Review: Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry

Jayber Crow opens with a riff on the opening of Huckleberry Finn*, admonishing interpreters and explainers of the novel, taking a more fitting revenge on the offerors of cheap analysis than the summary execution that Twain recommended. (As for me, the subtext is staring me right in the chops, so it's with a heavy heart that I accept my banishment.) It's an interesting contrast. I read Twain with a cutting sense of humor and sarcasm, a conflicted soul and a precise stylist, a sense of innocence that he embraced or lambasted with varying degrees of intent. I confess to a preference for the more playful style, and with Twain I do feel a certain sense of Yankee homerism, as well as a minor resonance with a tone that I often try to achieve. I'd say it's that divided spirit, but then here's Berry again, telling us that someone must be "troubled enough in their own hearts to have something to say." Maybe it's all a matter of delivery. Berry's writing is calm and mature, the narration clipped of any cynicism beyond maybe a gentle head shake as Jayber muses on the past. Words are chosen deliberately, in short sentences, and there are hardly any contractions used in the prose. It is a slow voice, like a beloved grandfather saying: stop, sit, listen. He weights everything with a sad foreknowledge of the future. There's a danger of saccharine here, but Berry is in command of the prose, and his heart is sufficiently troubled. The writing is often beautiful.

The novel, as you can pick up from the cover, is the memoir of an elderly narrator from the river town of Port William, Kentucky. He's a bachelor, a barber, janitor, and gravedigger by trade (which contents him well enough), a man of few words, who is excluded from certain of the upstanding social circles. But using his own sparing language, Berry gradually paints him as a man of deep and sensitive character. Jayber gradually decides to join the "membership" of the community, and tells various stories of its people and himself. Like all of us, Jayber Crow sees his world as hopeful and vibrant at the time of his youth, and as lost and dying when he is old. That the age of this man is meant to accurately reflect the Port William's health is a novelist's conceit. In his understanding of Port William, Jayber sees loss of farm space as an inevitable component of the march of civilization. Introduction of debt financing and a consumption economy (as I've recently babbled) to an agricultural community that was formerly self-sufficient is one part of it, but it's more a matter of overdevelopment, of the quiet and insensate expansion of powerful machinations into quiet rural life. Switters managed to pick the one quote in the whole damn book that rubbed me the wrong way, which used the word "scientific" to describe this progress, and I can't quite agree with that, even though I liked the other 14,000 words on the subject very much. Berry is pushing for simplicity here, and Jayber himself, the literary autodidact and chronicler of natural connections, is a simple man who doesn't by any means embody ignorance. It's a distinction which I appreciate, and if we can find a world where those two concepts don't correlate, it seems like a good one to live in. (Would that it's where this one was going.) But there are crimes of connectedness (just like there are sins of segregation), and the loss of the simpler community is a very real loss. We're offered a eulogy for it here, each departure catalogued as a tug on individual heartstrings.

In order to perform as a narrator, Jayber has to be both an observer and an insider. Berry accomplishes this by giving him a background that's common to novel characters. The familiar stuff is all there: the young orphan, the boarding school, the prodigious and independent reader, the outcast, the nature-lover, the reprobate, the unrequited lover with a hope of something like redemption: these are roles more common to the population of literature (and people who resort to literature) than, I think, to your typical small-town barbers. I suppose you could look at it the other way too, and say that as a habitual reader of novels, that's the format in which Jayber is likely to represent his own life. That story of unresolved affection is for one Mattie Keith (later Chatham), and is telegraphed early, but brought into the story at leisure. The central Port William story is the transformation and fate of the Keith farm over a couple of generations, which I imagine was meant by Berry to be a synecdoche for the casualties of the march of progress. Jayber's life story sometimes seems tacked on around this longish episode, possibly as a vehicle to give more views of the little society. His infatuation with Mattie is, I think, meant to mirror his feeling for the town, and the youthful Odyssey and the establishment of a home by the river** are meant to further fill out his sense of love for the place. It feels a little episodic, but Jayber Crow's understanding of the place feels solid and heartfelt.

Port William at its peak is almost an idealized farm town, and certainly the Keith farm is thrown up as an ideal approach of resource management, independence, and honest labor. I can see the inspiration in there. It's also a southern tobacco-growing town with hardly any black people, suspiciously insulating it from history. (Kentucky didn't really maintain the plantations that other southern states managed, but less-bad is still unconscionable. It's written out because I don't think Berry wants his paean to the farm to include the forced indenture of a whole population.) The town is also carefully isolated by its ruralness, connected to the outside world (in its best times) by only the narrow thread of the river. Although it's filled up with real people, I don't quite believe in Port William, at least not as a typical place. And it's not that I have to: the setting actually feels like well-written science fiction, where consistent application or removal of some real-world constraints can illustrate aspects of the world better the actual muddy past can. Call it America's Shire, and when Jayber goes There and Back Again, it's to witness the filthy industrial machine, the "real world", that'd eventually overrun the place.

(I also can't see the Kentucky River agricultural civilization as timelessly as Jayber can. Anyone living there, say, 200 years before Jayber Crow might have had a similar reaction to Whitey wandering by, cutting down all the trees, and scaring away the game. Sustainable local or regional agricultural models do certainly get some better credit than mechanized ones, having in some cases stood for many centuries pre-industry. Farming technology was slow but hardly static in the east and west, and even then not without environmental effects like deforestation and soil erosion, but it still looks like a much better record for stability of human population, at least if you don't mind the occasional famine.)

Eventually we get to the love story. I can be a softie for tales of true love denied, but taken without text, subtext, or analysis, it's an infatuation that came to Jayber's life far too late. Developing an excruciating crush when you are not a teenager can't possibly be healthy, when opportunities to grow into your senses come up considerably less frequently. If you can take the situation objectively, Jayber's feelings for Mattie were a lot like those of a 14-year-old nerd, and I kept wondering what her view of him might have been all those years. His strict hands-off affection must have been obvious and intense, and her own cautious distance was a perfectly logical response. I don't take Jayber as an unreliable sort of narrator--I trust the sincerity and chastity of his feelings--and of course a not-much-deeper reading says that this emotion is about more than just Mattie. A great theme of his story is learning how to love the world that won't necessarily love you back. It forms the essence of Jayber's religious ruminations. Like his younger self, my own agnosticism comes from an unwillingness to accept the Biblical (or equivalent) story as some kind of useful description, accurate history or comprehensive moral map. On the other hand, I very much understand the idea of loving the world so much that it can break your heart. The very idea breaks my heart. Does Christianity really follow from that? Is it too generous (or too insulting) to humanize God that way? I don't quite see it, but then I'm still far from Jayber's age. Or Berry's.


* One of the small handful of things I actually remember from Twain's novel, having last read it when I was 11 or so. I've read other Twain more recently.

** Quite a lot of these associations are switters' fault.

[some edits]

Pay It Forward

Last time it was Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, this time it was Wendell Berry. From 1952, The Space Merchants was satirizing indebtedness in the industrial sector, imagining a system of corporate indentureship where wages, by design, could only contribute to paying debt, which of course accrued faster than the pay could cancel it in the company town. It must have been funnier in foresight. In Berry's novel, Jayber Crow (review pending), it's a look back on the 1950s, when mechanized farming really started taking off, and we're given object lesson in debt and sustainability, where the borrowing against the yield for consolidation and growth broke the land use cycle and stabbed the community in the heart. (If I find a handy pull-quote or two, I'll add them later.) It's an interesting piece of historicity: Jayber's reminiscences take place a good century after America's Populist movement. Agriculture was already getting infected with finance in the eighteen-fifties, with fungible grain and futures trading already starting to deliver their mixed blessings. I'm not 100% sure where I stand with respect to agrarian Populism. I'm certainly sympathetic, and I think centralized industrial agriculture has been civilization-scale fuckup, but I also think shrinking the world with technology and transportation has largely been a good thing. Or could've been at least.

And of course (like the Populists), my interest is self-centered and my worldview is heavily projected. I'm more familiar with the debt traps of the modern knowledge-work economy where we aren't actually making anything, and they're alarming in their own way. Wage growth has been poor over the last thirty years, and has been nonexistent for the past ten. Meanwhile, household debt has skyrocketed (and recently declined a little with house prices, but remains enormous; I'll add some charts later if I can find any that summarize it neatly), and loan-based assets (like your house, your car, and your education) are more essential for existence within the model and have likewise puffed up with dubious prices, and escape-free legal clauses. With new legislation designed to prevent it, we can look forward to more creative gouging from our credit card masters (I need to ask what the "minimum interest charge" was all about). Instead of exchanging our labor for income, we're exchanging it for debt. (Poetically just, maybe, considering what our labor produces, but it's no way to live.) Individually, we may or may not be doing okay, but collectively, we're getting screwed.

Like most technologies, the indecency of debt depends a lot on how it's used. Anyone who's made an online purchase can appreciate how great is that liquidity that easy debt (or really, the easy transfer of funds). It is not difficult to justify borrowing when it's temporary, borrowing a little when times are tough, or for the sake of convenience, provided you can expect to repay in the normal course of things. I want to complain about what I guess is called structural debt, the kind that most of us plebes are stuck with, whether it's the mortgage, student loans, or all those pizzas we ate in college. It's those debts that are caught up inexorably with our working lives that really control us.

From a personal vantage, these running obligations are basically liveable, even though they tend to stay you in your course. We're still doing the same things, approximately: working and getting paid, and, unless we're producing our own essentials, paying for approximately the same things. That big tab sure as shit removes freedom though. Try being without a paid job, downgrading your existence to raise a family, or raise food, or even to actually observe life for a moment as it passes you by. It's like forward differencing, you get the same area under the curve, but instead of working with existing data, each time step is one out into the unknown and poorly modeled future. (Or maybe I'm wanting model-predictive control as my analogy. Do they make economists take control theory? They probably should. Understanding dynamic systems is helpful. e.g.)

Even temporary debt presumes your income will grow or at least remain predictable. Taking on a deficit restricts your future. Debt is the engine that drives the treadmill of the rat race.

People who are not you are have gotten rich off of your debt, of course, and they've fought getting poor when you couldn't pay it. It's diffuse, and there's a great deal of overlap because debt issuers are also employees and consumers and there are a million modes of lending, and a lot of small investors, but if we're looking at the extremes, it's the issuers that generally have the upper hand in society. You can argue that there's mutual benefit when it comes to lending, and I think that's probably true. Lending can enrich the borrower too, enabling him to do things that can produce growth (although even when it ends up win-win, the lender and the debtor are not advantaged to change roles), but I don't believe that this is the equilibrium that naturally emerges when the debt-holders are left out of the rule-making loop, and when the debt-originators become few in number. As human history generally exhibits.

It's appropriate to contrast government debt with private debt. Government borrowing also performs the task of supplying liquidity for social programs, but in addition, it offers the service of a stable investment for excess capital. (It's one of those things that works out in an argument of scale, like insurance pools, conservation, or colonialism, when they fall to the state, or to an agency with similar scope.) In that case, the debt-holders are more diffuse than, say, mortgage lenders, but you can worry about the concentration or composition of power there too if you want to, and a different set of worriers pops up quadrennially in this country. The government (or at least its quasi-subsidiary banks) also has additional powers over its debt, controlling things like money supply, exchange rates, and the overall amount of securities it chooses to issue. I'm not excited about the concentration of those powers either, but in bonds, there's a point to their stability, and the monetary entities are at least countered by the fairly democratic population of bondholders, who'd all be pissed if things changed obviously and quickly.

No one likes a welcher, but weaseling people into debt has got to be the bigger evil. The government also makes laws that govern all of these loan contracts, and can you tell me that, say, fractional reserve lending isn't letting independent banks that hold people's debt fuck with the money supply to their favor? Nominally, the U.S. government represents us marks as well as the sharks, but the large banks have little such interest. Legal conditions that enabled easy and high-level private financing have correlated to tuition and real estate bubbles--is there causation at play there too? Someone is making money off those deals.

The basic idea of the liquidity model that works for my home finances seems to make sense for the government, however. My economic expertise is obviously shaky, but there are some differences there too: the bureaucracy doesn't have to eat, but I suppose it can identify baselines for its services or for its existence. Deficit spending to spur economic growth isn't quite the same mechanism as our household plans, but it's still demanding that the future get bigger. I've worried about this a lot. Given limited resources, that can't really be a good thing.

On the other hand, we can take government spending from a money-is-not-real perspective, and keep in mind that money describes the economy, and not vice versa. Sure, the central deal with capitalism is that money is a good representation of our economic activity, and that under rules of its exchange, we can optimize producing or doing some things. (Just like you can take silly unintuitive thermodynamic variables like "fugacity" or do a coordinate transformation to more easily describe or design certain systems, with the caveat that in physics and engineering, those math tricks still describe real things.) The Populist farmer/economists are interesting in that their understanding of the fundamental relations of money to labor and commodities was a lot keener than most people's. Money is a contract, ultimately a matter of mutual agreement or of law. The dynamics of that can drive human behavior, but to a large degree it's as reflective of our human organization as the law is. People making, doing, or exchanging stuff is what the economy is, and we can spur that in various ways and then define the accounting around it. Arguably, that's the way we always have done it when someone has had greater access to Da Rules. The wealth distribution, even where it goes negative, describes power concentrating or decentralzing as much as it is a mechanism of those processes. By that measure, this place isn't particularly progressive or democratic.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get to work here.

Review: Debt, by David Graeber

(Full title: Debt: The First 5000 Years)

In these very pages, over the last several years, a sufficiently masochistic reader can dig in to find me struggling toward some basic criticisms of the modern study of economics. One of the basic complaints I've raised is that the field which claims to predict human behavior ignores far too much relevant humanity. Rather notably, it assumes away the dynamics of power and control, and as well presents a distorted and jaded view of the positive human motivations by which we estimate value. David Graeber has problems with this too, and he takes it further than I ever would have thought to. The central claim in Debt is that the majority of the economy, for the majority of history, actually arose from these interpersonal relationships and values, and not that truck and barter shuck and jive. The discussion relies less on neatly-tied case studies, or on any ideological paradigm (although he does make ethical judgments), and more on a broadly scoped anthropological and historical understanding of how lives were lived across time, among different classes, in different societies. There's a fair amount of jigsaw work in the earliest examples (as their must be when it comes to understanding very old or remote societies), and like all history, it's qualitative (although admirably inclusive), but holy fuck is it ever refreshing to read someone base his ideas about human economic interaction by observing human interaction, instead of burying it in a mountain of assumption-fudging artificially precise quantitation.

The opening bombshell (which I've linked to once or twice) is that, unlike the textbook discussion, there has never been any historical barter economy worthy of note, and that exchange using impersonal coin tended to arrive centuries after institutionalized credit arrangements. Most economic affairs were more typically conducted using a more or less elaborate organization of debts and favors, where members of a community would lend and borrow with varying levels of formality, and with individual cultural character too. It's also observed that community- and family-minded people are motivated by a "baseline communism" (as he cautiously calls it, meaning that at some point, we're all in this together) and tendency for hierarchical organization, most of which tends to get underplayed by the various modern economic theories.

Graeber divides the economic history of the globe broadly into pre-monetary times, ancient urban societies and the following imperial ages, the middle ages, and the capitalist era (not failing to speculate on whatever the hell it is we've transitioned into now). In discussing the early development of money, Graeber utilizes what he can in that period of history between writing and coin (the earliest writing known, after all, is ancient Sumerian credit accounting). He also leans heavily here on isolated cultures as they had been encountered and studied by Europeans, and the social and economic ways they reacted to the contact. (It tended to go badly for them.) Precious money-like objects, when actually used, tended to be reserved exclusively for social, human exchange (that is, for the not easily quantifiable--for men to woo women, in most cases), and while tokens have also been frequently used to keep track of debts and favors, this too was built on interpersonal trust and a sense of community. It's a recurring theme that it has historically taken a violent disruption of that social network that to turn these habits into more impersonal varieties of monetary exchange.

[As an aside, I think this is an interesting way to consider the evolution of western thought too, and it calls into question some of the things that were left on the table when the select pieces of the canon were going into the sociological scrapbook. Which was the bigger mark that ancient Athens left on the European world? Was its philosophical schools (the rediscovery of Aristotle), or was it the acceptance of slavery and the subjugation of women, right down to the veil (which count be more as an evolutionary initial condition)? Also, I wonder how much resistance there's been in European thought to universalizing human behavior by studying groups of people that Europeans were butchering and enslaving, literally by the boatload. My comic book understanding of the history of philosophy is not really up to the task, and admittedly they didn't know a lot about them yet, but it does seem the colonial-age thinkers argued a lot more with hypothetical primitive people than actual ones.]

The basic theme here is in fact a moral one. Slavery (which was rather a sudden concern for some of the African people he mentions), punitive state power, and imperial war were highly correlated with the transition to and away from currency, right up until the modern era. It took a powerful government to make the stuff official, and if there really is intrinsic value to gold, it's that it can be stolen and anonymized. Generally, Graeber writes, the estrangement of debt and finance from human connectedness made the tragedies worse (he doesn't make a more disturbing case than the Conquistadors, who kept at it because of a fucked up finance system that kept those vicious fuckers in debt too--how is the systematic destruction of a civilization more moral than not paying back your sponsors?). Adam Smith's contention that the economic sphere was separate from the human social one (and was in fact to the good), was as radical as it was utterly ahistorical. It's taken a lot of violence to get to the point where that's the default assumption, Graeber notes, and even then, the moral imperatives of debt aren't even equally applied. And really, who's doing more for the world, the one who impoverishes himself in misery to pay off his creditors, or someone who spreads happiness among his family and friends?

One interesting aspect of this viewpoint is the picture it makes of the middle ages. Graeber paints a different environment than we usually imagine, in large part because he expands it beyond the borders of violent and backward Europe. But even there, yes, it was indeed horrible in the usual respects, but people were also by most measures unprecedentedly free. Slavery was not reinstituted in any of the world civilizations following the previous imperial age, and (again despite the popular conceptions), regular people were largely left alone by greater powers. The world didn't revert to barter, but it did revert to credit. [And you know, this sort of quiet utopia is pretty close the sort of community relationships that Wendell Berry idealized in rural America too.] It's interesting to point out too, that the closest the world has seen to a free market (that is, an ungoverned one, that still works), was in the Islamic world of this time, which esteemed its merchant-adventurer class, and it succeeded because, according to the author, it was both anti-capitalist (usury was forbidden in spirit and cultural practice), and built on personal trust and community connection.

Does it all hold up? Graeber presents a great deal of compelling correlations, and some good causal hypotheses--the arguments for the origin of money are convincing--but now and then I think he goes a little too far. I wasn't quite convinced, for instance, that materialist thought was really generated from contemplating the economic nature of things, although no doubt the ideas of the time got swapped liberally around. The author frequently resorts to etymology (which must be an anthropologist's trick) to showcase various points, and while it's interesting how these thinkers of the time (and Graeber is quite good at linking thinkers to their times) found commonality in the ideas, it still feels like a stretch to state, say, that a sense of mind/body duality arose because coins have two sides. The institutions of the various imperial eras--savery and organized war--that originated coinage and then went hand in hand with it, have in my less expert opinion, much to do with resource availability and population density, and call it an emergent property of urbanization perhaps. For example, I don't think the middle ages would have evolved the Medicis and the Renaissance without coal. It seems an important additional ingredient to universalize our imperial economy (which runs on de-personalized credit) with the ancient ones, but then again, that's just my hobby horse. So far as the utopian qualities of the middle ages or rural subcultures go, I'm skeptical. You don't choose your communities, after all, but you're stuck there. As an alternative to the slavery/coin/military complex, people developed strictly hierarchical societies, a perversion of a different one of the human metrics presented in the book. (And fuck the communism of the rich, anyway.) It seems that history tells us we're left to pick our poison, a tradeoff of one kind of evil for another. Being tied to a small-town underclass is a different sort of hell. Maybe the next age will give us a genuine reimagining of social and economic organization. Here's hoping.

Review: The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

Browsing randomly through the non-genre aisles is just a terrible way to shop for books, no matter what your dotty strollers and romantically-inclined geeks would prefer to tell you. It's great to get drawn in by something stacked nearby and all (I might have been rewarded to find my way here if, for example, I happened to be mired in the Stephen King wing of the store) but if you don't have much free time, it's a lot better to have a list. This time I didn't, and so when I made a trip to the local Barnes and Noble to support one my daughter's school programs, I was encouraged to buy something quickly, but also listlessly. The Barbara Kingsolver book I had intended to buy, had I remembered to write it down, was her charming manifesto about gardening, not her Important Novel from the fiction section. I'm not angry about it. It's more of a segue than a complaint.

The Poisonwood Bible was very enjoyable—I tore right through it—although if you ever catch me without some criticisms, then look for signs of encroaching senility. I hate to be pushed that hard by the display, and a novel marketed as significant has got to face some high standards. In that light, I'll try and reveal my usual assortment of faint damns as quickly as I can; there were definitely some small contentions that kept creeping in. The Poisonwood Bible is the story of a missionary family's attempt to evangelize a village in the Congo in the early 1960s, told in a sequence of rotating (all-female) character points of view. We are introduced to Orleanna first, the mother, who in the opening sequence appears to be addressing the reader (she actually is not, and there is a nice symmetry with the Orleanna pieces that is not obvious at the outset, which do well under a re-read) and introducing the story as a stand-in for the author herself. This next shifts to the point of view of Leah, one of the middle children, and she is similar enough to her mother's voice, and so damnably precocious for a 14-year-old, that she sounds a lot like the author too. Two of the other sisters (Ruth May and Rachel, the oldest and youngest) feel again similar, but now straightjacketed respectively by childhood and by general dimwittedness, which leaves Adah as the odd girl out, physically handicapped, sly, secretive, and cynical, and of course I liked her best from the get-go. For the other four, it takes a while for their individual natures to be drawn out. To be fair, they're family, facing the same immovable obstacles, and I am sure that Kingsolver realizes that it's not uncommon to get to know a bunch of sisters this way.

The bulk of the novel covers the 18 months or so they lived in the Congo village, a period which takes them through the nation's independence from Belgium, and quick subjugation under the Mobutu regime. A frame story for revealing the alternating anecdotes would have helped this book a great deal. The individual sequences comes off a little like the indistinctly-timed interview portions of your lazier television mockumentary. It is unclear how do their composition might fit in alongside with the contemporaneously occurring drama. It's as if the characters are being deposed in some neutral purgatory space by the omniscient narrator. It would be a plausible explanation if Nathan had ordered the kids to write about their experiences--it would have been within his character, and they had plenty of downtime--but if the parents had been aware of children's' diaries, then some of the challenges in the book could have been overcome by reading them. And only Adah is ever portrayed as keeping a journal (a coded one). Touching on this framing issue could have helped some other things too. Leah (who I continue to see as the author's stand-in) is the only character that really seems to grow and change much in that long real-time section. If they wrote them all at once (as hinted by the section headings), then that would explain the stasis in tone, but in that case, the voices still don't change in the next sections, years or months later. Maybe we expect this from Rachel, who only grows into a bigger nitwit during this stretch, but here's Ruth May, who's somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 years old at the beginning (I missed her revealed age, but old enough to write?) and in almost two years, we'd expect her especially to evolve a great deal.

A few throwaways and Kingsolver could have settled the minds of certain kinds of continuity-minded geeks, but the stasis goes even a little beyond that. The conflict in the story is very well laid out, and the set pieces are well-positioned to proceed to a logical and probably inevitable conclusion, which they do. And to an extent they are revealed or they intensify (I don't want to give the impression that the plot is poorly written), but the conflicts do not develop. It's stated at the outset that Orleanna resents her husband, she doesn't grow to that point. Nathan doesn't become a tyrant, he starts as one. The only one that moves away from Nathan (and that needs to) is Leah, and she moves to someone else, a(n improbably appropriate) romantic interest, but that one's telegraphed from miles away too. The sections play out as examples of the known difficulties, but those misunderstandings were always there. And it's weird, because in the last third of the book, the long epilogue, the characters age in great leaps, and get a chance to look back to understand how their experience in Africa has defined them. Here the evolution of their characters is suddenly wholly plausible and highly persuasive. Now Adah is challenged with the selfishness of her conception of things. (Is it plausible that her handicap was merely learned behavior, incidentally? It gives her an interesting vehicle for self-reflection, but I'm not sure how realistic that is.) Now Leah develops depth to her cultural understanding. Hell, even Rachel evolves postscripturally into the true mode of her uselessness, and Kingsolver is able to subtly put an iota of wisdom in her head too. Certainly she's grown beyond a Georgia debutante, despite her disinclination to.

A modern reader might find it hard to buy into Nathan. He's a smart and motivated guy, but how could he maintain his will over a family of wiser, cleverer, more dynamic, and more interesting women by the mere force of patriarchy? If he didn't resemble so many of that, and even the children's (my parents') generation, if I didn't see my own family members so clearly right in there, then I might think him a caricature. Instead, I see him as an accurate (if extreme) portrayal of how people can oppress and subdue the families they imagine they nurture. His religious inflexibility is ironic--as if Christianity hadn't evolved to accommodate any number of societies, including his distinctively American Baptist take on it—but Nathan isn't a man with the slightest dose of irony, nor one to question the singularity of the American experience. If we learn anything more about Nathan, it's the perfect depth of his contemptibility.

The parallel of the Price family with America's treatment of the Congo isn't very subtle, and it gets a mention, but admirably, Kingsolver doesn't really harp on it. Viewing (patriarchal) politics and society from the angle of motherhood and womanhood is useful. The author shows, in the context of an interesting story, how power can be willfully blind and self-interested, as well as how its use can extend from the powerful, or fail to, instead extending from the setting. (To that running interest of mine, she makes a good anthropological case, intentionally or no, about calorie (and protein) availability as it dictates certain modes of civilization.) The African women are focused mostly on the basic dynamics of life and the forces above impinge on it, but change things only with difficulty, more by changing the conditions of things than imposing rules and ideas. I thought Kingsolver did an excellent job of positioning that observational understanding against the larger relationships in the world theater, giving the modern corporate state the indictment it deserves, although occasionally you do occasionally get a whiff of credulity when it comes to the prospect of any better proposals (Could Lumumba really have been so benevolent? Could the pre-contact Congolese society really have been so well balanced?) but it's smart to pose them from Leah who is given to a bit of ideal-worship in spite of moving past her old man, and anyway, it's understood that these are lost questions, worth regretting.


[There's probably a good case to be made that the Enlightenment- or colonial-era Europeans did not understand primitivism very well, or were at least ill-equipped to study it. (I say "probably" because I'm still not very willing to delve into the source literature.) It seems like a related issue, although I think it'd be better to say that your typical citizen these days, with more available information but lots of his own society's structure and benefits in front of his eyes, simply declines to make a validating comparison. I think that Kingsolver (based as much on Animal, Vegetable, Miracle than this one) and I, as well as of other writers on the theme (Wendell Berry or Eduardo Galeano come to mind), and a couple readers of this blog, will agree that we've ignored some valuable lessons from the throwback days, that would be worth re-examining in a modern context. A community of interconnected but more deeply rooted localities, each appropriate to its own environment, is probably a better one, and possibly an end-point of our own arc anyway. I don't know if it's realistic to think we can up and go all Iroquois Confederation or anything, but it's interesting how radical that would really be. Western history has been a long story of consolidation and subjugation over the couple of millennia (and of course people got the empire bug in Asia, Africa and the Americas from time to time too). Localizing like that would certainly throw the European-style bordered nation-state right on its ass, but I have my usual urge to caveat the hell out of that sort of thing: (1) we'd need a lot fewer people; (2) it's a better land-use and community support model, but it's society model that has a lot of room to righteously suck. Ample interconnections between the nodes has got to be an improvement over a more primitive form, as does technology and exchange. Imagine limited but versatile travel, easy communication, ready access to ideas, science and history. Also, (3) centralization works for some things, although it seems very difficult to pick and choose what we employ it for. Public insurance and resource management without ruling classes and wars between them? Good luck with that. Maybe I should call all this out as a longer post, but it fits in Kingsolver's themes, and frankly, I desperately need some new headlines.]