Euphoria

Euphoria, by Lily King, could have been called Young Anthropologists in Love. It takes place in New Guinea in the 1930s, with a love triangle erupting amongst a married couple and another man. It mixes the life of embedded scientists and a kind of torrid soap opera.

Of course, when one thinks of women anthropologists in the '30s, one thinks of Margaret Mead, who may be the only anthropologist that a person can come up with off the top of her head. Indeed, King has fictionalized her story, along with her husband, Reo Fortune, and the man she would later marry, Gregory Bateson. King focuses on the period when she is married to Fortune (here called Schuyler Fenwick) and studying a tribe called the Tam (all tribes in the novel are fictionalized) and Bateson (called Andrew Bankson) has fallen in love with Mean (known in the book as Nell Stone).

I suppose it was for legal reasons that King changed the names of her characters, or perhaps it was because she changed key details, but anyone can suss it out, especially since Nell is famous after writing a book about the sexuality of young South Sea island children (Mead wrote Coming of Age in Samoa). So once we get the past the roman a clef nature of the book, I wonder, is it worth reading?

To be sure the prose is quite good and it isn't often we read about anthropologists in the field. I was interested in how they live with the tribe--it's not a fly-by-night operation--they stay for months. I was interested to read: "Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the religious belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model." On a more practical bent, we get: "There is no privacy through a mosquito net."

The novel is mostly narrated by the character of Bankson, scion of a British family, who can't quite understand Stone's Americaness, yet he falls for her. It's hard to wonder if this is because she is the only white woman he has seen for years. She falls for him, too, but it seems mostly due to the unstable nature of Fenwick, who runs off with a tribesman for Australia, only to return in disgrace.

Euphoria (the title is what Stone feels when she first finds herself beginning to understand a new tribe) is an intellectual's novel that tickles the romantic bone. It works better as the former than the latter, as it is more through provoking that emotionally engaging. I fancied sentences like this one: "When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?" than the sexual passages that finally bubble up when Bankson and Stone get busy.

This book was named one of the Ten Best by the New York Times. I thought it was okay, but that distinction is a vast over-rating. I think I'd rather read a biography of Mead.