts.

What I liked about the novel was the questioning of the anthropological process. In particular the question of whether we can ever truly understand another culture or another person for that matter. And how much of ourselves do we bring to the table and to what degree does that color our results or our perception? Same thing can be said of reading and reviewing books. If something in a book has turned us off or on...for whatever reason, that will color our perception of it. Would I have liked this book less if I wasn't interested in anthropology? I don't know.

I mean all you have to do is read the reviews...some people gave this book five stars, rating it amongst the best books they read this year, while others hated it. I'm curious as to why...what would make one person love a book and another hate the book, almost as if they read two different books? In Euphoria, Bankson, Stone, and Reo all react to the native culture they are studying differently.
Stone sees a caring, loving, and gender bending community in the Tam, while Reo sees your typical gender roles, nothing unusual, and thinks she's reaching, and Bankson...something in between. Each character's interpretation tells the reader more about the characters than the Tam. Actually you leave the book knowing very little about the native communities...they seem to exist to shed light on our three leads. This is a heavy theme in the book. Along with the rather ambiguous morality of invading another culture and studying it as if it is primitive to your own. Although, it's clear that's not how Bankson and Stone nor their real life counterparts viewed it.
King also weighs in on how women were treated in the field and seen in society. And made the interesting choice of telling the story through Bankson's pov and letting his voice carry the narrative, with Stone's journals coming in sporadically.

Overall, a worthy read, if at times, a frustrating one. And, I do wish she'd ended it differently. I liked what actually happened far better.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I suppose that if this book focuses on the triangle hetero romance, there is no hint of the Mead-character's bisexuality?

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Oh, there is. I didn't discuss it, because it felt more in the background somehow or was one of the events that happened off-the-page, and was discussed in detail after-the-fact. Nell Stone had been lovers with Helen Benjamin, who she leaves in Marseilles for Reo Fortune. Nell thinks about it, and writes about it in her journals, and it is a source of discord between Nell and Reo. Nell also has a rather erotic moment with a native woman involving hot stone massage. Apparently the women of the TAM meet once a month to give each other erotic hot stone massages, which is important to the extent that it furthers her romantic relationship with Bankson. But she tells us about it after it happens.

Which is also true of the romance novels that I've read which have also touched on the topic. Homosexual and bisexual romances happen in these books, but usually they are referenced after they've happened or are on the sidelines, not a focal point.

The writer didn't really make a big deal out of it either way.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

I had what amounted to a minor in anthropology. Though I was interested in linguistics, the only part of anthro that I might have thought about pursuing was archeology.

Margaret Mead was a topic of discussion both in my psych and anthro classes in the 60s. She was still an active professor at the time. While things she'd published were required reading, there were constant reminders in class that she'd made a serious mistake as a researcher by getting too close personally to the people she was studying, thereby making her interaction with them too much a part of a her mind set about them. The question was always raised if a cultural anthropolgist could ever avoid causing the people they were studying to act 'differently.' than usual. Was it useful and even more important to quietly observe child rearing than to get in and ask questions of women who were friends like Mead did? Most of the debate ran against Mead, because researchers who went to the same places behind her found the people being studied had very specific expectations of how the new researchers should fit in and what they could and could not observe freely. We were always being reminded that cultural anthropologists had to be very careful about 'willing subjects' who would gladly tell a researcher whatever B.S. they thought the researcher wanted to hear either to keep the outsider out of the tribe's business, or purely as a joke.

Margaret Mead's sex life was a frequent topic of gossip outside of class. But despite what feminists of the 60s might have said, I don't feel that she was ever thought of less as an anthropologist because she was a woman or because of the rumors, just one that had made mistakes while otherwise gathering very valuable information.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

King's novel focuses a great deal on the critique of Mead (Nell Stone)'s researching tactics. Bankson at various point questions her closeness to the subjects. And wonders at various point the degree to which both Reo and Nell's analysis is affected by their close relationship to their subjects. Also there are points in the novel, where it is obvious that the "subjects" are hiding things, or keeping the outsider out of their business, or making things up. At one point, Bankson wonders if there's a point to any of it, and he even contemplates suicide out of pure frustration - because he can't get anywhere in his own studies -- he is more scientific in his approach.

It's a major theme and focus in the book - whether the anthropologist should get that close to their subjects. Nell Stone (Mead) does it, according to King, in order to find a people that she fits with. A community that represents her values or her views...that she's interested in them for both selfish reasons and scientific ones.

Not sure how true that is in reality. The book veers greatly from reality....and I don't want to spoil you on it, in case you want to read it.