Euphoria

Euphoria is a work of historical fiction loosely based on the life of Margaret Mead. The author, Lily King, ties her narrative to events from Mead’s time in Papua New Guinea, when she and her husband, New Zealander Reo Fortune, met the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson.

The fictional anthropologist at the novel’s center, Nell Stone, is searching for a tribe to study along the Sepik river in Papua New Guinea, with her Australian husband, Schuyler Fenwick, known as Fen. Nell and Fen spent a disastrous few months with a tribe too warlike to be comfortably studied, and want to find somewhere they can settle for a while and potentially observe more egalitarian gender roles. They meet a British anthropologist, Andrew Bankson, who tells them of a remote tribe who fit their criteria. He leads them up to “Lake Tam” where they are welcomed by the people known as the Tam.

Before reading this book, I had some familiarity with Mead. I read Coming of Age in Samoa at some point, possibly in college. However, I knew next to nothing of her work in other places, and absolutely nothing about her relationships. I chose not to look anything up about her as I read the novel, so I wouldn’t spend the whole time attempting to separate fact from fiction. King apparently invented the tribes and their names, although she borrowed details from the tribes studied by Mead, Fortune, and Bateson. Since I became utterly absorbed in the descriptions of these fictional tribes and some of their specific members, I find it an impressive feat of research and creation.

The book came out a decade ago and I acquired it at the time, but did not read it right away. Though I heard good things about it, it never seemed to line up with my other interests. At the moment, it is compelling to me because it is an example of historical fiction that comes alive in the telling. It may be set in the early 1930s—and is even tied to a very specific era in its field of knowledge—yet it still manages to seem contemporary. The struggles and concerns of the characters are timeless.

During the ten-year period when Euphoria was sitting on my shelf, I read a different book by King, Writers and Lovers. I am sometimes skeptical of novels that deal too closely with the writing life, such as novels set in MFA programs. They can come off as too self-referential or hermetically-sealed. Writers and Lovers won me over, for although it is about a recent MFA grad trying to write and get published, it mostly deals with her grief over her mother’s death—and with her waitressing job. A relative of mine described it as having the feel of a first novel that King reworked after leaving it in a drawer, where the story ripened rather than grew stale.

Grief also becomes a window into the world of Euphoria, especially for Bankson, giving his observations a palpable immediacy. His two older brothers died, one in the First World War, the other committing suicide after the expectations for the dead soldier land on him. Since those same expectations threaten to crush Bankson himself, his grief is a living, breathing thing, his brothers constantly with him. It is as if they stand on the shore of death beckoning to him. This is especially true because he has been in a remote part of Papua New Guinea for two years when the story begins. Without other like-minded people to talk to, he is slowly losing his mind. Enter Nell and Fen, who become a lifeline for him.

Nell and Fen, exhausted and discouraged after their failed attempt at field work, see Bankson as an answer to their own problems, since he can point them toward more fruitful study.

A major theme of the book is the nature of work, the shape and drive of it. Bankson’s father wanted him to be a scientist, like himself and like his brother killed in the war. But Bankson is drawn to anthropology, which does not have the structure or quality of proof of the hard sciences. His whole time in the field, he is haunted by doubt about what he is doing—until he meets Nell. Nell has a gift for this particular work, she has a feel for her goals and how how to achieve them. Even when she is sitting with several children in her lap playing a game, she is taking notes with her free hand. And her notes mean something. They can be woven into theories about culture that the whole world will consider.

Nell can handle the intangible nature of the work in a way the men around her cannot. Bankson admires her and wants to be more like her, but Fen resents her success and tries to outdo her—in more tangible and ultimately more destructive ways. It would seem that being a woman is an advantage in this situation, presumably because Nell is more observant about the implications for motherhood and childrearing and gender roles in their own society, which she has had more practice studying all her life.

Intellectual history is littered with stories of women pioneering new fields of study only to be crowded out by male colleagues once the discipline becomes more established. They can exist at the margins for longer, on crumbs of support, because they expect it less. And they see possibilities at the edges of current disciplines that men do not, because the margins are where they are allowed to exist. They inch over to places they can roam free—or at least their minds can. The story of the woman responsible for mRNA vaccines comes to mind, as an example.

Once I finished the book and started to do more research into Mead’s life, I wondered how much of the narrative was informed by the stinging posthumous critique of her work by a male anthropologist, Derek Freeman, who contended that Mead made observations to suit her theories rather than the other way around. The fictional Nell Stone does not get the long career Mead had in reality, and I was curious if this choice reflected the damage Freeman inflicted on Mead’s legacy.

This book lives up to the now ten-year-old hype about it. King’s work has great depth and power to it, and I will now read anything she writes.