‘Sunset Park’ by Paul Auster, Plus One

Paul Auster is one of my literary heroes and remains so even after this novel.  He is a writer whose every sentence drives the narrative forward, who delivers up vivid characters in just a few sentences, who can write convincing dialogue without quotation marks or “he saids,” “she saids,” and who writes with purpose.  Every book is masterful and worthy of careful study. There’s a puzzle in each one; each is as enigmatic as ‘Book of Illusions.’[1]  Mastery, I guess, is what happens when you’ve been at it for four decades.

I think ‘Sunset Park’ is not his best work, but that’s not to say it’s not good.  I’ve learned that there’s always much more than meets the eye in an Auster novel and I’d fault myself for being obtuse before I spoke ill of his work.  His dissection of the movie, ‘The Best Years of Our Lives,’ the classic 1946 story of three men returning home from war, is brilliant and insightful. That alone is good reason to read ‘Sunset Park.’  By coincidence, I had just seen this classic film, so it was fresh in my mind.

‘Sunset Park’ opens with Miles Heller, a 27-year-old man working in Florida on a ‘trashout’ crew—men hired to clear out foreclosed, abandoned homes of whatever its former occupants left behind.  Mostly, it’s broken toys, trash bags and burned out pots left on the stove; but occasionally it’s computers, DVD players and flat screen TVs.  Sometimes the houses look like the occupants just walked away from a half-eaten breakfast; more often they are trashed by the owners—missing stoves, sinks, and stripped of wiring and copper pipes.  Miles takes lots of pictures of what he finds, although he can’t say exactly why.  Maybe they hold the key to the lives lived there, a symbolic connection to the life he left behind in New York City seven years earlier.

Reading an old copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ in the park on his day off, he meets and falls in love with a young Cuban-American high school student, Pilar Sanchez. Sitting on a blanket nearby, Pilar catches his eye and laughs, pointing at her book jacket, gesturing that they are both reading the same book.  And, so, a relationship begins.  We soon learn that Pilar’s parents are dead, killed in a car crash, and she lives with three older sisters.  As we’ll soon discover, the oldest, Angela, is trouble.  Eventually, Pilar moves into Miles’s apartment and Miles, realizing how incredibly smart Pilar is, tutors her and encourages her to apply to several northeastern colleges.  He is confident she could win a scholarship.

There are just two problems; Pilar is underage and her oldest sister, Angela, dislikes Miles or, at least, takes a predatory interest in him.  Angela works as a cocktail waitress and, according to Pilar, “sometimes sleeps with customers for money.”  Sensing an opportunity to blackmail Miles, Angela pulls him aside after a dinner with the family and confronts him with the fact that Pilar is underage – “one call to the cops and your toast, my friend” – and demands he deliver to Angela the trash-out plunder for her and her associates to fence.  At first, feeling trapped, Miles complies, delivering a flat screen TV and a few other things, but eventually, he refuses.  One morning, as he was leaving for work, Angela’s friends corner him, punching him, “a cannonball of a punch” hard in the stomach to make clear they will be less gentle if he continues to refuse.  Miles decides his only recourse is to leave Florida until Pilar turns eighteen, about five months from now.  He gives Pilar most of his savings to cover her expenses so she can remain in the apartment until she turns eighteen and graduates from high school, at which time it will be safe for Miles to return.  Miles retreats to Brooklyn.

Back-story.  Miles Heller is the son of a New York publisher, Morris.  Morris Heller, now in his early 60s, started Heller Publishing at a time when it was possible to discover and publish unknown writers.  Morris owes much of his success to his father, who put up the money to start his business, and to those few writers he discovered years earlier—writers whose most productive years now are behind them, not necessarily because of diminished talent, just the inevitable consequence of growing old.  (Does Auster identify with these men?) 

Miles’s mother, Mary-Lee Swann, having sensed that motherhood would be the end of a promising acting career, left Miles and his father shortly after he is born.  Since then, she achieved fame on stage and film.  Contact is intermittent but not embittered.  Two years after she abandoned them, Miles’s father married Willa Parks, an English professor.  Willa was married before and has a son, Bobby, about Miles’s age.  When they were in high school, Bobby was hit and killed by a car while walking on a mountain road.  Bobby, happy-go-lucky and careless, had run out of gas.  The boys argued and Miles, exasperated, pushed Bobby.  The circumstances of Bobby’s death lead, circuitously, to Miles flight four years later at the end of his third year at Brown.  Miles, “…still can’t decide if he is guilty of a crime or not.”  (Auster’s ambiguous framing of Bobby’s death – Bobby’s lackadaisical attitude, the polar opposite of Miles’s; a typical step-brotherly love-hate relationship; Mile’s irritation leading up to the death; the coincidence of a car barreling down a mountain road at just the wrong instant; and for Miles, “… what is important … is to know if he heard the car coming toward them or not …” – are all pure Paul Auster.  I can’t imagine a book of his that didn’t place the reader on the knife-edge of ambiguity.)   However, as much as it affected him, it wasn’t the accident itself that sent Miles wandering, it was overhearing years afterwards his parent’s fraught conversation about him and the guilt this evinced.

Leaving no word of his whereabouts and, now, gone for more than seven years, Miles maintains a correspondence only with an old New York high school friend, Bing Nathan.  Miles travels to the ski slopes of New Hampshire, to Chicago, to California and eventually to Florida, where we first meet him working on the trash-out team. 

The trash-out theme re-emerges later in the book in a more brutal form, but not before we meet several interesting characters, each deserving one or more chapters of their own. 

There’s Bing Nathan, “the only person who has known [Miles’s] various addresses over the years…,” and, who, without Miles knowing it, shared the letters with Miles’s father, Morris.  Oversized and flabby, an anarchist and sometimes member of a band called ‘Mob Rule,” Bing is the proprietor for the past three years of a tiny fixit shop in Brooklyn called the “The Hospital for Broken Things.”  Bing abhors modern technology and among the things he fixes are old manual typewriters favored by a few writers who live nearby.

Then there’s Ellen Brice, an artist who, during the course of the novel, gravitates towards drawing highly erotic images.  Temporarily at least, Ellen is seriously miscast in life as a Brooklyn real estate agent who, while showing Bing cheep Brooklyn apartments, steers him to an abandoned house – a dilapidated shack really – on a street facing Green-Wood Cemetery (later referred to as a “vast necropolis”) in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.  As if to confirm her own disaffection with Real Estate, when Bing decides to take over the abandoned house, “… like no other house he has seen in New York,” Ellen becomes one of Bing’s three housemates.  Ellen has suffered emotional instability, but “doesn’t want to go back on medication.  Taking one of the pills is like swallowing a small dose of death…”

Then there’s Alice Bergstrom, a doctoral student who recently left a job as adjunct at Queens College “teaching remedial and freshman English” at lower wages then if she worked at a car wash.  Now, living rent-free in the Sunset Park squat and working just fifteen hours a week for a non-profit called PEN (more about that later), Alice is able to devote more time to her thesis on “…the relations and conflicts between men and women as shown in books and films from 1945-1947…”   (It is at this point that Auster works in his analysis of the film ‘The Best Years of Our Lives.’)  Alice is visited intermittently, and at lengthening intervals, by her occasional, self-absorbed boyfriend, Jake Baum, an unappreciated writer of short stories who is drifting towards the realization that it isn’t woman who interest him most.

Millie Grant, housemate number four, has a relationship of sorts with Bing and then, inexplicably departs, thus making way for Miles, who, responding to Bing’s entreaties, joins the Sunset Park squat, which he views as a inexpensive, temporary alternative to paying New York rents or getting beat up or murdered by Angela’s friends in Florida. 

But, there’s a flaw in their thinking.  They all are certain that the overworked staff of the city housing department, which acquired the house after its owner defaulted on taxes, are stretched thin and have forgotten about a worthless, rundown house in Sunset Park.  What Bing and company didn’t count on is just how far a senseless spirit of vindictiveness will carry even the most overworked city agency when abetted by two violence-prone policemen.

Miles hasn’t contacted his father or mother for seven years.  Transformed and emboldened by his love for Pilar, Miles decides to comes to terms with the past and contact his parents; his California mother temporarily in New York appearing in an off-Broadway play, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’[2]; his father at home in New York, but in and out, making frequent, unplanned trips to London, where his wife, Willa, who has become very ill, has been teaching a semester long class.

Of course, the central event here – the one that sets everything else in motion – is Bobby’s death and Miles’s unresolved guilt.  That the timing of Bobby’s death coincides roughly with 9/11 is interesting, but the events are not easily paired.  That the time frame of the story roughly parallels the Great Recession, bookended as it is between Miles trashing-out abandoned houses in Florida and the final scenes of the book, appears to be intentional.  One might even go so far as to suggest that, allegorically, Miles represents, with Bobby’s death, the national trauma that was 9/11 (did our actions trigger the attack somehow?); our collective ignorance of whatever deeper meaning is rooted there; the wildly irresponsible, go-out-and-shop, orgy of house-flipping that overtook the country; the subprime crash resulting in ‘trashing-out’ the homes of millions of Americans; and, just when recovery seemed possible and things looked like they are getting back to normal, another crash.  Yes, that double-dip hasn’t happened yet, but many people think that the political drift of the country all but ensures more trouble ahead.  While that certainly describes the arch of Miles’s experience, I am far from certain this is what Auster intended.  Another possibility just occurred to me.  Miles, young and feeling guilty and confused, is living the only life he could during these seven years.  He’s caught in a vortex of events he doesn’t understand, including his confusion about his culpability for a death.  He naively works to rekindles optimism about his future, finds love, reestablishes normalcy, then rudely, crushingly, realize that he has miscalculated once again.   What could be a better description of the confused lives Americans have lived these last ten years?  What could be a better prognosis of the hardships to come?

‘Sunset Park’ is the most topical and contemporary of Auster’s works in that it reflects and relies on recent and current events more than any other.  For instance, one of his characters, Alice Bergstrom, is working for an organization called ‘PEN Freedom to Write Program[3]’ and Auster devotes several pages to PEN’s mission.  He mentions Salman Rushdie, the death of a Norwegian publisher, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, Burmese writers, the Patriot Act, the Campaign of Core Freedoms, Cuban writers, and, of course, Chinese writers such as Lui Xiaobo, the jailed Chinese democracy advocate and cowriter of something called Charter 08, and PEN’s cause celeb.  While I wholeheartedly support PEN’s mission, I’m not sure it serves his narrative well.   But, maybe that’s the price he was willing to pay in support of this worthy and, as Auster points out, grossly underfunded organization.

Then there’s the frequent references to baseball, a passion that historically ties Miles to his father and grandfather, a passionate interest in players who’s lives have taken unexpected, often tragic, turns.  Names like Boots Poffenburger, Herbert Jude Score and Lucky Lohrke.  If I followed the game more closely, this might have drawn me in more than it did, but I was struck with this sentence: “…baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.”  I might add that man’s longing for certainty, for universes that can be comprehended and shared, is itself a universal longing.  Baseball is just one example.

There’s also the obvious references to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the effects it has had on not only on the poor but the nation’s psyche; to the shabby treatment of adjunct professors; and to the state of publishing today, and publishers’ struggle to stay alive.  It occurred to me that Heller Publishing might be a surrogate for Auster’s long-time publisher, which is probably struggling.  Maybe Auster, trading on his reputation and the all but certain sales his books generate, wrote this book to help his publisher get through the recession.  As a reader who only frequents my local ‘independent’ bookstore, I for one am more than willing to oblige.

I’ll close with this quote from one of Auster’s characters, Renzo, a writer and lifelong friend of Mile’s father: “The interview is a debased literary form that serves no purpose except to simplify that which should never be simplified…”  I guess he might say the same about a book review.

‘Three Stations’ by Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith’s latest book does not measure up to his first big success, ‘Gorky Park’.  He tries to squeeze just one more story out of Arkady Renko, and it probably won’t be his last.  In this instance, Renko is a Moscow police detective on the verge of losing his job; in fact, the order is out to can him, so he is avoiding contact with his corrupt boss.  Renko pursues a murder case of a woman presumed to be a prostitute who was found in a seedy trailer at the point where three railroad stations terminate in Moscow.  But the evidence doesn’t add up and Renko’s pursuit leads him through a maze of corruption, but not very convincingly, including attempts on his life.  While there are lots of street level Moscow atmospherics, there are also abrupt cutaways and plot shifts that are less than satisfactory, as if someone else edited this novel for length and left a few too many clues on the cutting room floor. 

Sometimes you get the feeling that a writer and his publisher just need to boost their revenues by riding on their reputation of earlier successes.  They both knew Smith didn’t have to try too hard to make some serious dough.  I know, this sounds terribly cynical, but, hey!  On that score, ‘Three Stations’ succeeds beautifully.

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[1] This is the title of an earlier book.  See my earlier post of Paul Auster’s book ‘Invisible.’  'Invisible' Review

[2] I’m not familiar with the play but suspect there’s a thematic connection here.

[3] See their homepage at http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/172

 

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'The Great Influenza' by John M. Berry

Imagine half a dozen ocean waves, emanating from different parts of the globe, converging on a coastal community in summer, a community whose residents are unaware of the impending danger.  Some waves are visible on the horizon; others are but deep swells, typical of the season.  What happens when all of the waves combine their amplitude the moment they reach shore and form a giant tidal wave, a tsunami of historic proportions?  This, or something like it, is what happened in 1918, when the influenza pandemic enveloped the globe in just a few months, resulting in the deaths of, by some estimates, one hundred million people.  Of course, one of the biggest waves was the war in Europe, now in its fourth year.  But this was not the deadliest.  There was also the long swell of medical history, only recently jolted out of a Hippocratic stupor lasting over two thousand years.  Then there was the wave set in motion by President Wilson, who unleashed a powerful political force determined to whip a fractious country to war.  This, along with the hastily passed a new Sedition Act and the Espionage Act of 1917, combined with a propaganda machine that brooked no dissent, made reporting actual conditions nearly impossible, criminal even.  Then there was biggest wave of all, the influenza virus itself.  Capable of slipping through all the body’s defenses and adapting to its hosts with increasing effectiveness – a virus, too small to see by conventional means – it infected and killed young adults to a disproportionate degree.   Compounding the devastation, most of the lifeguards – the doctors and nurses – were off tending to the troops in Europe, leaving communities begging for volunteers to nurse the sick and dying, and those few doctors and nurses left behind were overwhelmed and decimated by the disease.  And worse, public health officials, military and civilian, were overruled by the supreme urgency of war and made powerless to limit the influenza’s devastating effects.

War

For the first few years of the war in Europe, the United States tried to maintain its neutrality.  President Wilson himself was extremely reluctant to enter the fray.  However, in 1917, Germany outraged the nation when it announced unrestricted submarine warfare and tried to persuade Mexico to its side.  The President was forced to act.  As reluctant as he was, once the decision was made, Wilson pursued war with incredible single-mindedness, an almost religious fervor.  “To Wilson, this war was a crusade, he intended to wage total war.” 

“To fight,” Wilson declared, “you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life….”  And it did.

“The government compelled conformity, controlled speech in ways… not known in America before or since....”  Wilson pushed the Espionage Act and a new Sedition Act through Congress, and established the FBI and a volunteer group called the American Protective League (destined to become the Secret Service) to enforce these new laws, and initiated a “voluntary” Liberty Bond drive, and other measures.  He created, by executive order, the Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel, who went on to produce “tens of thousands of press release and feature stories that were routinely run unedited by newspapers.” 

In many ways, as is the case with the Influenza epidemic itself, our nation’s memory of the “Great War” has been eclipsed by the depression, WW II and the wars fought since.  John Berry’s excellent account reminds us of the draconian measures begun under the guise of war.  (The 2001 USA Patriot Act seems mild in comparison.)  Regardless of the motive or justification, these two statements sum up conditions leading up to the outbreak of the influenza epidemic:

“… Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler said, ‘What had been folly was now treason.’”

And Berry himself says, “As an unintended consequence, the nation became a tinderbox for epidemic disease….”

Epidemic

In the summer of 1918, the influenza crashed along the Coasts of all the continents of the world, working its way inland along the rivers and roads of commerce, spreading suffering and death in its wake, then receding, as it ran out of hosts to infects.   It started at an Army base in Kansas as “LaGrippe,” quickly mutating to its most lethal form and “swarming” through the population, through the port cities of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, Chicago and on and on, relentlessly infecting even remote inland outposts, then just as quickly running out of hosts and mutating again into a less dangerous form, infecting fewer and fewer, as it ebbed, but not before President Wilson was caught in its undertow while attending peace talks in Paris.  His encounter with influenza very likely resulted in a bout of depression that affected the course of history.  This strain of influenza would never disappear completely, it would just lie in wait for a new mutation or for new hosts whose lack of immunity would provide the opportunity to do it all again.

“It was influenza, only influenza,” yet it had mutated, exploded and “swarmed” into a disease more deadly than the Bubonic Plague, or any other in human memory. 

So widespread was the influenza that this morbid little ditty, sung by schoolgirls as they jumped rope in schoolyards across the country, spread like a virus too.

“I had a little bird,

Her name was Enza

Opened the window

And In-flu-enza”

My advice for those who think the H1N1 influenza scare a few years ago was overblown is to read this book.  The reason the medical community was so concerned about this particular virus in 2008 is that H1N1 is the same flu virus that affected millions in 1918[1].  John Berry’s well-researched, comprehensive book tells the story of this devastating pandemic; about the men and women who worked to contain and defeat it; about its spread from Kansas to virtually every corner of the globe; about our state of war that placed the need to mobilize forces above everything else, ignoring even the Army Surgeon General pleas and suppressing news reports that might have saved lives—reports about the virus itself.  John Berry takes it even further, and describes, in elegant detail, how the virus worked in the body and why it became so lethal; and how the epidemic spread, and about how this pandemic accelerated scientific research to an unprecedented degree, eventually leading, in one instance, to an understanding of DNA, that most essential building block of life.

Why was this influenza so much worse than ordinary flu?  It affected people in two ways.  For some, the luckier ones, it did act like regular flu from which most people recovered.  However, as is frequently the case with influenza, as symptoms subside and the patient starts to feel better, secondary infections take hold, often resulting in pneumonia.  Think of it this way:  The flu breaks down the body’s defenses—the natural mechanisms that work to keep the lungs sterile.  Enter pneumococcus, streptococcus and other bacterial pathogens.  These are the sources of bacterial pneumonia.  Today, as these secondary symptoms emerge, doctors typically prescribe antibiotics.  Antibiotics are effective against bacterial infections, but not viral infections.  In 1918, antibiotics had not been invented and pneumonia frequently resulted in death.

With the so-called Spanish Flu[2], however, the disease frequently took a more lethal turn.  After ravaging the respiratory track and defeating the body’s normal defenses, it penetrated the deepest recesses of the lungs, infecting those tiny cells responsible for oxygenating the blood, and, literally, choking them off by filling them with fluids[3].   This was the course the flu took in many, if not most, of the young adults who died quickly[4].   Often, symptoms progressed so rapidly that a person could wake up in the morning feeling fine and be dead within twelve hours.   Symptoms included intense headaches, bones that felt like they would break, hallucinations, high fever – all typical of flu, but much more intense.  What was new this time was that blood literally pored from eye sockets, nose, ears, mouth, and victims coughed up blood, even, as was frequently reported, projecting a stream of blood across the room, and in the final stages, “cyanosis”—victims turning such a dark shade of blue from lack of oxygen, it was hard to tell “Caucasians from Negroes.”  So fast did influenza spread, and so overwhelmed were the few medical staff available that “…nurses wrapped more than one living patient in winding sheets and put toe tags on the boys’ left big toe.  It saved time…” 

This was no ordinary “grippe,” this mutation managed to break down all the body’s defenses and confound public health official.  Facemasks – which became ubiquitous, were as useless as a window screen in a dust storm.  People were advised to avoid crowds (virtually impossible) and, as one health board advised, “…stay warm, keep the feet dry and the bowels open—this last piece of advice a remnant of the Hippocratic tradition.”  The problem was, and still is today, that “men could appear healthy while incubating influenza themselves, and they could also infect others before symptoms appeared.”  One patient could infect thousands without knowing it.

So devastating and so quickly did it spread, that there was a breakdown in civil society.  Indeed, at one point, so dire did the situation appear, Victor Vaughan, the acting Army Surgeon General, wrote, “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear … from the face of the earth within a matter of a few more weeks.”

People avoided people, many refusing to go to work or even to the store.  People were dying at such a fast rate that caskets were in short supply.  Sometimes entire families were infected, with nobody to even dispose of bodies.  Some were so ill, they were forced to sleep in the same bed with the dead.  Unable to buy and prepare food, many adults and children starved, and orphans roamed the streets, and many people collapsed and died in the street.  Horse carts roamed the city, collecting bodies and stacking them like cordwood.  But gravediggers were in short supply and, inevitably, after weeks of paralysis, officials organized to deal with the crisis by digging mass graves.  But public officials were powerless to prevent or slow its progress; chaos reigned.

In the midst of all this, newspapers were reporting, “This is only the grip, nothing to be concerned about,” or complete fictions such as this: “Scientific Nursing Halting Epidemic.”   “On a single day of October 10,” Berry tells us, “the epidemic alone killed 759 people in Philadelphia” and, “During the week of October 16 alone, 4,597 Philadelphians died….” And this was in just one city.  Yet, referring to people not yet infected, a public official is quoted as saying, “There is no question that by a right attitude of the mind these people have kept themselves from illness.  I have no doubt that many persons have contracted the disease through fear… Fear is the first thing to be over come, the first step in conquering this epidemic,” and “The weak and timid succumb first.”  These sentiments, propagated by Washington in the midst of war, appeared in papers across the country.  Of course, people could see what was happening all around them, so these admonitions had just the opposite effect as was intended, magnifying fear and distrust.

Medical History

I was most impressed with how well Berry put the medical history in context.  In just a few chapters, Berry covers a sweep of history from Hippocrates (460-370 BC) (and those who wrote under his name), up to the outbreak of the influenza, and beyond, rendered so expertly, you quickly understand the frustrations and challenges with which the medical community had to contend as the disease spread.

In the course of telling this story, Berry writes about dozens of scientists and health professionals.  I’ll just mention a few.  Most notable was William Henry Walsh, the “impresario” who “intended to precipitate a revolution” in medicine, and did.  He is described as “the glue that cemented together the entire American Medical establishment,” as he dragged the science and practice of medicine out of the dark ages and into the 20^th Century.  He was instrumental in establishing Johns Hopkins as a world-class medical institute, starting in the 1880s, and, from his position there, permanently altered medical research, education and its practice throughout the United States.  Along with his protégé Simon Flexner, who would lead the Rockefeller Institute, and Simon’s brother, Abraham, and dozens of others that he inspired, Walsh completed “the reform of all medical education” in the US, and directed “the flow of tens of millions of dollars into laboratory research.” 

To me, the most surprising revelation was the state of medical education and practice before 1900.  Even schools like Harvard, Penn and Columbia did not require students to have a college degree and, what’s worse, many schools admitted anyone who could pay.  Some could hardly read or write!  “The whole system of medical education … is something horrible to contemplate,” complained Harvard’s president Eliot in 1869.  When he urged the adoption of written exams, Harvard’s Professor of Surgery, Henry Bigelow, complained, “…[Eliot] actually proposes to have written examinations for a degree of doctor of medicine.  I had to tell him that he knows nothing about the quality of the Harvard medical students.   More than half of them can barely write.” (Judging from the handwriting on prescription forms, this still may be the case.)

Simon Flexner’s story is illustrative of the state of medical education in the late-19^th Century.   It begins from “his growing up the black sheep in an immigrant Jewish family in Louisville, Kentucky.  Older and younger brothers were brilliant students, but he quit school in the sixth grade.”   Described as “sullen and flirting with delinquency,” he worked and was fired from several jobs before getting a job at nineteen with a druggist who had a microscope.  While forbidden to use it, he did anyway and, “Abruptly his mind was engaged.”  He attended the Louisville College of Pharmacy, graduated at the top of his class, and attended medical school, at night, while working in a brother’s pharmacy.  About his medical school experience, “Flexner later recalled, ‘I never made a physical examination.  I never a heard a lung sound.”  Nevertheless, he was then free to hang his shingle and practice medicine.  This is where his story takes another turn.  Flexner was of exceptional intelligence and it was obvious to him just how ill prepared he was.  “His younger brother Abraham had graduated from the Hopkins. … Simon sent some of his microscopic observations to Walsh.  Soon Simon was studying at the Hopkins himself.”  Walsh was so impressed with Flexner that he “arranged a fellowship for him in Germany.”  Four years later, he returned to become a professor of pathology at Hopkins.  A true autodidact, Flexner made up for the gaps in his education by reading and studying widely.  Not only was he well prepared to become a professor, soon afterwards, with Walsh’s whole-hearted endorsement, he became the head of the new Rockefeller Institute, which he led with distinction for many years.  Flexner’s story is just one of dozens of compelling stories John Berry tells. 

Even as late as 1870, at a time when European schools taught the use of microscopes, stethoscopes, ophthalmoscopes and thermometers, doctors in the United States seldom used them.  Indeed, few American medical schools had them available.  While there were “two hundred endowed chairs on Theology at American colleges, there were only five endowed chairs in Medicine.”  Several states didn’t even license doctors, and “the titles ‘Professor’ and ‘Doctor’ went to anyone who claimed them.”  By in large, nurses were more knowledgeable and better trained than many of the doctors with whom they worked.  This infuriated some doctors, who resorted to using numeric codes when prescribing medicine so that nurses could not tell what the Doctors were prescribing, and object.  Traditional “heroic measures” such as bleeding, cupping, blistering, purging (with caustic purgatives) and so on were the methods employed for hundreds of years and, even though many doctors where aware of advances in medical knowledge and knew these techniques did little good, they were frustrated since “little of this new science could be translated into curing or preventing disease.”  

For a time, doing nothing beyond comforting the afflicted was the best medicine.  More often than not, “Do no harm,” meant, “do nothing.”  Not until Walsh and his generation of European-trained doctors began to address the inadequacies of research and education in the United States, would things change.  (Europe was decades ahead of the US until around 1910 or so.)

And change it did, first, with the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1893, followed by the Rockefeller Institute and, quickly thereafter, at other universities and institutions across the country.  An important development that served to precipitate this change was what became known as the “Flexner Report” – a comprehensive survey of medical education in the United States conducted by Samuel Flexner’s brother, Abraham.  This study brought to light the sorry state of medical education throughout the country.  Out of more than one hundred and fifty medical schools nationwide, one hundred and twenty were judged substandard, in fact, abysmal.  With the publicity that followed – publicity very much resisted by the American Medical Association – most schools closed, and those that survived now had a clear set of standards to meet; Abraham Flexner provided the model.  For over 2000 years, medical understanding and practice were frozen in Hippocratic stasis—in theories based on the “four humours[5]” and in practices that included bleeding, cupping, purging and so on; still performed by country doctors even as late as 1918.  But, thanks to Walsh and his protégés, medicine in the U.S. was turned on its head in just a few decades.  By 1918, there were vaccines to prevent bacterial diseases such as smallpox, cholera, typhoid, diphtheria and tetanus, and even cures for diphtheria, the first “cure … entirely the result of laboratory work.”

There is much more here about medical history and science and the men and woman who pursued it that is fascinating to read.  The lives of men and woman like Paul Lewis, William Park and Anna Wessel Williams, to name just a few, are probably deserving of books of their own, but Oswald Avery story deserves special mention.  Initially in pursuit of the cause and prevention of influenza during the pandemic, Avery spent decades in his laboratory, not emerging until 1943 at the age of 67, with a paper describing the function of DNA.  As luck would have it, that year, as he was being considered for a Nobel Prize for an earlier discovery, this new paper (the first he published in a dozen years) was so revolutionary and startling that the Nobel committee hesitated.  Even though Avery was first to publish, he never did get the recognition for his brilliant work on DNA by the Nobel committee that he deserved.  “Tenacious and persistent” don’t even come close to describing Avery.  My favorite Avery quote is, “Disappointment is my daily bread.  I thrive on it.”  Until his death ten years or so later, he never let up.

Researching and writing ‘The Great Influenza’ took John Berry seven years.  Perhaps he was inspired by Avery’s example.  It is surprising to me that, outside of some fictional accounts and memoirs, so little had been written about this pandemic.  It’s almost as though the country developed collective amnesia about an event that cost more lives than all the wars in the 20^th Century.   All I can say is, “It’s about time!’  This book is truly a monumental achievement, one that deserves to sit alongside ‘The Microbe Hunters’ and other classics of science.  It should be required reading for every medical student.

During a recent appointment with my doctor, I mentioned that I was reading ‘The Great Influenza,” and asked if he had heard of it.   I was delighted to hear him say he read it last year and express enthusiasm for the book.   I mentioned how surprised I was that even in the last half of the 19^th Century, most doctors didn’t use stethoscopes and other instruments we take for granted, and then pointed to the computer attached to the wall (which, I hasten to say, me doctor used) and said, “in fifty years, will we be as surprised and horrified to learn that most doctors didn’t use computers in 2010, and failed to understand the accumulated benefit it provides, for example, in epidemiology and reduction of medical errors?”  He laughed and said to me, “As I was reading the book, I wondered how many of the things I’m doing now I’ll be embarrassed about in fifty years.”

I thought, “now there’s a healthy, self-critical way to look at it—no matter what we’re doing now, how will we view it fifty years later?”  We could apply that to life as well as medicine.  In an instant, my respect for my doctor grew.

…

“I had a little bird,

Her name was Enza

Opened the window

And In-flu-enza”

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[1] Thanks to the Army, which preserved lung tissue from autopsies performed in 1918, this was confirmed by RNA analysis in the 1990s.

[2] Spain was one of the few nations not at war and therefore free to report the spread of the disease without interference by the censors.  Since Spain reported it first, people thought that that was where it started, hence the misnomer, Spanish Flu.  Kansas flu would have been more accurate.

[3] What’s going on here is a bit more complicated.  In some ways, the younger and healthier the victim, the greater the danger, since a healthy immune system mounts a more robust counteroffensive.  Ultimately, what killed many patients was the immune response, which flooded the lungs with white blood cells and antigens, which, together with a stew of dead lung cells, clogged up the lungs so completely that the body could not eliminate the congestion fast enough.  Some victims coughed so hard they tore cartilage and broke ribs trying to clear respiratory passages.  Many died and many others suffered brain damage, depression and other long-term disabilities.

[4] One theory for why this virus affected a higher proportion of young adults as compared to people over forty-five, besides the close-quarters imposed by war, is that older people who lived through the “Russian flu” of 1889-90 were more likely to have an immunity.  That flu was similar enough to offer some protection to this newer strain of the disease.  Also see previous note.

[5] Blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm.

'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen

It is not possible to be unimpressed by this novel, if for no other reason than Jonathan Franzen’s metaphoric virtuosity and linguistic invention.  However, I would not recommend this book for the aspiring writer; it just sets to bar too high.  You will come away despondent, knowing that it would be impossible to measure up, as you plod along producing your own pale, delusional, weekend-watery prose.  If Franzen lived in another time, another century, you could take solace; telling yourself contemporary writers lack the patience or courage or education or vocabulary or chutzpah to be this good.  But Franzen is a contemporary; he’s an Olympic bar-setting literary decathlete with a remarkable vocabulary and the dexterity to make it look easy.

Besides being a spectacular read, ‘The Corrections’ is also extremely funny.  Pick up the book at practically any point and start reading… you’ll see what I mean.  Here, watch this…  [Honestly, I just picked a passage at random!]  OK.  Let me set the scene.  Early in the book, Chip’s sister, Denise, is talking to Chip outside his New York apartment building while their parents, who just flew in from St. Jude (a comfortable Midwestern town outside of Chicago) on their way to a Fall foliage cruise to the Canadian Maritimes, are waiting for Chip to serve them lunch.  But Chip has other plans—no, wrong word.  Not plans, he’s not into planning.  He’s completely untethered by now; call it “acting on testosterone-driven impulse.”  He is in hot pursuit of his girlfriend who was moving out just as he arrives home from the airport with his parents.  (She hoped to have made her escape before they arrived.)  Explaining to Denise how his girlfriend has been led astray by therapy, (rather than Chip’s odd behavior) Chip says this:

“I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed.  I’m saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as ‘diseased.’  A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication.  Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures.  The very definition of mental ‘health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy.  When you buy into therapy you’re buying into buying.  And I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant.” 

Denise closed one eye and opened the other…  [And so on.] 

In case you missed it, let me say that at this stage in the story, Chip is adrift in the world and in need of a good slap up the side of the head, which Denise, his younger sister, having herself recently derailed a meteoric career as a chef in Philadelphia, fails to deliver.  She hands him cab fare instead.

And here’s one of my favorite outbursts (not picked at random):  Again let me set this up.  Chip is now working in post-Soviet-beyond-redemption-corrupt Lithuania for a colorful character named Gitanas (deserving of his own book,) who has developed a scheme to bilk American investors by setting up a website called Lithuania.com.  Eventually – predictably – competition for “most corrupt” degrades into “most ruthless.”  Gitanas has the appetite for the former, but not the later.  In the midst of this deflationary spiral there is an election.  But let Franzen finish setting it up himself –

On a very gloomy Sunday morning, Lichenkev and his slate of smugglers and hit men on the Cheap Power for the People Party ticket claimed 38 of 141 seats in the Seimas.  But the Lithuanian President, Audrius Vitkunas, a charismatic and paranoid arch-nationalist who hated Russia and the West with equal passion, refused to certify the election results.

“Hydrophobic Lichenkev and his mouth-frothing hellhounds will not intimidate me!” Vitkunas shouted in a televised address on Sunday evening.  “Localized power failures, a near-total breakdown in the communications network of the capital and its environs, and the presents of roving heavily armed ‘constabularies’ of Lichenkev’s hired mouth-frothing lickspittle hellhounds do not inspire confidence that yesterday’s voting reflects the stubborn will and immense good sense of the great and glorious immortal Lithuanian People!  I will not, I cannot, I must not, I durst not, I shall not certify these scum-flecked, maggot-riddled, tertiary-syphilitic national parliamentary election results!” 

Talk about civility!  (John Boehner, you mouth-frothing lickspittle hellhound you!  Mitch McConnell, you scum-flecked, maggot-riddled, tertiary-syphilitic excuse for a Senate minority leader.  Wow! … OK.  Enough random – and not so random – sampling.) 

Let me step back a bit.  This is a story about a wildly dysfunctional family.  (My wife, Joan, say, “Why would you write about any other kind”?  Good point.)  Enid and Alfred Lambert set off on a Fall foliage cruise on some Norwegian cruise line up the east coast to the Canadian Maritimes.  Alfred, suffering from Parkinson’s and progressive dementia, has been retired from his job as an executive at a Midwestern railroad for ten years and has spent the intervening years in his big blue chair in the basement.   Their home is slowly disintegrating around them.  Enid, who arranged this cruise and has paid for it from her own stash, takes care of Alfred more out of duty than love.  As Alfred’s condition degrades, Enid sees their lives spinning out of control but is powerless to do anything about it, so she fixates on something she thinks she can control, Christmas in St. Jude.  If only. (Even as he is slipping in and out of dementia, Alfred still holds the cards.)

Meanwhile, their three grown children, Gary, Chip and Denise have gone off to make lives for themselves, each in his or her own uniquely dysfunctional way.  Gary, in his early forties, and living in a trendy Philadelphia suburb, is an investment banker whose wife, Caroline, a masterful, psychologically intimidating manipulator, sets the terms of their marriage and their parenting.  Gary functions best at the office.  The hilarious interplay between Gary, Caroline and their young three boys will, alternately, make you laugh and cringe.  Caroline indulges – in fact – encourages the boys’ every whim.  Powerless to stop her, poor Gary is trapped between his own timidity and his beautiful wife’s Quaker inheritance.  Any time Gary raises an objection, Caroline suggests he’s in need of psychotherapy, thus turning every disagreement about raising their children into Gary’s having to defend his sanity; sanity he frequently has reason to doubt.   The oldest of the three Lambert children, Gary’s the most responsible.

Chip.  Ah Chip… at thirty-nine, Chip is an ex-tenure-track English professor recently fired from a New England college because he got a little too close in a carnal way to one of his students, a precocious, hedonistic young senior who pursued him aggressively and then ditched him.  His transgression, which turned him into a drug-addled sex-obsessed borderline-stalker, came to light about the same time his mentor the Dean died and his chief rival for tenure published her book.  (Chip, certain he was on the fast track, had neglected this essential requisite of academic life.)  Unhinged and unemployed, he goes down in flames.  He relocated to New York to write an absurd screenplay (with a pedantic opening monologue that runs forty minutes,) and works odd jobs for which he is eminently overqualified, except that he is far too distracted to show up for work.  A stroke of luck, in a manner of speaking, occurred immediately after the scene in front of his apartment building with Denise, when he is introduced to the colorfully fatalistic Lithuanian entrepreneur, Gitanas, the soon-to-be ex-husband of the woman who just left Chip (yes, this does gets hilariously complicated) and who, magnanimously (since Chip’s affair with Gitanas’s wife now seems to be past tense, and because Chip is the only prospect), offers Chip a job as the web marketing director of his new ethically challenged venture, Lithuania.com.  Chip, who had to borrow the cab fair from Denise and, in all probability, would have to walk home in the rain, has little choice but to accept the job and the generous cash advance offered.  Chip and Gitanas fly, that very evening, to Vilnius.

Then there’s Denise. At thirty-two, Denise is the youngest.  At the outset, she appears to be the rock of the family, the successful chef of a trendy Philadelphia restaurant, “The Generator,” which her newly minted millionaire boss builds into a recycled Philadelphia power plant, complete with massive power generator.  Were it not for Denise’s sudden discovery of a blooming, obsessive, and irresistible preference for having sex with women, especially her boss’s wife, things might have turned out better for Denise.  Eventually, Brooklyn claims her, but the path to Prospect Park was somewhat twisted. 

These four stories – Enid and Alfred’s, Gary’s, Chip’s, and Denise’s – are told in parallel, culminating around Christmas in St. Jude, attended by Gary sans familia (early on, Caroline had extracted a promise never to have to attend a Christmas in St. Jude, a promise to which she held firm), Denise the least alienated of the three, and Chip, who flies in from Lithuania and arrives broke, under the dark cloud of Gary’s disparaging doubts on Christmas morning, just a few hours before Gary has to fly back to Philly.

Nestled deep inside this brilliant comedy is hidden a more serious literary mission. The title, “the Corrections” provides the clue.  Think of a stock market or housing market ‘correction.’  Now back off to, say, thirty thousand feet.  This is a story about generational ‘correction’ in a nation and a world that has changed, is changing, dramatically, wrenchingly, from one generation to the next.  Here, the Lambert progeny are set adrift from the comfortable shores of Midwestern life onto a sea without a map or compass, left to stumble about finding their own way, without the advantages of either a trade union or good ol’ American nepotism, vainly grasping at anchors of stability that their parents’ generation, and most generations that preceded them, took for granted.  But here, the parents are adrift too—Literally, at sea.  Their Fall foliage cruise serves as a metaphor for their life in retirement; experienced in isolation, one from the other, but tied together in a financial lifeboat or straightjacket, take your pick.  Then there’s Chip.  The desperation of Chip’s Lithuanian adventure illustrates the extent to which he is adrift.  Lithuania, cut adrift from the former Soviet Union, serves both as metaphor and as a reflection of the chaotic and corrupting reality with which younger generations must contend.  We Americans like to pretend the only thing you need to succeed is a vision and ambition.  But as automation finally fulfills its promise of rendering human beings superfluous, and the few jobs that are left go offshore to the lowest bidders, it will take more than an exciting new technology to reinvigorate the world economy.  But, this book is not a commentary on the state of our economy; it’s a book about how the accelerating pace of change, from generation to generation, tends to pull the rug from under anything resembling stability; leaving it its place a constant state of upheaval into which each generation stumbles, able to rely less and less on strategies that served the last, left to totter forward in the dark alone, sometimes (if you have a taste for bewildering irony) with great comedic affect.

Jonathan Franzen’s latest book, ‘Freedom,’ came out last summer.  I very much wanted to read that when it arrived at the bookstore.  But before I did, I decided to read at least one of his earlier books first, then to read his latest to see how he has changed in the intervening years; to see how a writer might learn from an earlier work, and how (or if) that is reflected in his later works.   Of course, with a writer as accomplished as Franzen, this might be as good as it gets and everything that follows is of equal quality, just pointed in a different direction. 

So, now that I’ve sampled Jonathan Franzen’s work, I’m ready to see the effect of nine years passing.  Bring in on.  Bring on ‘Freedom’!

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'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver

I don’t think I’ve ever read two books by the same author, back to back, before.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it's because some books deliver an emotional intensity that I find both exhilarating and exhausting, and I feel the need to recover by reading something mindless, like a plot-driven mystery or a memoir by George Bush.  Or maybe it’s because once I’ve read a book that I really admire, I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed with the next; afraid my admiration for the author will be undermined.  Like most of us, I treasure my illusion.  Well, where Barbara Kingsolver is concerned, I need’t have worried.  Once again, as with ‘The Lacuna,’ I filled a legal pad with quotes that I read again and again. With luck, I’ll find a way to slip a few of them into this review.

‘The Poisonwood Bible,’ is the story of a Southern Baptist missionary family, Nathan and Orleanna Price and their four daughters, who travel to the heart of Africa to spend a year at a remote mission in the jungles of what was, in 1959, the Belgium Congo. 

This novel consists of seven “Books,” each beginning with Orleanna’s account, followed by her daughter’s contemporaneous account of their years spent in the Congo, and of their lives since.  Each tells of many of the same events in her own distinctive voice.

Orleanna’s ruminations – lamentations, really – are written years after her return from Africa at her secluded cottage on a Georgia Sea Island.  There, she struggles to make sense of their African experience – to understand how she had let Nathan lead her family to Africa, of how little she understood about Nathan and the Congo beforehand; of her failure to recognize the dangers that cost the life of one of her daughters and the dissolution of her family.   Of her flight from Africa and her life since, she writes movingly, “As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water.  I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me.”

You only have to read the following description of the jungle on the opening page to be drawn deeply into Kingsolver’s story.  It is both evocative of the Congo and portentous.

(My advice to any reader of ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is this: after reading each of the seven “Books,” reread this first chapter.)

“Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves.  Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight.  The breathing of monkeys.  A glide of snake belly on branch.  A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen.  And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death.  This forest eats itself and lives forever.”  (Italics mine)

As is characteristic of her prose, Barbara Kingsolver’s descriptions of the natural world are spellbinding.  Further down the same page, we are made to understand that, while Orleanna is leading her four daughters along a jungle path, she is in no way in control of events that transpire or understands how she and her daughters happened to be there in the first place.  Speaking as if observing herself from afar, she writes,

“The mother … watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate.  Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way.”  (Italics mine)

While sitting on a stream bank, her children playing around a bend, Orleanna writes, 

“A beautiful animal stands on the other side of the water.  They look up from their lives, woman and animal, amazed to find themselves in the same place.  He freezes, inspecting her with his black-tipped ears, from the gentle hump of his shoulders … Finally he surrenders his surprise, looks away, and drinks.  She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water’s skin, as if he were lapping from her hand.” 

This most rare and delicate forest creature, this okapi, a “horseish gazelle, relative of the giraffe” and this pale, white woman, as rare a sight as the okapi, calmly observing each other from across a stream.

Thinking back on her life years later, she writes,

“I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband’s confidence and the undertow of my children’s needs.” … “I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass.  I crave to be rid of them…”

“What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself?”

“Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same.  There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?” 

This is the question that consumes her since her exodus from the jungle.

Thus begins Orleanna’s struggle to make sense of the devastating experiences that would indelibly brand her for life.  Orleanna’s begins as a seventeen-year-old wife, on what appears to her to be a predictably happy path that quickly spins beyond her grasp in unexpected ways, overrun by an overwhelming force, the “riptide of her husband’s confidence.” 

Here’s how it all began: It’s the Depression.  Orleanna is living in a town called Pearl, near Jackson, Mississippi with her father, an eye doctor.  Along with her girlfriends, Orleanna attends a religious revival led by Nathan Price, a handsome, young, red-head, itinerant Baptist minister.  “We threw ourselves at Jesus with our unsaved bosoms heaving,” she writes.  Nathan took an immediate interest in Orleanna and “fell upon my unclaimed soul like a dog on a bone.  He was more sure of himself than I’d thought it possible for a young man to be, but I resisted him.”  After weeks of courting and equivocation, Orleanna’s Aunt Tess tells her, “You’re a-feeding him anyways, child, why not go on and marry him if that’s what he’s after.”   Whether or not that was what he was after, they married.  Then the war began.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, “half the men in all this world were pledged to a single war, Nathan included.”  Nathan volunteered to be a Chaplain but was sent to infantry training in Paris, Texas, instead.  From there he was sent to fight in MacArthur’s army in the Philippines where, just a few months later, he is injured and, dazed, is picked up wandering on the beach by the crew of a PT boat.

“From a Hospital bunker on Corregidor Island he wrote me a cheerful V-mail letter about his salvation by the grace of God,” Orleanna wrote. “That was the last I would ever hear from the man I’d married.”

While Nathan is recuperating, his unit is massacred.  In Orleanna’s words,

“Through the tunnels of that island fortress came wind of a horror too great to speak aloud—whispered litany that would take years to be fully disclosed to the world, and especially to me.  It would permanently curl one soldier’s heart like a piece of hard shoe leather.”  (Italics mine)

This is the genesis of “The Poisonwood Bible,” the closest we come to an understanding of the demons that possessing Nathan, gradually transforming him into someone possessed by a myopic Christian dogma—a madness.  It’s the closest we come to a sympathetic portrait of the man whose single minded religious fervor becomes a fever from which he never recovers.  It is also the point at which Orleanna’s imagined life took an abrupt turn towards the incomprehensible. 

Discharged from the Army early, Nathan returns home to Mississippi a changed man and resumes his Baptist ministry.  He had changed from “one who could laugh, … call me his ‘honey lamb,’ and trust in the miracle of good fortune…” to one who angrily scolded her when she tried to touch him “teasingly” … “Can’t you understand the Lord is watching us?”   Years later, after giving birth to four girls, including one set of twins, Orleanna declares, “I cannot believe any woman on earth has ever made more babies out of less coition.”

Nathan and Orleanna settle in Bethlehem, Georgia where they spend the next fifteen years.  It is at this point that their African story begins.  In 1959, Nathan volunteers to become a missionary in the Congo for a year.  Whether because they judged the Congo politically unstable or Nathan too unbending, the Southern Baptist Mission League advised against their going, (a detail Nathan keeps to himself,) and so they went.  The family packed up all they could carry and traveled to Kilanga, a remote village on the Kwilu River in the heart of the Congo.  Their daughter Leah says it best: “We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.”  The humorous descriptions of what they brought with them captured perfectly the giddy excitement and anticipation of a travel adventure into the unknown.

They struggled to keep their luggage below the allowable weight limit.  Then someone from the Mission League told them there was a weight limit for luggage, but not for what they could carry on their person.  Leah tells us, “We struck out for Africa carrying all our excess baggage on our bodies, under our clothes.  Also, we had clothes under our clothes…. the other goods, tools, cake-mix boxes and so forth were tucked out of sight in our pockets and under our waste bands, surrounding us in a clanking armor.” … “My Father,” she continues, “was bringing the Word of God—which fortunately weighs nothing at all.”

They are utterly unprepared for life in the Congo, which, without running water, electricity, gas or any of the conveniences of home, imposed the most primitive conditions on the family.  Quickly, their bleached flour spoils, their vegetable garden planted with seeds from home, fails miserably, and even the hammer they’ve carried from Georgia turned out to be useless, since there were no nails in the jungle.

There is also the historical backdrop that is key to understanding this novel.  Within six months or so of their arrival, in the face of increasing unrest, Belgium grants the Congo it’s independence and holds elections.  Fearing danger, especially for whites, the sponsors of their mission, Mr. and Mrs. Underdown, fly in from Stanleyville to urge Nathan and his family to leave.  Nathan refuses, ignoring the danger to his family and stubbornly holding on to his delusion that he is saving souls.  In the face of Nathan’s refusal to leave, the Mission League withdraws its meager financial lifeline, leaving the Prices to fend for themselves.

Patrice Lumumba is elected president.  However, in the face of US and Belgium – especially US – hostility, and of mining interests of southern Congo, Lumumba’s presidency lasts just fifty-one days.  The father of Congo’s independence is deposed and beaten to death.  Joseph Mubutu, a corrupt, rapacious army colonel and coup leader, becomes President.

(For more background on these events, see --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba)

Nathan, a physically imposing and domineering Southern Baptist minister, possessed by his war guilt and inflexible biblical dogma, sees his mission in the narrowest possible light—to save souls.  Nothing else matters, not even the wellbeing of his family.  As his daughter Leah observes, when speaking of the frequent funeral processions that pass their front porch, “He doesn’t seem to mind the corpses so much as the souls unsaved.  In the great tally Up Yonder, each one counts as a point against him.” 

Although unequipped for life in the jungle and cut off from financial support, the Price family struggled to survive.  Predictably, things do not go well.  Eventually, after a year of extreme hardship, events transpire that culminate in Orleanna’s and her daughters’  abrupt “exodus.”   Without other means of escape, they walk out of the Congo.  Nathan doggedly remains behind. 

We come to know Nathan only in relief, like a photo negative, viewed only through Orleanna’s and his four daughters’ eyes.

(Maybe, some day, as was done for Beowulf’s ‘Grendel’ in John Gardner’s 1971 novel by that name, Kingsolver will retell ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ in Nathan’s voice, although I doubt he would be any less a monster.)

Now, let’s talk about the daughters, whose narrations make up most of the book.  They are Rachel, sixteen; Adah and Leah, fourteen; and Ruth May, five.

Rachel, the oldest by sixteen months, is a self-absorbed teenager whose most important possession in the Congo is her mirror.  She wants nothing more than to get back to Georgia.  Upon arriving in their remote village, she declares, “Jezz oh man, wake me up when it’s over” and “…the Bobbie girdle I quit wearing right off the bat, this horrid sticky jungle being no place for Junior Figure Control.”  (Yes, as with her other books, Kingsolver serves up a considerable helping of humor, especially from the pens of these daughters.)  Rachel’s sister Leah describes Rachel this way: “[O]n the plane, she kept batting her white-rabbit eyelashes and adjusting her bright pink hairband trying to get me to notice she had secretly painted her fingernails bubble-gum pink to match.”  Rachel becomes familiar to us for her hilarious malapropisms and critical eye of her own, and for her acerbic observations in response to one assault after another perpetrated by the Congo or her father.  Of her father, she writes, “Hurray! They all cheered, but I felt a knot in my stomach.  He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.” and, when asked, “Did you know Katanga has seceded from the Congo?”  “I’m just happy to know somebody has succeeded in something.” she replies.  It turns out that Rachel, as detached as she is, is the truest reporter of events and dialogue, often punctuated with her own sardonic, malaprop-laden asides.   (I can only imagine the fun Kingsolver had writing as Rachel.  I can hear her laughing out loud, as I did, when writing lines like, “It is my girlfriends …” that helped me “… make the graceful transition to wifehood and adulteration.” And, “Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.”)

Rachel's reporting of her father tense meeting with his predecessor, Brother Fowles and his African wife and children, and Nathan’s debate about scripture with the genial Brother Fowles is sharp, enlightening and a joy to read.  (I highly recommend Rachel’s chapter, starting on page 245 of the paperback edition.)

Then there’s the twins, Leah and Adah, both cleverer than Rachel, and more complicated—less stereotypical American teenagers and more open to the Congo experience.  Leah is a tomboy who, early on, works hard to win the approval of her father, but is determined to learn the ways of the jungle, like hunting with bow and arrow. As Adah attests, “Nelson [their houseboy] shows her how to stand, close one eye, and whack her arrow trembling into the heart of a leaf.  She is a frighteningly good shot.”  Her determined embrace of Africa separates her from her Father.  She comes to view Nathan as Africans might view him, if not deranged, inconsequential.  Consequently, she loses her own religious faith, but never her earnestness, her intensity, saying at one point to her future African husband, “I want to be righteous, Anatole.  To know right from wrong, that’s all.  I want to live the right way and be redeemed.”

Her twin sister, Adah, brain damaged at birth (“Officially my condition is called hemiplagia.”) walks with a pronounced limp and has trouble speaking, but is in every other respects as clever as her twin sister.  “It is true…” Adah says, “that I do not speak as well as I can think.  But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. … Silence has many advantages.”  Besides being a sharp observing and chronicler of events, Adah’s talent or affliction, depending on how you look at it, is palindromes – reading and making up verses backwards and forwards, like, “Amen enema,” (her palindrome for her father) and “Poor Dan is in a droop.”

The youngest, Ruth May, is just five when they arrive in the Congo.  Her voice is less distinct, but she has a charisma all her own and quickly earns the affection of the village children by leading them in a game of “Mother May I” or, from their mouths, “Ma-da-meh-hi.”  Born nine years after the clutch of the first three, who had arrived within sixteen months of each other, Ruth May is Orleanna’s favorite.  Referring to her last child, she says this: “… the baby who trials her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after—oh, that’s love by a different name.  She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep.”

Of course, Africans play a vital role in this book and it is here that Kingsolver’s meticulous research and talent for empathy are on full display.  She absorbs the rich traditions, language and nature of Africa and plays them back to us in ways that make them intelligible, teaching us to appreciate and respect Africa’s struggles and rhythms, even to understand some of the subtle tones that make up the Kongolese language.  And, while not as foreign to her as Africa must have been, she achieves the same feat of affinity, as she inhabits the souls of each member of the Price family. 

The central tragedy here is that Nathan, a fundamentalist southern preacher bent on baptizing African children in the Kwilu River, a river in which an alligator had recently eaten a child, is the least suited to the task of saving African souls.   Religion, race, prejudice, cultural assumptions and ignorance conspire against his ever succeeding, especially at this critical moment as the Congo is waking from a century of colonial rule, to demand its independence. Kingsolver’s novel drives this point home: our approach to Africa ignores Africans.  The reasons for this are made manifest.

Nathan’s predecessor, Brother Fowles, who has married an African and embraced Africa on its own terms, and who plies the Kwilu River in an old barge delivering aid, put it this way: “If some of the branches have been broken off, and you who were only a wild olive shoot have been grafted in, and made to share the richness of the olive’s root, you must not look down upon the branches.  Remember that you do not support the root; the root supports you.” 

Armed with his religious dogma and southern American prejudices, Nathan is unequipped to absorb this central lesson.  Africans have their own religions passed down for milllennia; the Congolese only tolerate his; they don’t embrace it.  He brought a hammer to a jungle that uses vines and grasses to build their homes.  They have no need for nails.

The Africans of the village have indigenous knowledge acquired over centuries that it would take a lifetime for an outsider to acquire.  So too, have they been subjected to centuries of colonial rule that they have patiently endured, and for the most part, struggled to peacefully rid themselves.  Patrice Lumumba finally achieved Independence in 1960.  Yet, as was revealed more than a decade later, the United States saw Congo’s independence only through the narrow lens of the Cold War and considered Lumumba a Soviet puppet—an enemy who must be eliminated.   Speaking to CIA director Allan Dullas, Eisenhower said something to the effect that that “Lumumba should be eliminated.”  He was, and the consequences reverberate even today.

In a very real sense, ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is an allegory.  Nathan arrives in the Congo with his own prejudices and misconceptions, dragging along a reluctant family as ignorant of the environment and people there as he is, but who come to see firsthand what their preacher father is incapable of seeing.  Nathan is burdened with contempt for anyone who doesn’t accept the righteousness of his mission and burdened too with contempt for women, even those in his own family, and of the blacks that inhabit the Congo and even those whites who have learned to appreciate and love the Congo, as Brother Fowles does.  If Nathan represents a US government that views the world through its own narrowly defined interests and exaggerated fears, then the women of his family represent those who come to see, after its too late, the greed and ignorance that drives a nation’s policies, and the shameful injustice imposed on so much of the world by their own government.

Barbara Kingsolver has much to teach us here.  We have seen this story played out, time and again, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, where a powerful nation’s economic interests and imagined fears overwhelm weaker nations around the world.  There may be short-term gains, but as the bubble that is our economic empire’s arch through history pops, these chickens will come home to roust.

While ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is allegorical below the surface, foremost, it is a moving story about a family caught up in its own history; lives they can barely understand themselves decades later. As Orleanna writes, referring to that rare okapi she spied across a stream, “I didn’t know any name for what I’d seen until some years afterwards, in Atlanta, when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in a public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”  

This speaks to the universal human condition to which we all are subject.  It is what makes this book an enduring classic.

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