-

July 2014
Tuesday, July 14, 2015, at 11:00 A.M. (Please note Summer schedule)

Euphoria, by Lily King

Discussion leader: Ellen Getreu

Inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is a
captivating story of three young, gifted anthropologists of the 1930s caught in a passionate love
triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and ultimately their lives.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015, at 11:00 A.M.

The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez

Discussion Leader: Edna Ritzenberg

Moving from Mexico to the United States when their daughter suffers a near-fatal accident, the
Riveras confront cultural barriers, their daughter's difficult recovery, and her developing
relationship with a Panamanian boy. Evoking a profound sense of hope, Henríquez delivers a
moving account of those who will do anything to build a future for their children—even if it
means confronting the fear and alienation lurking behind the American dream. (NovelistPlus)

Monday, July 27, 2015, at 11:00 A.M.

How to use NovelistPlus, the best database for finding the books you want to
read!

With Ellen Getreu, Librarian and H-WPL Readers coordinator

Learn how to use this wonderful user-friendly database. Discover authors you never knew about
and make the choosing of the perfect book for your book group fun and exciting, and much
easier.
Euphoria by Lily King - the colourful love
life of Margaret Mead
The 1933 meeting of an anthropologist and two of her husbands is thrillingly reimagined.

By Camilla Gibb

theguardian.com Dec. 24, 2014

Bateson, Mead, and Fortune in 1933. Photograph: Library of Congress

If one anthropologist’s name is known beyond the field, it is that of Margaret Mead, and
yet in all my years of studying anthropology I was never taught her work. For scholars, Mead
had become both caricature and cliche; her findings had been challenged and her work was
largely sidelined as quaintly old-fashioned.

As a woman and a populariser of anthropology, she was bound to encounter fierce criticism. Her
major works, Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies,
challenged the “naturalness” of adolescent angst and gender roles, and the wisdom of restrictive
sexual mores. Her provocative claims found a wide audience, from the moment they were
published in the 1930s until they fell out of favour in the 1960s.

Lily King’s Euphoria, a fictionalised account of a brief period of field work along New Guinea’s
Sepik river in 1933, does not set out to redeem Mead’s reputation, but its humanising portrayal
of her as a dedicated ethnographer certainly re-establishes Mead’s remarkable presence in the
field.

Love and work were inextricably entangled for Mead. She had three marriages, all to
anthropologists; a relationship with anthropology’s other leading lady, Ruth Benedict; and
another – her last and longest – with US anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived
from 1955 until her death in 1978. In every case, these partnerships were also professional
collaborations.

King takes as her point of departure an actual encounter between Mead, her second husband, Reo
Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, the man who would become her third. Nell (Mead) and Fen
(Fortune) are about to set sail for Australia after a particularly dispiriting stretch of field work in
New Guinea when by chance they meet Andrew (Bateson), a rival anthropologist in the region,
at a Christmas party hosted by the colonial administration.

Slight, malarial and injured, Nell appears a much diminished version of the famous
anthropologist of Andrew’s imagination. Her apparent vulnerability opens the door to his own.
Desperately lonely after two disenchanting years among the (fictitious) Kiona tribe, Andrew has
recently tried to drown himself. With self-interested desperation, he insists Nell and Fen do not
leave, promising to take them upriver to the Tam, a peaceful tribe of strong women. Therein
begins Andrew’s coy courtship of Nell, who reignites his belief in his work.

Fen, meanwhile, has become contradictory and entrenched: resentful of his wife’s success, and at
times derisive; he is spurred into action only by the threat of further emasculation. Sexual
jealousy and intellectual rivalry become inseparable, culminating in the collaborative drafting of
a schema that maps cultures according to particular traits. In one frenzied night the trio put it all
down on paper: an exhilarating scene of creative and intellectual gestation that captures all the
excitement of discovery, and the promise that we might find a way to better understand
humankind. Here is the euphoria of the title; that breakthrough in understanding – a moment of
sudden and exhilarating clarity in the life of the artist or scientist. Nell, with her lyrical, near-
poetic field notes, is as much artist as scientist, with an infectious capacity for liberating passion
in those near her.

That is a good night, but with three robust and competitive egos in the jungle, something is
bound to go wrong. Despite no small amount of foreshadowing, King’s taut pacing manages to
lead us to a satisfying shock; an outcome so different from Mead’s biography that we could
never have predicted it.

King immerses us so fully in the lives of her characters that they remain excellent company
beyond the pages of this book. Her research is so well digested that she is able to drop us into the
complexities of their work without being didactic. We can forgive the occasional cliche – “the
savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter
where you go” – and recognise the radical value of early anthropology to our understanding not
just of the other, but of ourselves.
Going Native

‘Euphoria,’ by Lily King

By Emily Eakin, New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2014.

Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History in 1930. Credit Getty Images

As a public icon, Margaret Mead has grown fusty — more respected than read, scarred by
potshots (remember the critic who tried to prove that she’d been duped by her Samoan
informants?) and sidelined in anthropology by a new dispensation, fluent in evolutionary
biology, that makes Mead’s “culture and personality” approach look quaint. It’s hard to conceive
of the shock caused in 1928 by her depiction, in “Coming of Age in Samoa,” of sexual freedom
as key to a happy adolescence, or of the scope of her influence, decades later, as an unflagging
champion of progressive causes, from women’s rights to the legalization of marijuana. For most
of us, Mead’s name no longer automatically conjures what one biographer termed “steamy things
that happened in torrid, languid jungles.” But her life was rich with incident and, on one occasion
at least, may have conformed to this description.

In “Euphoria,” the novelist Lily King has taken the known details of that occasion — a 1933
field trip to the Sepik River, in New Guinea, during which Mead and her second husband, Reo
Fortune, briefly collaborated with the man who would become her third husband, the English
anthropologist Gregory Bateson — and blended them into a story of her own devising. The result
is as uncanny as it is transporting. “Euphoria” is a meticulously researched homage to Mead’s
restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday. It’s
also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic
menace — a love triangle in extremis.
For King, whose three previous novels, all expertly crafted, rarely strayed far from late-20th-
century, New England WASP culture, “Euphoria” represents a departure and arguably a
breakthrough. The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic (for Mead there seems
hardly to have been a distinction), and King’s signal achievement may be to have created
satisfying drama out of a quest for interpretive insight.

The threat of violence and death looms from Page 1, as a disgruntled Mumbanyo tribe member
lobs what may or may not be a dead baby at Nell Stone, the controversial American author of the
best-selling ethnography “The Children of Kirakira,” and her envious Australian husband, Fen,
who are fleeing the tribe in a canoe. Nell’s glasses are broken (by Fen, in what, it’s implied, was
a deliberate act), as is one of her ankles. Both husband and wife are filthy, dispirited and sick
with malaria. Nell, who longs to be pregnant, has recently miscarried. “Maybe you noticed —
there’s sort of a stench of failure about us,” she tells Andrew Bankson, the English
anthropologist they run into upon arriving at the local government station, where a drunken
Christmas party is underway.

Bankson, the novel’s narrator, isn’t doing too well himself. Like Bateson, his real-life
inspiration, he’s tormented by the deaths of his older brothers, one blown up over Belgium in
World War I, the other a suicide in Piccadilly Circus, and for two years has been living with a
tribe on the Sepik River, less out of a passion for analyzing human social systems than to escape
his overbearing mother. Stymied in his work and deeply depressed, he’s fresh from his own
suicide attempt — in the river, his pockets full of stones, like Virginia Woolf. On seeing Nell and
Fen, it’s all he can do not to fling himself at them: “My heart whapped in my throat and all I
could think was how to keep them, how to keep them. I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a
goiter.”

The book is rife with such visceral imagery and pungent with the stink of disease, foul breath and
unwashed bodies. Bankson, who falls hard for Nell, describes her — much as Bateson did Mead
— in a letter to his mother, as “a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin”;
in the bush, sentimentality is a luxury, like iodine and Band-Aids. Anyway, it’s Nell’s brain that
excites him, her drive and discipline, her easy way with the natives, her scandalously
impressionistic field notes, her poetry-laden talk, her naked curiosity, her freedom. “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.”

“Euphoria” takes the form of unflinching retrospection, interspersed with entries from Nell’s
journal, as Bankson recounts, decades later, his helpless love for her. King deploys this frame
with admirable delicacy, casting a shadow of impending tragedy over the narrative and
administering the occasional strategic dose of irony or nostalgia. Apart from an early chapter in
which Bankson chronicles his painful family history — her only misstep, it comes off a bit pat
— she wisely allows the proceedings to unfold mostly as they happen.

Bankson persuades Nell and Fen to take up residence with the Tam, a tribe seven hours upriver
by motorized canoe from the one he’s studying. In the bush, this makes them neighbors, and
Bankson can’t stay away, at one point falling so desperately ill that he ends up spending a week
in their bed. King is brilliant on the moral contradictions that propelled anthropological
encounters with remote tribes — a volatile mix of liberal high-mindedness, stoicism, hubris and
greed. “If I didn’t believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn’t be here,” Nell tells
Bankson loftily. “I’m not interested in zoology.” Yet she and Fen make clear to him that after the
loathsome Mumbanyo, who practiced infanticide with clinical indifference, they require a tribe
with more savory amenities — a pretty beach and good art. When Bankson visits the couple after
they’ve installed themselves among the Tam, he laughs out loud at the sight of their house, with
its portico and blue-and-white cloth curtains — “this English tea shop encircled by pampas grass
in the middle of the Territories.”

Inside the house, Nell and Fen’s collaboration is dissolving in rancor, along with their marriage.
Bankson’s presence temporarily defuses the tension, enabling first an uneasy détente, and then,
in an episode King has adapted from Mead’s life, a collective frenzy: Over the course of one
sleepless night, the three converge on a framework for mapping the whole of human culture, in
all its variations. “We believed we were in the throes of a big theory. We could see our grid in
chalk on university blackboards. It felt like we were putting a messy disorganized unlabeled
world in order.”

So intense is this communal labor, and the thrill of new apprehension, that the physical romance
that follows is almost beside the point. In any case, neither the love affair nor the theory is meant
to be. (Mead never formally published her theory, which she called “the squares,” later writing of
this period that “it was the closest I’ve ever come to madness.” In the novel, “the Grid” is
published to acclaim, but after it is embraced in perverted form by the Third Reich, Bankson has
it suppressed.) In King’s exquisite book, desire — for knowledge, fame, another person — is
only fleetingly rewarded, and gratification is inseparable from self-deceit. As Nell observes
about the moment, typically two months into fieldwork, when a culture suddenly begins to make
sense, “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.”

“Euphoria”: Primitive love

A volatile romantic triangle among anthropologists is the center of a novel
based on the life of Margaret Mead

www.salon.com June 6, 2014

It’s the rare novel of ideas that devours its readers’ attention. More often, as with Eleanor
Catton’s “The Luminaries” or “Gravity’s Rainbow,” we work our way through these books
carefully and with frequent pauses, rather than gulping them down in long, thirsty drafts. It’s not
a literary form known for its great romances, either, although of course love and sex play a role
in most fictional characters’ lives. Lily King’s “Euphoria,” a shortish novel based on a period in
the life of pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead, is an exception. At its center is a romantic
triangle, and it tells a story that begs to be consumed in one or two luxurious binges.

Late in 1932, Mead and her second husband, the anthropologist Reo Fortune, decided to study a
tribe living alongside the Sepik River in New Guinea. Another anthropologist working in the
area, Gregory Bateson, joined them for a few months. Cut off from their own culture, the three
researchers were cooped up together, a situation that fomented both an explosion of intellectual
creativity and a lot of sexual tension. The result was Mead and Bateson’s model for a spectrum
of cultural temperaments and the breakup of Mead’s marriage to Fortune. Bateson would become
her third husband.

King has taken these three people and given them new names and fates. Their pasts closely
resemble those of the historical figures: Like Mead, King’s Nell Stone had a beloved younger
sister named Katie who died in infancy. Like King’s Andrew Bankson, Gregory Bateson lost one
older brother to World War I and the other to suicide. Nell is a protegé of the real-life
anthropologist Franz Boaz and a friend of Ruth Benedict, and she also has a former lover named
Helen who writes a formative theoretical book while Nell is living in the jungle with Fen and
Bankson. Benedict, with whom Mead once had an affair, wrote “Patterns of Culture” in the early
1930s.

You don’t need to know all of this while reading “Euphoria,” but it does help to understand that,
together, Mead and Bateson helped to boost their discipline out of the 19th century and into the
20th. Previously, blinkered by Victorian hubris and prejudice, scholars had believed, as Andrew
puts it, “that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model,” and,
somewhat paradoxically, that cultures are determined by such “biological” factors as race. What
Nell, Fen and Andrew find along the Sepik is a panoply of tribes with a wide range of behaviors
and values, and the anthropologists’ struggle to see these peoples clearly is mirrored by their
efforts to understand themselves. It is partly their willingness to recognize the parallel that draws
Nell and Andrew together.

King is a sinewy, disciplined writer who wisely avoids the temptation to evoke the
overwhelming physicality of the jungle (the heat, the steam, the bugs) by generating
correspondingly lush thickets of language. Her story — told by Andrew in a mix of first-person
chapters, excerpts from Nell’s notebooks and the occasional third-person passage from Nell’s
point of view as Andrew imagines it — sticks close to the interlocking bonds that give the novel
its tensile power. Nell has written a bestselling work of anthropology that has made her a
household name back home and the breadwinner in her marriage. Fen has proceeded to punish
her for this in many small ways and some not-so-small ones. Andrew, so abysmally lonely that
he attempted suicide shortly before meeting the couple, longs for their company and tries to
ignore his attraction to Nell, a heady blend of the erotic and the cerebral. The two of them, as
Nell sees it, are both a little bit in love with him.

“Euphoria” — titled for what Nell describes as “that moment two months in, when you think
you’ve finally got a handle on the place,” inevitably “followed by the complete despair of ever
understanding anything” — is about love and whether it can be liberated from the desire to
possess. Nell (like Mead) hopes and believes it can, a utopian inclination that finds its way into
her work. Mead’s own work would be criticized by those who believed she allowed her dream of
a more sexually free society to distort her perception of life in, among other places, Samoa.

That’s a double-edged sword, however, and in Fen, King presents the macho school of
anthropology. He’s infatuated with warrior societies and contemptuous of a gentle tribe he and
Nell once studied: “If they had been dead they would have been less boring.” He ignores or
dismisses any form of social organization not founded on dominance and force. As husband and
wife settle in together to study the Tam, a fictional Sepik River tribe, Fen and Nell have a
theoretical advantage: She can witness aspects of Tam culture reserved for women and he can do
the same for those restricted to men. But Fen, feeling emasculated by Nell’s success (and by
mounting evidence that she is the genius in the family), jealously hoards what he learns and,
unbeknownst to his wife, harbors even more dangerous plans regarding a sacred object hidden in
the region’s hills.

Enter Andrew, whose humility in approaching the practice of anthropology is its own kind of
genius. Unlike Nell and Fen, he doesn’t presume that he can ever fully understand the people he
chooses to live among. Nevertheless, his encounter with Nell — her curiosity about his work and
her passionate involvement with her own — galvanize him. When the three scientists receive a
manuscript of Helen’s revolutionary book, it makes all three of them feel “we could rip the stars
from the sky and write the world anew.” They sit down to draw up “the Grid,” a formulation that
will become famous in the discipline, and for Andrew it is like “her words were pulling it out of
me and at the same time my axis was pulling the words out of her. I wasn’t sure if I was having
my own thoughts or hers.” It’s hard to think of a better portrayal of the erotics of the mind.

King’s version of this story does differ from the real one in some key aspects, but it has a feeling
of shapely inevitability all the same. “When only one person is the expert on a particular people,
do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?” Andrew
asks. Other recent novels with similar premises — Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder” and Hanya
Yanagihara’s “The People of the Trees” — have approached this question more directly. With
“Euphoria,” it seeps up around the edges and through the cracks of the story. For their part,
King’s characters are caught up in their own reflections and the playing out of a drama as primal
as the rituals they have come to New Guinea to observe.

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's
Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

Possession: PW Talks with Lily King

.Publishers Weekly, Apr 14, 2014

Euphoria, the engrossing fourth book from King, is based on a chance encounter between the
anthropologists Margaret Mead, Ron Fortune, and Gregory Bateson in 1930s Papua New
Guinea.
You have stated that the book was inspired by a chapter in Jane Howard's 1984 biography of
Margaret Mead. How did you come across that book?

When I moved to Maine, one of my first friends was a woman named Cornelia who brought me
to Casco Bay Books. It was closing so there was hardly anything left. The only thing I found was
a biography of Margaret Mead. I started reading it and got to this part when Mead was 31. She
was with her second husband , an anthropologist from New Zealand, and they were doing
fieldwork in the Territory of New Guinea. Then she met Gregory Bateson and there was this
immediate intellectual, emotional, and physical attraction. The chapter in book is probably only
11 or 12 pages long, but I just stopped and thought, "This would make such a great novel!"

How did you decide which facts to keep and which to embellish?

When I started the novel, I thought that I was going to write the Margaret Mead story. But then
my fiction writer self took over very quickly. Once I started writing the characters' dialogue, they
became different people. I had to make a choice between sticking to facts or writing what I
thought would make a better novel. I was terrified the whole time because I'm used to writing
characters who have sisters and fathers--people who live in houses with real walls. This was a
departure in terms of the period, the geography, the science, the historical nature of it. But I kept
telling myself, "If I can finish this, I can write anything."

Were there other changes?

I originally tried to write the book from the perspective of Nell . First it was going to be in third
person. Then it was going to be first person. Then I was going to write it from all three points of
view within a chapter. Then I wrote it with one perspective for each chapter. Finally I came to
terms with the fact that it was Bankson's story, and I wanted to tell it from his perspective.

Is there a message that can be drawn from Euphoria?

When [Mead] arrived in the Territory of New Guinea, mining was already underway, plantations
were underway; it was the beginning of the real rape of the land across the globe. I am definitely
drawing a parallel between the way industry came in and the way the anthropologists came in
and claimed their territories. They thought of those tribes as "my tribe, my people, my study."
They behaved like colonists. I am interested in what happens when you think of people like that-
-the consequences of that kind of possession.

I read that you wrote the first draft of the novel in pencil--is that true?

Yes! It's the way I've been writing fiction since I was in ninth grade. Then I go and type up the
whole thing, literally. It's not a revision process; I have to choose the words, one by one, again.
It's a really important step for me.
Reading Group Guide
by Lindsey Tate

Euphoria
by Lily King

1. Set against the lush tropical landscape of 1930s New Guinea, this novel charts British
anthropologist Andrew Bankson’s fascination for colleagues Nell Stone and her husband, Fen, a
fascination that turns deadly. How far does the setting play a role in shaping events? Is there a
sense that the three have created their own small universe on the banks of the Sepik River, far
removed from the Western world? If so, by whose rules are they playing?

2. “She tried not to think about the villages they were passing … the tribes she would never
know and words she would never hear, the worry that they might right now be passing the one
people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock
hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her” (p. 8). In the light of this quote,
discuss Nell Stone’s passion and need for anthropology and find ways in which they differ from
Bankson’s and Fen’s. Talk about the significance of her childhood dream of being carried away
by gypsies.

3. Continue your discussion by considering Nell’s statement: “If I didn’t believe they shared
my humanity entirely, I wouldn’t be here … I’m not interested in zoology” (p. 55). Find
instances in the novel in which she demonstrates this. How far do you agree, as Nell states, that it
is an anthropologist’s role to encourage self-analysis and self-awareness in the tribes he/she
studies?

4. Over the course of the novel we learn a great deal about Bankson’s childhood and young
adulthood. Talk about the reasons and life events that brought him to anthropology. What has led
him to the brink of suicide? How seriously do you think he views his statement: “The meaning of
life is the quest to understand the structure and order of the natural world—that was the mantra I
was raised on. To deviate from it was suicide” (p. 32).

5. Given his upbringing and his father’s passion for “hard” science, Nell’s focus on
humanity instead of zoology must hold great appeal for Bankson. What else draws him to Nell,
leaving him with “Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an
ache that seems to have no name but want. I want” (p. 86). What exactly does Bankson want?

6. Discuss the ways in which Bankson’s attitude toward his work changes as he gets to
know Nell and her research methods. Consider his acknowledgment of the limitations of an
anthropologist’s work and discuss how far it is possible to ever get to know another’s culture.
Take into account Bankson’s interest in the objectivity of the observer.

7. Take your discussion of the previous question a step further by considering whether it is
ever possible to truly know another person. Apply your observations to Bankson’s views of Nell
and Fen.

8. The theme of possession, of ownership, runs throughout the novel, twisting like the river
Sepik itself through the relationships and conversations of the protagonists. Talk about Nell’s
search for “a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to
be” (p. 88). Has she found this kind of freedom in any of the tribes she has studied? In any of her
relationships? Talk specifically about Fen and Bankson.

9. Further your discussion by focusing on the idea of words and thoughts as things to be
owned—as Nell states, “once I published that book and my words became a commodity …” (p.
91). How has this impacted her relationship with Fen? Consider her statement “I only know that
when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying—and hearing—the first wholly honest
words of my life” (p. 198).

10. On several occasions during the novel, Nell refers to an Amy Lowell poem, “Decade.”
Why do you think the poem holds such meaning for her? How does the poem’s central idea—of
feelings for a lover changing from the sweet, almost painful intensity of red wine into the blissful
satisfaction of bread—relate to her and her own relationships?

11. While Nell declares later that “He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach” (p. 247),
do you believe that Bankson was able to give Nell the freedom she was looking for? How or how
not? Could it have led inevitably to her death?

12. How far would you consider Nell to be the epitome of a young, independent
accomplished woman? Talk about her character, her personality, work habits and motivations.
Then discuss her disturbing relationship with Fen, and her inability to escape his harm. How did
she end up in such an untenable situation?

13. In one journal entry, Nell writes: “I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen &
Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only” (p. 92).
Consider Nell’s relationship with Helen as compared to her relationship with Fen and talk about
the reasons she may have chosen Fen over Helen. Do you think that she made this decision or it
was made for her?

14. Set against a distant backdrop of a Western world mired in doubt and economic
depression, the novel can be seen to depict a search for understanding, for a sense of order. Look
at the ways in which the study of the tribes of New Guinea reflects the protagonists’ desperate
search for meaning—a search that can lead to a sense of failure or instead to Nell’s euphoria
when “at that moment the place feels entirely yours” (p. 50). Find instances of despair and
disillusionment for Nell, Fen, and Bankson in their various work experiences. How do they
react?

15. What do the three of them really see in the tribes of New Guinea? To what extent, when
unlocking the puzzles of the Kiona and the Tam, are they searching for meaning within
themselves? How important is it to impending events that the Tam tribe appears to be female-
dominated?

16. In the context of the previous two questions, talk about the significance of the Grid to the
three anthropologists. What does it represent to them? Why does Bankson refer to a “shift in the
stars” caused by the Grid?

17. Discuss the glimpses the novel gives into the world of 1930s colonialism—in the
conversations with Westerners in New Guinea and in Australia; and in Bankson’s, Nell’s, and
Fen’s attitudes to the tribes they study and the Western society to which they must eventually
return. How, if at all, do Nell, Fen, and Bankson take colonial approaches toward their research
practices and anthropological subjects? What is the role of Xambun as he rejoins his tribal
village after being recruited by a Western company? Is it possible to live between the two
worlds?

18. Fen briefly mentions a dark family secret, then continues the conversation to discuss the
primitive world versus the “civilized world”: “Nothing in the primitive world shocks me,
Bankson. Or I should say, what shocks me in the primitive world is any sense of order and
ethics. All the rest—the cannibalism, infanticide, raids, mutilation—it’s all comprehensible,
nearly reasonable, to me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of
society” (p.137–38). What does this say about Fen? How far do you agree with his comment,
especially in the light of events that follow in the novel?

19. For all of Nell and Bankson’s heartfelt conversations, and Bankson’s keen observations
of her at work, there are many important things left unsaid. Nell states: “You don’t realize how
language actually interferes with communication … how it gets in the way like an overdominant
sense” (p. 79). Should Bankson have understood further Nell’s sadness within her marriage,
Fen’s physical abuse? As a reader, do we miss the clues too?

20. Discuss Fen’s obsession with the flute, and the reasons why it ultimately leads to the
destruction of so much: the anthropologists’ relationship with the Tam tribe, Fen’s relationship
with Nell and Bankson. If Xambun had not been killed, would it have been acceptable for Fen to
take the flute?

21. Continue your discussion to consider whether an anthropologist must always betray in
some way the tribes he/she works with. How does Nell writing books about the people she
studies differ from Fen selling the flute to a museum? Was Nell’s work in the field beneficial to
the Tam or to the children of Kirakira? Are her reasons for working with them ultimately as
selfish as Fen’s need to profit from the flute? How morally responsible are Bankson and Nell for
Xambun’s death?

22. Fen justifies taking the flute so that he can restore balance to his relationship with Nell:
“There has to be a balance. A man can’t be without power—it doesn’t work like that” (p. 238).
Contrast this with Nell’s thoughts on balance: “[P]erhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that
has found a similar balance among its people” (p. 144). Do you think they are talking about the
same thing? Does balance always need to rest on power?

23. Trace Bankson’s emotional and intellectual development throughout the course of the
novel, ending with his visits from his biographer. How do you think his experience with Nell and
Fen affected and changed him? Talk about what may have kept him going after Nell’s death.
Why did he not revert back to his suicidal path? Consider the quote that holds so much meaning
for him from war poet Edward Shillito’s “Hardness of Heart”: “Tears are not endless and we
have no more.”

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna; The People in the
Trees by Hanya Yanagihara; State of Wonder by Ann Patchett; Bel Canto by Ann Patchett; Old
Filth by Jane Gardam; The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; The Signature of All
Things by Elisabeth Gilbert; Rain and Other South Sea Stories by W. Somerset Maugham;
Mating by Norman Rush; Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett; Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret
Mead; Sex and Temperament by Margaret Mead; Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead
 Photo: Bettman/Corbis Ruth Benedict

Gregory Bateson, photographer. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson working in the mosquito
room, Tambunam, 1938. Gelatin silver print. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (211b)
Lily King
Contemporary Authors Online, 2015 Updated: February 06, 2015

WRITINGS:

The Pleasing Hour, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 1999.
The English Teacher: A Novel, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2005.
Father of the Rain, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2010.
Euphoria, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2014.

Contributor to publications, including Ploughshares.

Writer. Taught English in a bilingual high school.

Raymond Carver Prize for Fiction, Syracuse University; MacDowell Colony fellowship, 1995;
Discover Great New Writers Award, Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1999, and Whiting Writer's Award,
both for The Pleasing Hour; inaugural Kirkus Prize for fiction, 2014, for Euphoria.

Married; children: two daughters. Education: Graduate of the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, 1985; Syracuse University, M.A., 1991. Addresses: Home: ME.

"Sidelights"

Lily King's award-winning debut novel was The Pleasing Hour. A Publishers Weekly contributor
wrote that the novel is "expertly constructed, full of surprises, superbly paced, and sweetly sad,"
adding that "King's book hardly reads like a first novel." Library Journal reviewer Shirley E.
Havens called it "deft and moving." GraceAnne A. DeCandido wrote in Booklist that "with
longing and sweetness, this subtle and gorgeously crafted novel takes us into a tangle of family
affections."

At age seventeen, the central character, Rosie, conceives a child for her married sister, who is
unable to have children following a hysterectomy. After the baby is born, Rosie leaves her home
in Vermont to become an au pair for Parisians Nicole and Marc Tivot, who live on a houseboat
on the Seine with their three children. Most of the story is told in Rosie's voice, but King uses
third-person narration to express the views of the children and their rather distant mother, who
experienced a great loss in her earlier life. Ploughshares contributor Jessica Treadway wrote that
King "pulls it off masterfully; the shifts feel not imposed on the story's structure but organic to it,
and add a layer of complexity uncommon to first novels."

Odile, at sixteen the oldest of Rosie's charges, is becoming aware of her lesbian orientation. The
younger children are Lola and Guillaume; the latter hopes to become a priest. Rosie becomes
very fond of her charges, and also of Marc, with whom she has a sexual encounter during a
holiday in Spain. Treadway called the book's bullfighting scene "one of the strongest scenes in
the book." Treadway added: "In the space of eight pages, we see how the blood sport affects each
Tivot child on a profound level." Rosie escapes the complications of her life with the Tivots by
accepting a position as companion to Nicole's elderly aunt in the south of France. Once there, she
learns more of Nicole's past, including her mother's affair with a German soldier and eventual
suicide.

Times Literary Supplement contributor Sylvia Brownrigg commented that King "is a careful,
intelligent writer." Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Mark Rozzo wrote that King
"tells this haunting tale of surrogate histories and maternal betrayals with a narrative that slips
among time, place, and points of view." Beth E. Anderson in the Library Journal declared that
"King has taken some unusual elements and worked them into a believable, beautifully etched
tale."

In The English Teacher: A Novel, King tells the story of two families battling difficult situations
as they are thrust together after marriage. English teacher Vida Avery has immersed herself in a
world of books and literature but eventually marries a local Maine widower with children. Vida's
son Peter looks forward to a family life but is rejected along with Vida by his new siblings, who
are still grieving over their birth mother's death. Vida has her own secret past that Peter does not
even know about. She becomes an alcoholic in response to the oppressiveness of her new family
life. As Vida teachers her class about the classic novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles, King leads the
reader to understand the parallels between the story of Tess and the teacher.

In a review of The English Teacher in the Library Journal, Reba Leiding wrote: "The author
expertly weaves together diverse themes." A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the
author "renders Vida's seething withholding in a free, direct style." Calling the novel "a keen and
forthright study of the inner workings of a family circle," Austin Chronicle contributor Marrit
Ingman went on to note: "King writes convincingly from a shifting third-person omniscient
perspective, crafting a panoramic view of the book's events and evoking the reader's
sympathies." Deborah Donovan, writing in Booklist, commented that the author "writes with
subtle clarity, displaying an intuitive understanding of the vulnerable psyches of teenagers."
School Library Journal contributor Susanne Bardelson wrote: "The author's style is
unsentimental and direct, and the compelling story draws readers right in."