Going Rogue

Palin, Sarah.  Going Rogue: An American Life.  New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

I told reporters what I still believe today: government experience doesn’t necessarily count for much.

- Sarah Palin in Going Rogue

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Alaska Governor Sarah Palin exploded onto the national political scene in August of 2008 when Senator John McCain selected her as his running mate on the Republican ticket.  She was pretty, folksy, and, importantly, a woman.   Yet she was also no stranger to controversy, as her pregnant teenage daughter and penchant for inventing words and speaking in nonsensical non-sentences kept the McCain campaign on the defensive.  Going Rogue is Palin’s attempt to set the record straight, to explain her career, the 2008 campaign, and her political vision for the future in her own words (or her ghost writer’s) rather than in soundbites edited to tarnish her image by what she deems the liberal mainstream media.

The writing is actually quite engaging.  A ghost writer’s more eloquent constructions dominate the text — “We must abandon the false dichotomy that says you can’t be pro-environment and pro-development” — but there are enough unmistakable Palinisms to evidence that this is her book — “we took our broke butts down to the Palmer Courthouse and lassoed a magistrate to pronounce us man and wife.”  And, yes, she even humors readers with a single use of “mavericky.” 

I found the earlier chapters — more biographical, less political — easier to stomach.  Born in Sandpoint, Idaho, Palin and her family relocated to Alaska when Palin was a child.  Once in the largest state in the union, in which travel by small plane is often more convenient than driving, in which hunting for survival remains an important part of life in remote villages, Palin excelled in high school basketball, found her faith, and met her husband, Todd.  After attending college in Hawaii and receiving a degree in journalism from the University of Idaho, Palin returned to Alaska to be a wife, mother, fisherman and part-time sports anchor.

Palin’s political ambitions started small.  She was elected to the Wasilla city council and was later elected mayor.  During her tenure in Wasilla government, Palin consistently advocated limited government intervention in the lives of private citizens.  She supported sales taxes rather than property taxes, thus taxing consumption rather than ownership, advocated voluntary annexation of neighborhoods into the city, and kept the city’s budget in check.  After unsuccessfully running for lieutenant governor, she was appointed commissioner of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, at which point she witnessed the abuses — bribery, unresolved conflicts of interest between government officials and oil companies — occurring within her own party.  As numerous Alaska Republicans came under federal indictment, Palin was elected governor in 2006.  She vowed to hold her administration to ethical standards previous administrations had ignored, thus raising the ire of her own party and later earning her the title of maverick.

Although Palin’s account of her time in Alaska politics is one-sided, I believe she was good for her state.  Federal indictments prove that corruption within her predecessor’s administration and within the state legislature was rampant, and people she knew in those days who now speak out against her include incompetent staffers she fired and a sleazy ex-brother-in-law.  She clearly understands her state’s history, geography, culture, natural resource potential and independent spirit — which is exactly why she should stay there.

The nationalized Palin, the vice presidential candidate we encountered during the campaign, was inarticulate, inexperienced, and irritating.  The McCain campaign deliberately kept her away from the press in order to avoid her rambling pseudo-statements from becoming headline news and fodder for SNL’s Tina Fey, who at times simply repeated Palin’s statements verbatim before a laughing audience rather than writing parody.  Yet at no time does Going Rogue admit mistakes.  Indeed, Palin inscribes the few moments that verge on admission — Palin acknowledges she campaigned less than passionately for the lieutenant governor position and thinks she may have hidden her last pregnancy from her constituents for too long — within Providence, stating that whatever she has done, whatever her failures, they are simply part of God’s larger plan for her.  Her faith may be genuine, but it is also convenient, for in subscribing her inaction and poor choices to the divine, she simultaneously sidesteps personal responsibility.

What Palin does not delegate to Providence she blames on McCain staffers, the vague, unidentified “headquarters” and “political machine.”  The one villain Palin does identify is McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt, whom Palin blames for neglecting to shift the campaign’s message from national security to the economy; disallowing her to give a concession speech on election night; telling her what to say, wear, and eat; not permitting her to jog; and swearing in front of her daughter.  The $100K+ spent on her high-end wardrobe was the campaign’s doing, not hers, naturally.  The campaign forbade Palin from discussing Obama’s connections with “domestic terrorist” William Ayers, the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and ACORN not because the public saw them for the crackpot conspiracy theories they were, but because the campaign was poorly managed.  Going Rogue becomes increasingly self-righteous at this point, as Palin proceeds to assert once again that Alaska’s proximity to Russia qualifies as foreign policy experience, equates being interviewed by newspapers with reading them, and compares the hacking of her email account to Watergate.

But no one can compare to Going Rogue’s arch-villain, that despised liberal pundit Katie Couric.  Palin repeatedly indicates that she was insulted to be interviewed by a news anchor with such low ratings.  She also accuses Couric of posing “repetitive, biased” questions and editing the interviews to highlight Palin’s weaknesses and worst moments.  Indeed, Palin spends much of the latter half of the book portraying herself as a victim of a liberal media behemoth, never acknowledging that the interviews conveyed weaknesses because she had them, or that her inability to construct an intelligible answer may have prompted the repetitive questions.  The election and post-election sections of the book largely constitute a series of blame games; Palin wanted to interact with the media and with everyday Americans more, but “headquarters” wouldn’t allow it and punished her for speaking her mind, and when she did speak to reporters, they twisted her words and damaged her credibility and reputation.  Palin never admits fault or takes responsibility (If you don’t want to be filmed in front of someone decapitating turkeys, try not standing in front of someone who is decapitating turkeys rather than blaming the cameraman in your memoir).  In Palin’s defense, though, her decision to resign as governor in 2009 comes off as reasonable.  Bogged down in ethics complaints and lawsuits, which Alaska’s government requires the governor to dispute using his or her own funds, Palin and her staffers were personally going broke, while abundant Freedom of Information Act requests brought the government to a standstill and monopolized taxpayer funds.  Leaving office saved Palin and Alaska’s taxpayers a lot of money.

Going Rogue’s final chapter is supposed to outline Palin’s vision for America’s future, but it primarily consists of Obama bashing and unsubstantiated claims (Cap and Trade will destroy farms!  The New Deal caused the Depression!).  Palin decries the escalating national debt yet supports U.S. involvement in two oversees wars and opposes raising taxes, despite the fact that 47% of Americans paid no income taxes for tax year 2009.  She states that she empathizes with people who cannot afford health care, yet she offers no solutions for fixing the broken system.  Like most Republicans in office today, Palin rants against Obama but offers no concrete alternatives to the Democrats’ proposals.

I don’t know what the future has in store for Sarah Palin, the hockey mom turned maverick politician turned Fox News talking head.  Perhaps she will become a permanent fixture of reality television (the Palin reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, debuts November 14th on TLC), or perhaps she will challenge Obama in the 2012 election.  Either way, it’s Providence — and more material for Tina Fey.

When You are Engulfed in Flames

Sedaris, David.  When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

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When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris’s 2008 collection of stories/essays, is a quick read and a good laugh.  Sedaris’s recounting of how his partner, Hugh, has a tendency to walk at light speed when they are on vacation reminds me of family outings with my dad.  Sedaris’s efforts to develop an appreciation of fine art at a mall art print store in “Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool” are hilarious, not to mention the story’s title brings back memories of my high school’s bad poetry contest.  And the bad Japanese translations of English phrases in “The Smoking Section,” including procedures for how to react “when you are engulfed in flames” in your hotel room, will induce laughter in anyone familiar with foreign travel.

Unfortunately, humor alone does not make a good book.  My overall assessment of When You Are Engulfed in Flames is that it tries too hard and too overtly to achieve a degree of depth unsupported by its stories.  “That’s Amore,” for example, spends the bulk of its 25 pages building Sedaris’s crude and ornery neighbor, Helen, into a caricature — she gives disgusting, unsolicited food to Sedaris and Hugh, demands help with household chores, and continually stops by uninvited.  The last page of the story, though, seeks to engage Sedaris’s sense of guilt for not helping Helen with one final chore, tries to humanize in one paragraph a character built on irony and hyperbole, attempting a transformation of the laughable into the lovable that ultimately proves unsuccessful in the limited space Sedaris allots to it.  Other attempts appear simply disingenuous; indeed, Sedaris’s assertion in “April in Paris” that he worried more about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on spiders than on humans caused me to groan.  After reading works by authors who successfully blend humor and critique, laughter and depth (i.e. Sherman Alexie and Augusten Burroughs), When You Are Engulfed in Flames sadly does not measure up.

Washington Square

James, Henry.  Washington Square.  New York: The Modern Library, 2002.

Don’t undervalue irony; it is often of great use.

- Dr. Austin Sloper in Henry James’s Washington Square

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Henry James didn’t much like Washington Square when he initially published it in 1880.  A quarter century later, while compiling a volume of his fiction for republication, he opted to leave Washington Square out.  Though I subscribe to the school that believes an author is not necessarily the best judge of his or her own works, I find myself in agreement with James in this instance.

At its outset, the novel, set in early 19th-century New York, shows considerable promise as a tale of young lovers grappling with a father’s disapproval.  Morris Townsend, an attractive but unemployed young man recently returned from Europe, pursues the plain and altogether unremarkable Catherine Sloper, who has inherited $10,000 per year from her late mother and stands to inherit an additional $20,000 per year upon the death of her father, the widely respected physician Dr. Austin Sloper.  Dr. Sloper naturally opposes his daughter’s engagement to a man who has already squandered his own inheritance and lives on the meager income of his widowed sister, while Dr. Sloper’s flighty and mettlesome sister, Mrs. Penniman, promotes the match by serving as an unsolicited and rather unreliable intermediary between the two lovers. 

Washington Square is not a bad book, per se; rather, its insufficiency lies in its want of a sympathetic, admirable, or remotely likable character.  Morris proves to be the mercenary Dr. Sloper believed him to be all along, as he abandons Catherine when it becomes clear that her father will disinherit her if she becomes Morris’s wife.  Rather than comforting his daughter, though, Dr. Sloper derives a sadistic pleasure from his daughter’s pain.  Indeed, ”he rather enjoyed having to be so disagreeable” to his daughter during her engagement, and when his sister states, “It seems to make you very happy that your daughter’s affections have been trifled with,” the doctor’s response is one of cold triumph: “It does [. . .] for I had foretold it!  It’s a great pleasure to be in the right.”  Even Mrs. Penniman, who ought to serve as Catherine’s surrogate mother and confidante, exploits the drama of her niece’s situation for her own amusement, using Dr. Sloper’s objections to Morris as an excuse to arrange secret meetings with him in unfamiliar churches and neighborhoods.  When Catherine goes to meet with Morris, Mrs. Penniman feels disappointment not because her niece’s lover has left her jilted, but rather because she disapproves of the setting: “To visit one’s lover, with tears and reproaches at his own residence, was an image so agreeable to Mrs. Penniman’s mind that she felt a sort of aesthetic disappointment at its lacking, in this case, the harmonious accompaniments of a dark storm.”  The unceasingly ironic narrator mocks them all, but the humor does not disguise the fact that an attractive, lazy man seeks to take advantage of an innocent young woman while her bored and wealthy elders look upon her trials as entertainment.

I had hoped that Catherine would emerge an acceptable heroine.  Indeed, she does speak her mind with honesty and conviction at several points in the novel, prompting even her father to experience “a sudden sense of having underestimated his daughter.”  She also displays a more powerful control of her emotions than most young women in her situation could evince.  But, on the whole, Catherine is neither beautiful nor brave.  James frequently describes Catherine as healthy, large, and having a broad back, meaning, in addition to having a plain face and no special accomplishments to attract suitors or friends, she is unbecomingly plump.  Shy and largely submissive, she initially lacks the passion for Morris to defy her father but later cannot move past Morris to consider another suitor.  Catherine is astounding only in that she is so quintessentially average and frustrating in that she, along with the other three main characters, neither grows nor changes over the course of the novel.  More than twenty years later, Dr. Sloper’s wishes dictate from the grave, Morris and Mrs. Penniman continue to conspire, and Catherine is content to live out her life as a spinster doing needlework on her porch.  Though the writing throughout Washington Square is fluid and funny, the lack of a satisfactory hero or heroine and the stasis of plot and character render the novel as lackluster and disappointing as Catherine Sloper herself.

Thirteen Moons

Frazier, Charles.  Thirteen Moons.  New York: Random House, 2006.

She seemed full and complete.  Though the rational, unraptured part of me figured that no one, man or woman, gets to be full and complete ever.  We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people.  It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living.

- Will Cooper in Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons

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Like Charles Frazier’s previous best-selling novel, Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons is a beautiful, enthralling novel embracing multiple genres, enveloping a tale of frustrated love in naturalism, history, and politics.  We first meet the novel’s hero, Will Cooper, as a 12-year-old orphan sold into indentured servitude at a frontier outpost by his aunt and uncle.  Will rides west alone, save the companionship of his horse, Waverly, along the way encountering the girl who will both fill and break his heart, Claire, and his nemesis, Featherstone.  Upon arriving at the store he must keep, Will meets Bear, the Cherokee who later adopts Will as his son.

I expect the Will-Claire-Featherstone love triangle has already captured the attention of filmmakers.  Will first meets Claire after winning her from Featherstone, her husband in name, at a late-night card game, only to have her stolen back that same night.  Will finds her again as a teenager, and together they indulge in a season of hormonal hedonism that eventually ends in a rather comical duel between Will and Featherstone.  But Jackson’s Indian Removal policy soon takes effect, and Claire, a mixed-blood, heads west to Indian Territory, while Will makes the tortured decision to stay behind and aid his adopted family, Bear and the Cherokee of Wayah.

The Cherokee of Thirteen Moons are refreshingly human.  Unlike the noble but destined-to-die Uncas and the savage Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, the inhabitants of Wayah live lives characterized by pastimes other than the shedding of tears and blood.  They hunt and farm.  They drink.  They throw bawdy parties that feature costumed caricatures of the English, French and Spanish with wooden heads and fake phalluses.  And, most importantly, they realize the need to innovate in order to ensure their survival and maintain control of their ancestral lands.  Bear recognizes the authority of paper deeds and private property in the white civilization enveloping his people and begins buying the land on which Wayah is built before Will arrives.  Will in turn uses the profits from the stores he acquires in his late teens to finance the purchase of additional tracts, thereby expanding Wayah’s holdings slowly, deliberately, and legally, eventually merging the land and its people into the one unassailable American institution: the corporation.  The Cherokee thus employ the whites’ own devices against them.  In addition, Will employs his skills as an autodidact lawyer to thwart the U.S. government’s many attempts to move the Wayah Cherokee westward.  Under the joint leadership of Bear and young Will, the tiny Indian empire grows, its vast square mileage dependent on a tenuous balance of loans, debts, trades, and the whim of the War Department.  Though less racy than the affair with Claire, the politics of Indian Removal dominate Thirteen Moons, as Frazier incorporates historical figures from Andrew Jackson (whom Will calls the Old Possum after forming the opinion that Jackson’s hair resembles a dead opossum) to Elias Boudinot to illustrate the callousness with which Indians were forced west and, in some cases, betrayed by their own wealthier advocates.

As Will ages and Eastern politicians, most of whom have never encountered an Indian, implement Removal, the exuberance of Will’s youth gives way to actuality, and, after years of chasing a woman who will not marry him and fighting for an Indian nation the whites in power would just as soon exterminate, the energetic hero of Thirteen Moons arrives at the unfortunate reality of his own limitations and moral flaws.  While Will suffers perennial guilt for sacrificing an Indian rebel to the U.S. military in exchange for Wayah’s continued existence, he views his ownership of slaves with unapologetic ambiguity.  As a Confederate colonel, Will leads his Cherokee soldiers into admittedly stupid skirmishes that cost lives and achieve nothing.  And, while constantly travelling in an effort escape his heartbreak, Will allows his business interests to crumble, thus endangering the livelihood of the very community he worked so long to save.

As the years progress, the whites keep coming.  They arrive in never-ending waves.  The world Will sees as an old man only faintly resembles that of his youth, as the railroad and the logging and the immigration have transformed and broken and scarred the land.  After a lifetime of effort, the aged Will feels the weight of his own inefficacy, similar to though lesser than the feeling of loss and futility most 19th-century Indians must have felt after decades of broken treaties, renegotiations, Removal, and outright warfare.  Thirteen Moons concludes with an old man ritualizing his own powerlessness, firing bird shot at a train it will not penetrate or impede, feebly demanding attention without effecting change.  Will continues his fight for justice — ironically, weakly, but nonetheless noticeably — reminding us in short yet violent bursts of the human price of nation building.

Adam Bede

Eliot, George.  Adam Bede.  New York: Signet Classics, 2004.

Adam [. . .] had not outlived his sorrow — had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again.  Do any of us?  God forbid.  It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it — if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness.  Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy. [. . .] Desire has chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering.

- from George Eliot’s Adam Bede

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Though rife with insight into human folly and heartbreak, George Eliot’s Adam Bede (originally published in 1859) gets off to a slow start.  Eliot sets her novel in the English village of Hayslope in 1799 and devotes the first 300+ pages of her novel to character development, presenting an expansive cast of characters in which everyone has his or her foil.  The meticulous and hardworking carpenter, Adam Bede, stands in stark contrast to the wealthy and flippant Arthur Donnithorne, who joins the army only to preoccupy himself until he can inherit his fortune from an elderly uncle.  The Methodist preacher and mill worker, Dinah, reaches out to those living the most dreary and desperate lives, while Mr. Irwin, the Anglican clergyman, enjoys a comfortable life and offers little religious guidance.  Mrs. Poyser, the garrulous yet dedicated dairy mistress, is the opposite of her beautiful yet vain niece, Hetty, who spends her nights modeling her jewelry in front of the mirror.  Adam loves Hetty; Hetty desires Arthur; Arthur longs to be liked by everyone.  Adam’s brother, Seth, loves Dinah; Dinah loves the Lord.  In the beginning, Adam Bede is a slow-moving story of laborious and often unrequited love.

Eliot reveals her penchant for drama in the latter part of the novel, where we see the extent to which Eliot understated Hetty and Arthur’s earlier involvement.  Hetty, now engaged to Adam, finds herself pregnant by Arthur, who is in Ireland receiving military training.  (No one notices the pregnancy, as Eliot frequently describes Hetty as pleasantly plump even before the pregnancy.)  Hetty sells her jewelry and burns through her savings in an effort to reach Arthur, only to discover that travel is more expensive and Arthur farther away than she had anticipated.  Arthur is a wealthy landlord; Hetty is an orphan and a peasant.  She lacks money and options, and all she can look forward to is shame.  Therefore, Hetty commits the crime she hoped would save her but which instead destroys the lives of those who love her — she commits infanticide, shaming the Poysers, and devastating Adam, and horrifying all of Hayslope. 

Adam Bede thus becomes a novel about healing and surviving.  While Hetty goes to prison, the Poysers remain on their farm and endure her humiliation.  Arthur, despite inheriting his uncle’s estate, enters a voluntary exile, ironically finding life safer in the army than among his own tenants.  Adam works, expands his house, and cares for his mother.  Time passes.  And through his pain Adam grows, emerging a wiser man capable of choosing a wiser love the second time around.  Adam Bede is a novel that every high school girl should read, for it teaches us that our youthful heartache has a purpose and that our pain transforms us into better people.

Yet the story’s more uncertain moral, if we can even call it that, centers on what constitutes a good Christian.  Everyone in the novel is a Christian in the vague sense of the word.  Hetty attends church every Sunday, though she absorbs none of what is said.  Mr. Irwin is amiable but apathetic, giving short sermons and saying little about God, even while speaking at Arthur’s coming-of-age party, a perfect opportunity to impress his young friend’s Christian duties upon him.  Only Dinah, the travelling preacher woman, the aberrant Methodist, embraces the true essence of Christianity, reading her Bible rather than having it read to her, visiting Hetty in prison while her family shuns her, and coaxing Hetty to confession through patient prayer.  Dinah chooses to live among the poor, for it is the poor and despondent who need her most.  And yet, ironically, this model Christian is hindered at the novel’s end when the Wesleyan Conference outlaws female preaching.  In Adam Bede, good clearly triumphs over evil in matters of the heart, but the novel’s spiritual tensions remain unresolved when patriarchal tradition trumps Dinah’s selfless and all-inclusive Christian love.  While the novel opens with Dinah’s sermon, it closes with her submission and silence.

Adam Bede is thus a bittersweet story, for it questions as it soothes.  While blatantly “bad” characters are punished (or punish themselves) in accordance with their crimes, the lives of the righteous and good are far from easy.  The difference — the comfort, I suppose — is that the good at least learn from their pain, and while they do not overcome it, they build on it, and prosper.

The Financial Lives of the Poets

Walter, Jess.  The Financial Lives of the Poets.  New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

[T]he truly stupid mistake was believing that when we fell, a net made of money could catch us.

- Matthew Prior in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets

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Thanks to the layovers and delays endemic to modern air travel, I had the pleasure of reading Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets in nearly one sitting.  I found the novel off-putting at first; Walter’s propensity for composing lists felt disruptive rather than stylistic, and the novel’s sex-obsessed protagonist-narrator, Matthew Prior, diminished my remaining hope that men achieve emotional maturity as they age.  A few chapters in, however, I came to appreciate the novel as a commentary on life in the current economic recession.

At the novel’s outset, the Prior family — Matthew, his wife, Lisa, their two sons, and Matthew’s senile father — clings to a middle-class dream founded on car loans, mortgages, and home equity lines of credit.  After quitting his job as a newspaper reporter in order to found poetfolio.com, a site that blends poetry with financial advice, Matthew panics at the uncertainties of self-employment and returns to his old job, only to be laid off weeks later.  Realizing that he owes more on his Nissan than the car is worth, that his home is going into foreclosure, and that he can no longer afford private school tuition for his sons, the desperate Matthew determines that the only way to turn a quick profit in this economy is to become a drug dealer.  Thus The Financial Lives of the Poets traces the journey of a middle-aged, sleep-deprived, unemployed man who cashes in what remains of his 401(k) in an effort to procure large quantities of marijuana.

Hyperbolic as Matthew’s story is, the factors that drive his darkly humorous decisions ring uncomfortably true.  There is all too much reality in Matthew’s repeated efforts to figure out which company owns his mortgage and how to get in touch with an actual human being at that company.  Particularly insightful is Walter’s linking of financial and marital stability; as the Priors’ financial security declines, so, too, does the quality of their relationship, as Lisa uses Facebook and text messaging to reconnect with her former high school flame and heir to a successful family business.  His job loss and descent into bankruptcy reveal to Matthew how much of his middle-class happiness — his home, his car, his children’s education, his job, his retirement, his nuclear family — is grounded in money, and how the sudden loss of that money threatens to destroy everything he holds dear.  It is a lesson all too many have been forced to learn in recent years.

Within the satire, though, lies hope.  Ultimately, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a tale of humility, of learning to live with less, of valuing relationships and memories more than material items purchased through unsustainable debt.  It is a story of scaled-back dreams that, in a way, prove more satisfying than middle-class success.  Amidst all the unlikely plot devices and black comedy, Walter’s novel emerges as timely, teachable, and illuminating.

Stones into Schools

Mortenson, Greg.  Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  New York: Viking, 2009.

 Of the hundreds of soldiers I have spoken with during the past six years who have been deployed in Afghanistan, almost every one of them firmly believes that the best way to augment our security is by truly being of service to the Afghan people — and moreover, that the capacity to render this service meaningfully and well is predicated upon listening, understanding, and building relationships.  In this respect, the goal of enhancing our own security is best achieved by enhancing theirs.  And the most critical building block to accomplishing both is education.

- Greg Morstenson, Stones into Schools

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Americans have far more to learn from the people of Afghanistan than we could ever hope to teach them.

- Greg Mortenson to Admiral Mike Mullen, Stones into Schools

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Greg Mortenson’s 2003 bestseller, Three Cups of Tea, chronicles how Mortenson’s failed attempt to climb K2 landed him, lost and hungry, in the Pakistani village of Korphe, whose inhabitants inspired him to not only promise to build them a school for boys and girls alike, but to actually fulfill that promise.  Mortenson thus evolved from a failed mountain climber into the head of the Central Asia Institute and champion of female literacy.  Stones into Schools provides the next chapter of the story, describing the CAI’s endeavor to build a school for Kirghiz children in one of the most remote parts of Afghanistan.

Mortenson’s mission, as Stones into Schools articulates more than once, is to promote female literacy and empowerment by building schools, establishing women’s centers, and paying teachers’ salaries in a land previously dominated by Islamic extremism.  As Mortenson argues, an educated population, particularly an educated female population, can help reduce infant mortality and women’s deaths in childbirth, contribute extra income to their families, and thwart the Taliban by opening the hearts and minds of the Afghan people to possibilities beyond the rule of “men with Kalashnikovs who help sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran.”  Mortenson, with the aid of his dedicated partners, Sarfraz Khan and Wakil Karimi, constructs schools in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas in which traditional international aid never arrives, in hopes of improving lives while simultaneously undermining the extremists who have long held hostage the people they purport to serve and protect.

While charting the growing number of CAI schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Stones into Schools likewise describes the growth and maturation of the CAI itself.  In Three Cups of Tea, one CAI board member laments that the CAI was, essentially, Mortenson himself, and that if something ever were to happen to Mortenson, the CAI would cease to exist.  Fortunately, this situation has been rectified in the years since Three Cups of Tea was penned, as Mortenson has finally learned to delegate.  Sarfraz Khan spearheads the CAI’s operations in Pakistan, while Wakil Karimi builds relationships and schools throughout Afghanistan.  Supplies are purchased locally, transported by local drivers or yak trains, and the schools are approved and built by natives of the communities they will serve, communities that donate both their land and their labor to make these schools more personal and important than a gift of international aid could ever be.  Mortenson continues to struggle with his role as author and chief fundraiser (he would prefer to be on the ground), but he simultaneously recognizes the toll his incessant working and travelling has taken on his health and his family.  Indeed, he finds it necessary to apologize to his children in the book’s acknowledgements: “I’m sorry that I missed out on nearly half of your childhoods.  That reality is the most painful part of my work.”  Stones into Schools illustrates Mortenson’s process of learning to share this burden, as Sarfraz and Wakil spend up to nine months a year away from their families, reporting to Mortenson in Montana via satellite phone, asking for funds when necessary.

Stones into Schools may reiterate the three-cups-of-tea metaphor a bit too often for my taste, but it is easy to forgive Mortenson his literary foibles when faced with the tale of his courageous, if unlikely, fight for universal education.  Mortenson and his CAI colleagues fight the War on Terror one book, one schoolgirl, one school at a time, hoping to eventually erect a girls’ school in Mullah Omar’s home town as a powerful slap in the face to those who would deny women their right to read and learn.  I firmly believe Mortenson will win the Nobel Peace Prize someday.  After reading Stones into Schools, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion.

The Poisonwood Bible

Kingsolver, Barbara.  The Poisonwood Bible.  New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.

- Adah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible

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Nathan Price enters the Congo hellbent on baptizing the natives.  Untrained in the Kikongo language spoken in Kilanga, unfamiliar with Kilanga’s people and history, and unwilling to entertain opinions that differ from his own, Nathan’s goal is to baptize Kilanga’s population in the crocodile-infested waters of a nearby river.  In his butchered Kikongo, Nathan proclaims that Jesus is poisonwood, confusing his congregation as his wife and daughters look on with embarassment.  He proclaims himself a good Christian while beating his wife and daughters and without recognizing the hypocrisy.  Yet Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is not so much the story of a maniacally stubborn missionary as it is of those he leaves in his wake.  It is a story of tortured and tenuous survival, of a family’s physical and psychological struggle, and of the continent they simultaneously love and long to escape.

As the Prices’ year in Kilanga draws to a close, the Congo gains independence from Belgium.  Nathan refuses to leave, despite the advice of his fellow missionaries, thus trapping his family in Africa.  With no income, the Prices are forced to rely on the kindness of their African neighbors and to persevere through drought, torrential rains, and an ant plague of biblical proportions.  And even after tragedy strikes the family directly, his daughters find Nathan baptizing neighborhood children in the rain in an impromptu ceremony the children neither requested nor understand.  The family splits at the seams, mother and daughters scattering across the globe, leaving Nathan to his allegedly divine calling.

The Price daughters become the novel’s central focus, as all of them struggle to form identities and beliefs independent of their domineering father.  Leah Price stays in the Congo and marries an African teacher, and though she finds herself more personally and politically engaged in the affairs of the Congolese than any other American in the book, she remains haunted by her own skin, as her whiteness prompts distrust in her neighbors and connects her to the horrors — slavery, Belgian rubber plantations, the U.S. installation of a Congolese dictator – whites have inflicted upon Africans.  Adah Price in turn becomes a doctor for the purpose of studying African pathogens.  However, despite her success, self-definition proves challenging and elusive, as her lingering attachment to a childhood disability causes her to question the authenticity of others’ affection.  Rachel bounces from man to man, and, despite living in Africa, never bonds with its people, instead associating with white diplomats and oil executives, drinking frequently, suspicious of everyone, and never finding true love or respect.  All of the Price girls harbor the guilt of white privilege and wonder at the justice of their survival on a continent where so many children die of preventable causes.  They are simultaneously grateful for and undeserving of their lives, though their guilt manifests in different ways.

As the Price girls grow, the Congo, their adopted home, grows with them.  As in Kingsolver’s most recent novel, The Lacuna, history and fiction intersect in The Poisonwood Bible.  The Belgian Congo becomes the Congo, free of colonial rule and led by elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, as the Prices’ missionary work is supposedly about to conclude.  Lumumba’s imprisonment occurs as Nathan’s decision to stay in the Congo imprisons his family in Africa.  Lumumba is murdered the same day the Price family splits apart.  And as the U.S.-supported dictator, Mobutu, takes the reigns of a new Zaire – using the country’s wealth to construct private villas, imprisoning dissenters, taking loans from the World Bank that subject the Congo to the West all over again — the wounded, mined, linguistically and culturally fragmented Zaire limps toward an uncertain future, much as the Price girls stumble and question as they try to carve out their own.  Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, The Poisonwood Bible initially personifies the Congo as a dark, ravenous, hopelessly wild place that swallows all who dare enter.  Africa is failing, or has already failed, yet Kingsolver’s characters realize that while blaming colonialism and Western intervention may explain the Congo’s problems, it does not solve them.  Both Rachel and Leah feel drawn back to the U.S. — to the vaccinations, to the abundance of food — but find themselves inextricably connected to Africa, unable to leave even when they are unhappy or unsafe.  Ultimately, a glimmer of hope emerges towards the end of the novel in the the form of a newly independent Angola, tired from war but in control of its natural resources and slowly stepping up to the challenge of self-governance.  Kingsolver’s juxtaposition of the human journey with the national and continental one, of fiction with fact, illuminates and humanizes the history of a warn-torn, disease-ridden corner of the world the West destroyed and now would prefer to ignore. 

The ending, however, I did not like.  So much of this 550-page book is about living with guilt and injustice and the inability to forgive oneself, and to have the last ten pages offer an eerie, post-mortem absolution seems unjustified and out of place.  Life comes from death, I suppose, and the intensely fecund jungle will continue to grow, but there is no closure for the Prices, and no certainty for a post-Mobutu Congo.  After chapters about loss and death and hardship, the oddly happy ending feels like a forced smile.  Nonetheless, the reflective and lyric Poisonwood Bible is well worth the read.

1491

Mann, Charles C.  1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.  New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491.  None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today — a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists.  But every one of the seven chose the Indians.

- Charles C. Mann, 1491

*~*~*

Charles C. Mann’s 1491 combines history, archaeology, and science in a compelling argument for unlearning.  To this day, many believe, because many are taught, that the Americas prior to Columbus were sparsely populated and wild, comprising an empty and open Eden that invited European colonization, organization and control.  This myth has long served as a justification for colonization, for one cannot steal land that no one owns or occupies.  It has also provided fuel for the more recent environmental movement, which likewise errs in envisioning Indian societies as living in harmony with nature without altering it.  Both schools of thought, Mann explains, present Indians as static and simplistic — too few to be socially or technologically advanced or to impact their surrounding environment.  In fact, ample archaeological evidence suggests that Indians inhabited the Americas longer, in larger numbers, and with more extensive effects on their concomitant plant and animal contemporaries than the average historian comfortably admits.

Mann divides 1491 into three sections, the first of which deals with pre-Columbus Indian populations.  Using early sixteenth-century accounts from the first Spaniards to reach the Americas and archaeological evidence spanning from the Southwestern U.S. to Peru, Mann depicts the Western hemisphere as teeming with people.  In fact, several of the newly arrived Spaniards described South America as downright crowded.  The primary reason, then, for the apparent emptying of the hemisphere prior to the later arrival of the Pilgrims was the introduction of European disease, namely smallpox, which swept across the continents and killed more people faster than any colonial army could have.  Anthropologists and scientists estimate that such introduced diseases may have killed off as much as 95% of the Native population, which at its pinnacle may have exceeded 100 million persons.

Section two grapples with the origin and age of Native American societies.  Archaeological evidence unearthed in both North and South America undermines the commonly taught Bering Strait theory, which states that Asians walked across the frozen Bering Strait a few thousand years ago and founded all subsequent Native American societies.  Carbon dating of artifacts recovered at archaeological digs indicates that the Americas may have been populated as much as 40,000 years ago.

Section three addresses the notion that Indians were unsophisticated hunter-gatherers subsisting in small bands within a profound and sprawling wilderness.  Contrary to common knowledge, Inca ruins in Peru, Mayan ruins in Mexico, and the Cahokia site in North America all attest to the existence of large Indian communities that were actively engaged in plant breeding, terraced agriculture, irrigation, soil improvement, erosion control, and herd management, some more successfully than others.  Maize, the staple of many Indian societies’ diets, is the result of intensive breeding whose parent species scientists have yet to conclusively identify.  The charcoal-rich soil of the Amazon, which has withstood thousands of years of cultivation while neighboring lands have parched and withered, reveals the Indians’ keen understanding of soil fertility and agricultural productivity.  The limited number of animal bones found within excavated Indian settlements testifies to the ways in which Indians regulated and relegated game safely away from their farms but conveniently close enough to hunt.  Only after smallpox swept across the hemisphere (in a series of epidemics depicted in Native art and Spanish writings) and removed the human regulators did the forests grow dense from a lack of burning, farms resemble wilderness, and bison, elk and deer roam free.  Thus did North America appear empty when the Pilgrims arrived more than a century after Columbus, which whites interpreted as a license from God to conquer and fill the land with their progeny.

Mann’s book is more historical than political, more anthropological than activist, but he nonetheless unveils the centuries-old propensity of primarily white scientists and academics to find what they wish to see, to dispossess Natives of their land all over again by denying their ancient origins, staggering populations, and exuberant and advanced societies in the milenia before Columbus.  After all, it is easier to stomach the inevitable deaths of a few hundred thousand primitives than the genocide (intentional or not, in the case of smallpox) of hundreds of millions of Natives who understood math, astronomy, and agriculture better than many of their would-be conquerors.  But guilt should never be an excuse for poor science, nor should discomfort justify the continued insult to the Native nations among us through the systematic denial of their long and rich history.  If Mann is up for the challenge, I suggest his next foray be into the school textbook industry.

Lolita

Nabokov, Vladimir.  Lolita. 2nd Vintage International ed.  New York: Random House, 1997.

Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction — that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

- Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

*~*~*

Whenever I make acquaintance with the average, non-literary person, and they subsequently discover I have a Master’s degree in English, their first impulse is always to give me the titles of books they have happened to read, and if I’ve never heard of those books, their response is to look at me as though my education has in some way proven useless and deficient.  Despite the fact that thousands of new books are published every year in the United States alone, it is automatically assumed that English majors have (or should have) read all of them.  Admittedly, after two degrees and a Master’s thesis, I confess I have still not made it through even the established literary canon.  Thus I picked up a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, I book about which I knew nothing other than that it is (in)famous.

First of all, I must comment on the remarkable ignorance of the Random House editors who published the 1997 Vintage International edition of Lolita. The back-cover text bills the novel as “a meditation on love” and “the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.”  Any reader with an IQ above 70 will discern within the first ten pages that Lolita is in no way about clashing cultures or love.  Had the editors bothered to actually read either the novel itself or Nabokov’s 1956 essay, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” which they included in the back of their edition, they may have avoided embarrassing themselves with their irrelevant jacket copy.

Lolita is not a love story; it is instead a tangle of pedophilia and adolescent promiscuity that burn and tear and consume their subjects.  Humbert Humbert — psychologist, academic, author, and one-time ad man — serves as the novel’s mentally ill, alcoholic, highly unreliable pedophile-narrator, who becomes infatuated with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze (Lolita).  Humbert marries his landlady in order to gain permanent access to her daughter, and when his new wife is suddenly killed in a car accident, Humbert, now Lolita’s sole guardian, is free to enact his ravenous fantasies.  Together he and Lolita traverse the United States for two years, staying in motels as father-daughter, criminal-victim, and lovers.

Lolita, for her part, is a complicated girl.  Humbert’s initial plan is to drug her with sleeping pills and violate her unconscious body.  However, when she informs him that she has had both lesbian and heterosexual liaisons while attending summer camp, that she is not truly innocent, he pursues her openly, consciously, unapologetically and unrelentingly.  For a time, the pill-popping, gin-sipping Humbert portrays Lolita as his willing lover, his co-conspirator.  Yet the cracks in his story give him away: Lolita cries herself to sleep every night, and when she gazes at herself in the mirror, even Humbert senses the wounded hopelessness in her look. While Lolita may initially enjoy and even invite the attentions of the older Humbert, she is still an orphan, still a child.  The sex she initially finds novel becomes oppressive and grotesque as she realizes she has nowhere else to turn, no one to provide for her other than her father-abuser.

Humbert in turn never redeems himself — he continues to espouse a lust for underage girls (”nymphets”) and hopes to have a daughter with Lolita, so that he may violate her also — but he does eventually recognize himself as the monster he is, although the recognition never proves transformative.   He remains obsessed, broken, and unsatisfied.  His only solace lies in his writing, for only in art can he immortalize their forbidden relationship, freeze it, preserve it.

Lolita is not an easy read.  It is profoundly disturbing, so much so, in fact, that four American publishers turned down the manuscript before Nabokov retained a French publisher, Olympia Press, in 1955.  It likewise lacks a clear theme, moral or message; indeed, Nabokov writes in “On a Book Entitled Lolita” that his purpose in writing is merely and always either aesthetic or to purge a burgeoning book from his brain: “I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book.”  Yet Lolita is also rife with an ironic humor (”since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic”) that renders the book uncomfortably funny.  And, despite Nabokov’s lamentations that the Soviet Union’s ban on his Russian novels had forced him to write in “a second-rate brand of English” for an American readership, his writing is lofty and fluid.  Lolita thus defies categorization, for it laughs at the mechanisms of literary interpretation, simultaneously embracing horror and humor, pornography and art.  Like Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, it seems Lolita may have earned its place in the literary canon through its very inscrutability.