the latest book you have to read

I’ve just read one of those books that, after completion, forces the reader into the role of evangelist. Everyone I know who is remotely literate, I will come at with this book, saying You must read this. And then, of course, most of them won’t, or if they do they won’t love it the way I do, and then, however briefly, I will have to hate them.

The book is Pearl by Mary Gordon. It was just published this year. I’ve never read anything by Mary Gordon before, though she has a very distinguished literary career behind her and this is something like her eight novel. I will, of course, be hungrily devouring her others after I’ve given this one ample time to sink in. Either that, or I’ll shrink from them in fear, as I sometimes do with the other books by the author of a book I’ve just fallen in love with, because I can’t abide the thought of reading something else by them that isn’t this book. That, I’m fully aware, sounds completely insane. I usually get over it.

I could start by describing the plot of Pearl, or by listing its heavy themes. I don’t know which approach would be most likely to sell you on the book—and understand, my motive here is to make you read it. Well, all right. Here are the bare bones of the plot: In Dublin, winter of 1998, a twenty-year old American exchange student named Pearl chains herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy. She hasn’t eaten for six weeks or drank anything for a week, and is determined to die a public death by starvation, to bear witness to the human will to harm. There are smaller, more specific reasons for her act that tie into this larger one, to do with Irish politics and her disillusioned relationships with members of the radical wing of the IRA. Her force-of-nature, liberal mother, in New York City, receives word of what she is doing from the State Department, and flies to Dublin to save her life, undone by the realization that she does not know who her daughter is.

It sounds horribly bleak, and it is, but it exhilarated me for some reason. I think it is because Pearl takes on so passionately the questions that have haunted me for as long as I’ve been cognizant of how cruel human beings can be to one another. Such as, how on earth do you bear the weight of this knowledge? How do you understand your own capacity for harming others, and how do you fight for justice without becoming a destroyer? My identification and sympathies drifted from the mother and daughter in a very disconcerting way. In the beginning, I was as annoyed with the daughter as the police and embassy personnel who are grossly inconvenienced by her “witness.” How on earth could anyone believe that voluntary death by starvation serves anyone or anything? No one has any idea what to do with the self-starving first-world witness, but the book makes us see the dangers of dismissing her offhand as selfish or pathetic.

Then I meet the mother—she’s the kind of liberal I’ve never understood, the person who works for the right causes without ever understanding what it means to feel despair, who has never tried to see the victims of oppression as people, even though she’s build a life around the fight for justice. To the question “How do you bear the weight of such inhumanity?” she can only answer, “Why would you try?” And to a daughter who despairs over the human capacity for harm: “Haven’t I protected you from that?” You want to shake her for her lack of imagination, and yet she has a kind of wisdom that people like Pearl work years for: that a person isn’t meant to know the meaning of everything, that all we can do is what’s in front of us. The problem, for Pearl (and for me), is how her mother got there; her politics are developed out of reaction, not empathy.

There’s another theme in the book that struck me powerfully—that is the desire for purity, and its relationship to martyrdom. I’m sure that some people will label this an “anorexia book” because of the centrality of self-starvation to the plot, but Pearl is not concerned with being fat—her anorexia, if that is what it is, hardly falls into our popular understanding of this disease, though perhaps it should, I don’t know. She starves herself in emulation of Irish prisoners of the British who went on hunger strikes, and then to pursue a sense of lightness that eliminates the dirt of humanity. Purity. In flashbacks, we learn about Pearl’s father, a Cambodian doctor who came to the United States to tell the stories of the Khmer Rouge, but ultimately returned to Southeast Asia and disappeared. He is concerned with purity, as well, but in his case it’s a well-informed fear of the whole concept: “…it is a dangerous idea. I am a scientist, and I know that nothing alive is pure. To be pure is to be impervious to change, to mixture. Change and mixture is our lot, our lot as living things.” And, “It seems greatly desirable to be only one thing. To be, to do one thing fully, with no contradictions. To be a closed circle, impenetrable, impermeable. This, I believe, makes people feel safe.”

We see Pearl as a closed circle, when starvation has whittled her down to nothing but certainty and the conviction that her own actions are right and justified. Then, as she is force-fed through tubes, she gains back her capacity for hunger, and the messiness of being human shatters her purity. She loses the conviction that death is the right choice for her. She is devastated at her loss of certainty. It’s one of the most resonant and chilling things I’ve encountered in fiction for a long time. In eliminating all of her own doubt, she forged a connection to the people she feared, people so secure in their own convictions that they had no understanding of what it means to take life.

Gordon doesn’t try to resolve any of this in a neat package, which is part of what makes this novel great. I’m no literary critic, but I’d say great in the weighty sense. This is one of the best modern novels I’ve ever read. I’ve passed the stage where it’s fun to have a birthday, but one of the rewards of getting older is that I can read something like this and think, Yes, I understand this. I know what she’s talking about.

not that i'm bitter

This morning the local NPR station reported on the physical assault of a University of Kansas religion professor who recently withdrew his special topics course on intelligent design as a religious mythology. The professor’s course, which first pissed off the right-wingers by labeling intelligent design a “mythology,” became doomed when the prof in question sent an e-mail to some students containing derisive remarks about the religious fundamentalists who have been pushing this ideology into our state’s biology classrooms. The e-mail somehow became public, and the poor man retracted the course rather than deal with firebombs in his classroom or whatever he was going to have coming to him should he attempt to soldier on. And the speculation of violence is not hyperbolic fancy, as evidenced by his recent experience. According to the NPR report, the professor noticed a vehicle tailgating his own car, the night before last, I believe, and after this went on for awhile, some Y-chromosome-related insanity came over him and he stopped his car, got out, and proceeded to confront his tailgaters. When asked why they were behaving in such a manner, they responded in time-honored redneck fashion, by beating the shit out of him. Fortunately, it appears he did not sustain major injuries.

There was a time when such an incident would make me think twice about that pro-gay-marriage bumper sticker I’m thinking of buying myself for Christmas, but since moving to the Bible Belt I’ve become more determined than ever to make these sons of bitches eat my free speech, dammit. That said, it might be time for liberals in Kansas to go in for some en masse martial arts training. Not that I’m espousing violence as a means of solving problems, understand, but I believe in self-defense, and if we are now in danger of physical assault merely for our personal beliefs about the origins of life on this planet, I can’t even begin to count the number of ways in which I’m screwed. They may start beating me for being a vegetarian, who knows. God, I’m proud to be a Kansan.

What is wrong with this state? (Hey—this is funny—I just wrote that sentence completely forgetting that someone else recently posited this question and then answered it in the book What’s the Matter with Kansas? I admit I haven’t read it.) Actually, I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s wrong with it. Drained by the vacuousness of American culture, sensing a dearth of meaning in our public sphere, victimized by the systematic dismantling of everything resembling local culture, Kansans have let themselves fall prey to the religious right’s capitalization on these problems. Rather than exercise the thought and obtain the education (and by this I don’t necessarily mean book-learnin’ or advanced degrees) required to understand the roots of these problems, they go the easier route. They suck up the consoling religiosity that promises meaning and in-crowd comfort in exchange for their adherence to a list of allegedly moral dictums. In response to all those oppressive societal problems, they are offered a convenient list of scapegoats: immigrants, fetus-killers, gay people. It’s a system that celebrates a lazy sense of logic, and we like that here, as rigorous logic marks you as overeducated and therefore vulnerable to beating.

Do I sound uppity? I don’t give a fuck anymore. I don’t see any possibility of reasoning with people who think this way anyway. I guess it could be argued that at the very least I shouldn’t aggressively alienate them, but tell me, how can I avoid alienating a group that is mortally offended by almost everything I believe? I mean, if I may stoop to the schoolyard level for a moment, why the hell is it that uber-conservatives never worry that they are alienating or offending people who don’t think that abortion should be illegal, creationism should be taught in public schools, or gay people should be stripped of rights and driven to the margins of society?

People like me, we want a society where diversity is supported, where we can have differing views about the origins of the universe and not bully each other too much over them. People like the folks who demonized that KU professor, particularly those who resorted to physical violence against him—I really have no choice but to think that they’d prefer a society where citizens are tortured and intimidated into proscribed views about just about everything. I really couldn’t begin to guess what words like “democracy” and “freedom” actually mean to these people. Apparently something, since they act like they own these concepts, a phenomenon I find increasingly galling. Just get the hell out of town, I want to scream at them, and leave the freedom for those of us who actually enjoy it.

There’s really only one conclusion I’ve come to from all of this, and that is that God knew what she was doing when she gave us such interesting and variable weather here in the Midwest. (Hey, did you notice that I called God a she? What are you gonna do now, beat me?) It may parch and pound our crops or rip them out by the roots, but at least liberals and conservatives have some unifying subject about which to converse. Many a family reunion would end in open war were it not for the inexhaustible subject of weather. Were it not for our common foes, the ice storms and the tornadoes, flag-draped Bible-thumpers might even now be circling the city of Lawrence to burn all of us peace-loving liberals out of our beds. Seeing as we’re such a threat to “freedom” and “democracy.”

Damn, the expelling of righteous fury feels SO good.

Briefly.

hostages

I just learned that four of the hostages who have just been taken in Iraq are members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a peace-making organization run by Mennonites, Quakers, and the Church of the Brethren. They live among Iraqi civilians and travel without weapons, and have been in Iraq since 2002 learning and reporting on the stories of ordinary people. They were, to my knowledge, the only aid group present during the 2003 invasion, and have been advocating for an end to the occupation since then. I don't know any of the Iraqi team members, but I've known a number of people affiliated with CPT over the past ten years, and I am completely heartsick to hear of this. Please, please, pray for their safety and release.