Euphoria by Lily King

Euphoria

by Lily King

Grove Press, 2015

ISBN: 978-0802123701

288 p.p.

Margaret Mead was once an anthropologist exploring Papa New Guinea, Bali, Samoa, and other remote places; and furiously taking notes that would later evolve into controversial books like Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperate in Three Primitive Societies (1931). Euphoria, by Lily King, is a fictional novel roughly based on the lives of Margaret Mead (Nell), Gregory Bateson (Bankson), and Reo Fortune (Fen), and their chance meeting in the Sepik River in Papa New Guinea.

The book begins from Nell’s perspective and then switches to Bankson’s perspective, after which Nell’s point-of-view is only told through her journal entries. The central conflict of Euphoria is the love triangle between Bankson, Nell, and Fen; but the book is also an interesting fictional adventure story.

Where Euphoria shines is in its analysis of our culture at large. Nell challenges monogamy. Her idea of love is one in which she is not forced to settle down with any one person. She does not wish to owe her full self to one human being. Euphoria also compares human temperament. Fen is ruled by his emotions. His idea of study is to go out and build a boat with the men in the tribe. He hardly takes notes and never asks questions. He does not wish to study these people; he wishes to be a part of their culture. Fen wishes for dominance in every interaction he has, but he cannot control Nell and this angers him. In some ways, Fen is stereotypically masculine, but really I think he wishes to return to normalcy. Fen does not like this new society where women have opinions and men do not have control. He wants uniformity and conformance. Lastly, the book questions the role of the observer: Is it best to remain impartial, as a scientist would, or to ask probing, sometimes rude questions, as Nell does?

King decided to make Bankson the main character because she felt this character was “more natural, more intimate.” Bankson yearns for human connection, but specifically Western connection, as he feels lonely when he is surrounded by people in the tribe. Bankson is searching for who he is. Internally, he feels broken. Not from his work, but, like Bateson the historical person, from the loss of his two brothers. Right before Bankson meets Nell and Fen, he attempts to commit suicide, “Perhaps all suicides are happy in the end.” Bankson fills his pockets with rocks and prepares to die. Luckily, Bankson’s suicide is unsuccessful when he is saved by some fishermen who scold him for his foolishness. After his suicide attempt, Bankson heads to a party, “I was going to be alive for Christmas after all.” Nell is Bankson’s wake-up call—such a sharp turn from the usual romance, where the heroine flounders and the hero saves. Bankson is the one lost and concerned with his own troubles. He is consumed by his emotions and finds it difficult to look past his own troubles. When he finally does have friends, he complains that these friends have brought troubles with them. Nell and Fen’s marriage is already fractured by the time they meet Bankson and he acts as a virtual buffer between the two. His loneliness is now replaced by passion for Nell.

Fen and Nell have just left the Mumbanyo tribe earlier than expected, and Fen is not pleased with that. Nell made them leave because she did not feel connected to them and feared them. They were too harsh and cruel of a culture in her eyes. Nell’s purpose is bigger than simply making money or even making history, she wants to understand other cultures and she could not understand the Mumbanyo. Nell sees the big picture. She knows that what she is doing matters. Although she does love many people (men and women), her work is what she finds stimulating study, but as real people with real ideas about the world. On the outside, she is dirty and sick with malaria, but in the inside she is driven and this is what makes her character so interesting. She is not just tagging along with Fen; she is the reason they have funding and drives most of their research.

Nell wishes to prove to the world that there is not simply one kind of society. “I think above else it is freedom I search for in my own work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be whatever they need to be.” Nell is not stupid. She knows that “the world is deaf,” and her ideas will simply be picked apart and dissected to find the most sensational piece for a magazine. The West will likely never change their ways, but she feels it is important to at least preserve what is left of these tribes. Most of Nell’s magic comes from the way that she studies. She feels that each tribe she visits has a different “flavor” and no one else can truly understand this flavor except by living in that tribe, speaking with them, and understanding them. She hates that others will only see “black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages.”

The debasing of Nell’s professional writing is hauntingly similar to what actually happened to Mead herself. Once regarded as a great anthropologist, her work was picked apart and sensationalized. Especially parts of Sex and Temperate, because of its celebration of sexual desire in children. The book that Nell wrote, The Children of Kirakira, was basically the same book that Mead wrote, and she was lauded and celebrated for the same reasons. Nell made conclusions based not just on impartial observation; she questioned what the people she studied did and why they did it. This is one of the reasons that Bankson is attracted to Nell. He admires her freedom and her mind. “For so long, I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating and I needed to see her again.”

King introduces these three anthropologists as young explorers. They all seek the next big idea. The jungle is dirty and dangerous, and this story is filled with danger. Throughout the novel, the character’s desires only lead them to despair. Passion reverberates off the pages: passion between Nell and Bankson, passion between all three, and passion for what they are doing. Nell, Fen, and Bankson work through an idea, called “The Grid” (Mead’s version, “The Squares,” was never published), and feel as though their minds have become one. Even this cannot keep them together, though. As passion brought them together, passion also tears them apart. The desire to possess in any way is punished in this novel and in the end they are all punished for desire. Nell’s ideas do live on. Her selfless desire to understand and her search for freedom are celebrated and I think this feels true to the memory of Margaret Mead who is still celebrated for her work. Nell’s passion lies in finding “euphoria” which she describes as that moment about two months in, “when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”

King crosses the boundary into biography by writing a character so similar to Mead, but she does not stay there. The novel takes on its own journey, separate from Mead’s life. Euphoria is mystical, romantic, and filled with dangerous adventure (physical danger and danger of the heart). King tells a captivating story that kept me hooked the whole way through.

***

Lily King is an American novelist. Her first novel, The Pleasing Hour won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second book, The English Teacher, was a Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Her third novel, Father of the Rain, was a New York Times Editors Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year and winner of both the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Maine Fiction Award. Euphoria won her the Kirkus Prize for Fiction in 2013 and was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Awards. It has already been translated into numerous languages and has been optioned for a film.