White Oleander by Janet Fitch

I want to talk to you this morning about a beautiful but also very disturbing book. The title of the book is White Oleander, and its author is Janet Fitch. The book is disturbing because it is about a young girl who goes through a series of foster homes and is exposed to the horrors and dangers of the world so early; she is denied any sort of genuine childhood, denied any sort of home. But in spite of how awful her various situations are, the writing is beautiful beyond description. I know almost nothing about this writer, but I suspect that she must either be a painter herself or that she has lived around someone who painted as a way to talk back to the world. The painterly quality of the writing is at times so achingly beautiful that the reader almost forgets the bleakness of the situations being described. Indeed, some of my reader friends found the language too beautiful, insisting that the author’s absorption with word pictures, her intensely careful painting of words on paper interfered with the stark realities being described, even with the covert message of the book. Perhaps they are right in their criticisms, but for me, a hopelessly inept artist who is mesmerized by those who can capture the world in images, this is simply beautiful writing.

This is, like so many books that capture my attention, a first novel. The young Danish girl described in it is the daughter of a talented and beautiful but icy and self absorbed mother who prefers poetry and music to men and who dismisses all of her daughter’s queries about the sperm donor responsible for her birth. When she asks about her father, she is told that she has no father, that fathers are irrelevant. The reader meets this young girl, Astrid, when she is twelve years old, living with her mother, Ingrid, in southern California. The Santa Anas are blowing, furnace like, bringing in the thick smell of the poisonous oleanders. Ingrid, the mother, seems to have it right; men are worse than unnecessary; Astrid and she can do very well without them. The young girl loves to look at her white-blond and beautiful mother, to be included in her powerful aura, to hear her poetry, hear her tell of the many places in the world they have lived. But when one of the men who chases after Ingrid will not be shrugged off, continues to pursue, to demand to be noticed, Ingrid finally relents, and for a short time, Astrid has a man, a sort of father in her life, and sees her mother soften some, sees her melt, give in.

I don’t intend to tell you much about the plot in this complex and intricate novel, indeed I can’t betray the ending, for I have not yet quite finished it. But I am not giving away much in telling you that this brief period of happiness, a mom, a surrogate dad, and happy child does not last long. Just as Ingrid has always warned her, men are not to be trusted, not to be indulged, not to be counted on or lived with. The charming Barry who has melted the ice queen has no inkling of just what he has found, what he has uncovered. When he tries to leave this woman behind (as he has done with all the women he has ever known), he discovers that he has unwittingly made a lifetime commitment.

Without saying too much, let me say that Ingrid is soon in prison and Astrid is in the first of many foster placements. The series of events and placements that follow are almost incredibly awful. Indeed, if we did not know from reading the news that just such horrors actually occur, we would not find the series of events credible. I found myself supposing that this must be an autobiographical novel. Why would anyone bother to fabricate such an awful train of events? In fact, I began to think that I could not forgive the author if the book were not, for the most part, autobiographical. I could understand her having to tell her own story, but I could not understand why she would construct it simply as a way of writing a story.

With the bit of research I have done, it appears that the novel is not autobiographical, but it is equally obvious that the writer knows a lot about foster homes and about what so often happens to children once they become wards of the state. She is not telling us this story just for kicks. I have no way of knowing what instigated the author’s search into abandoned children, but it is obvious that once she began, she felt she had to tell us what she uncovered. I suspect that the life described as Astrid’s is, in fact, pieced together from the real lived-lives of several different children. But neither is this simply a fictionalized expose of what gets called children services (though it certainly is intended at least in part as a wake-up call, a call to action). The twelve year old child whom we meet in the opening pages of the novel and follow through her tortured life in junior high and then high school has much to tell us of the world. Almost as beautiful as her imprisoned mother, Astrid comes to see what a curse her beauty is in a world controlled by men. In one confrontation with a young boy in a detention center, who, like Astrid, cannot help but express his relationship with the world in the form of visual art, the boy tries to tell her how beautiful she is. When she explains that what he sees as her beauty hurts her more than it helps her, he at first refuses to understand. Thinking he has been cursed always with ugliness (though really it is only the bad skin of adolescence), he continues to insist that Astrid secretly must welcome her beauty. Let me have Astrid speak for herself.

“It doesn’t mean anything. Only to other people.”

“You say that like it’s nothing.”

“It is.” What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, or despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

“You’ve never been ugly.” replies the boy, and talks of how hurtful it is to be rejected, to never be touched or allowed to touch. As if to make his point, he asks Astrid if she would allow him to touch. Her reply:

“I don’t let anyone touch me.”

“Why not?”

Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whisky ... men who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.

I wouldn’t want potential readers to think that this book is unremittingly sad or bitter. In fact, the beauty of the description is almost overwhelming, and there are moments of ease, even of happiness for this girl. There are a few women who actually see her, who care about her rather than simply using her for their own gains. And somehow even the sad and awful parts seem to instruct.

All in all, this is a good book, maybe even a great one. It is neither short nor easy to read. Read it when you are strong and when you have time.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

I want to talk to you this morning about a little book that has been the occasion for a lot of controversy. The book is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling.

Conservative Christians have boycotted both the book and the movie, calling both threats to Christianity and to the mental health of children. Instead, what they are displaying is dangerous closed-mindedness of self-righteous zealots who claim to be in sole possession of The Truth.

Having been raised a Mormon in Salt Lake City, called Zion by these claimants to the throne of Chosen-ness, I am all too well aware of just how narrow is the world of those who claim chosen status. According to the Mormons, the only route to the Celestial Kingdom, the highest of the three rungs of heaven, is via the sacraments of the Mormon church. Women can get there only through the status of their men, and non-Mormons cannot get there at all. But not to be too hard on the Mormons, Catholics, too, claim their sacraments to be the only road to glory, and there are countless other claimants to the throne of truth and righteousness.

Rowling’s little book (now books) is, at the very least, harmless. There is no doubt that too much has been made of these books, both by those who fear them as corrupting sources and by those who praise them as works of art. I was urged by a good woman friend, a fellow reader whose judgment I respect, to read the first of these little tales, and I’m glad I did. Let me say immediately that Rowling is good enough as an author to have maintained my attention, and since I am a fairly demanding reader, that says something. I have to add that I doubt I will bother to read any other books in the series. That, too, says something. Once I had read The Hobbit and the first volume of Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, I was hooked, and I simply had to read the rest—not out of simple and rather idle curiosity, but because I was engrossed by the story. Rowling is not on the same level as Tolkien, or even that of the Christian fantasy-tale writer C.S. Lewis. But the fact is that kids love these books, and that, too, should tell us something.

I would urge all of you who have children, especially those who have children who are reluctant to read or who prefer television to books, to give them the whole Harry Potter series. At the very least, these little books might be gateway books to bigger and better things. Many adults, even those who are college educated, seem to think that being a reader means simply knowing how to read. Nothing could be further from the truth. I went to school with a lot of people who now openly boast that they have not read anything but magazines and newspapers since they left college. If this is so, then clearly their college education failed. School is not a place where empty vessels get filled, so that once we have finished school, once our vessels have been filled, we are finished. Instead, school should be a place where we get in the habit of reading, where we come to want to read, even to come to love reading. For it is true that the desire to read (rather than the mere ability) can be liberating. It can bring us into the larger world, into the world of left-liberal politics; it can help us to see the world for what it really is (instead of seeing it as the corporations and rulers of our little world want us to see it).

From what I can see so far, Rowling does her part in bringing about this metamorphosis from mere ability to read to lover of the written word. Perhaps if you start your children on Rowling, you may steer them next into a far more important writer like Ursula Le Guin. You may find them reading The Earthsea Trilogy or The Word for World is Forest, and who knows, they may graduate from those little morality tales into genuinely political fantasy fiction like The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed.

While there are clearly much better children’s writers around than Rowling, and certainly ones who have a much deeper message for our children, Rowling is not bad. The struggles between light and dark, good and bad, right and wrong that take place at least in this first of the series are, all in all, simple and informative ones. We find that even witches and wizards who come from rich families tend to be corrupt and spoiled, and that even with the powers of wizardry, the children of poorer wizard families do not use their talents to gain power over others, or even to gain riches. While I don’t think that Rowling intends to give a political overview in her books, perhaps her own rather humble financial condition before striking it rich is responsible for her suspicions of the wealthy and her aversion to those who seek power over others.

Again, I would claim that Rowling argues for genuine tolerance, for humility, for the so-called Christian values that are so much not practiced by those conservative religious folk who brand her writing as the work of the devil. As I was growing up, the Mormon leaders who were my teachers told me that the ministers of other religions were (though usually unwittingly) disciples of the devil—a doctrine that has since been abandoned by the Mormons, though only quite recently. So, in their claim to ascendancy, to sole possession of the Truth, they were willing to condemn other seekers as not only mistaken, but as corrupters, as evil. I see a clear parallel in this frenzied and neurotic condemnation of Rowling by conservative Christians. Not enough for them to say that she has it wrong and they have it right; rather, they must insist that she is a spokeswoman for the devil, for evil. If Rowling is mouthpiece for the devil, then what will these same people say of Jews, of Muslims, of any and all who, in seeking for the way, announce a view different from theirs? All of these claims to chosen status, to sole possession of the truth, are clear signals of the many ways in which religion can go wrong, and instead of being in some way or other forces for moral insight become, instead, causes of a dangerous, inbred myopia that is a morally lethargizing rather than energizing force.

Rowling is not a great writer and this is not a great book, but she is a good story-teller, and I would guess that she is a good and decent person as well. While our children may not become fighters for the good simply by reading her, they may become avid readers, may come to love reading, and that may bring them to an understanding of the world in which they live that will make them as fierce in their fight against corporate injustice as Harry is in his battles with the dark forces.

Jane Smiley and Jeanette Winterson

I want to talk to you this morning about two very different authors, both contemporary but so different in style and content. Though both have written several novels, I am going to talk about only two, a relatively old book by Jeanette Winterson (published in ‘85) and a quite new one by Jane Smiley (published in 2000). The Winterson novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, was her first, and it won the prestigious Whitbread prize for first fiction. Jane Smiley’s latest book, Horse Heaven, once again establishes her brilliance and her intense preparation.

I recently reread Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit because I am using it as supplemental reading in a philosophy of religion class. Although philosophers concern themselves primarily with the question of the role of reason in establishing religious beliefs, and thus concentrate primarily on the so-called proofs for the existence of a god or gods, it seems clear to me that questions about the social, moral, and political consequences of religious beliefs are far more important in the long run. And while it is of some value to talk in the abstract about the opiating effects of religious beliefs, about the ways in which they can induce a kind of moral lethargy or blindness, it is often far more effective to look at the effects of religious self righteousness on an individual or community. Jeannette Winterson, like the heroine in her coming of age novel, grew up in a obsessively religious household with a mother far more concerned about the converting of the black heathen in Africa than about cultivating tolerance for those around her. Again like the real Jeanette, this little girl is groomed to become a missionary and go forth, not so much to do the lord’s work, as to do her mother’s work, to enlarge the mother’s already much inflated vision of herself and her goodness.

The book is written in a fanciful and rather childlike manner and would seem simply a well drawn comedy caricaturizing a religious sense of being chosen were it not for the horrible effects it has on the little girl. The heroine, also (and not coincidentally) named Jeanette, seems to be turning out just fine in the cookie-cutter image her mother has for her until poor Jeanette discovers that she has unnatural passions, i.e., instead of being drawn only to Jesus, or, at worst, to boys, she is drawn to girls! Jeanette is, to say the least, confused over the reactions of her mother, the preacher, and the congregation. She is convinced (as she should be) that to the pure, all things are pure, and certainly the intense love she has for her girlfriend is good and pure. She knows in her heart that there is a spiritual dimension to her love and that the physical and spiritual blend perfectly; neither girl takes advantage of the other, neither disconnects body and spirit. But, of course, the reactions of her mother and the religious congregation are ones of fear and outrage. Jeanette is essentially kidnapped and forced into a kind of brainwashing session, denied food and sleep as the preacher works to exorcise the devils in her. Her girlfriend is spirited away, shamed and convinced (as Jeanette is not) that her desires have, indeed, been devils working inside her.

Although her mother and the preacher believe that the exorcism has taken and Jeannette is allowed back into the congregation, she knows from the outset that the sickness is not in her. When she again ‘slips’, allowing her very natural affections their way, she is ostracized completely, excommunicated and pronounced impure—quite literally turned out by her mother and shunned by almost all who were her family in her small community.

Initially, while Jeanette lingers in ecclesiastical quarantine, her pastor (staggered by the immensity of the problem and feeling incapable of dealing with such a gargantuan issue) turns the problem over to the council. They, in their divinely guided wisdom conclude, “The real problem, it seemed, was going against the teachings of St. Paul, and allowing women power in the church.” But of course, strong, uppity women, descendants of Eve—therein lies the problem.

Fortunately, the little girl in the story, much like the real Jeanette, is a strong and uppity woman who sees that the real problem is in the contemptible self-righteousness of the religion, the ignorance and fear and closed mindedness. She leaves her home, her religion, and the family who adopted her behind and moves on into the larger world.

You will quickly see as you read this little book why it is such an appropriate aid in helping students to see some of the ways in which religion, while claiming to be the holder of the moral torch, instead so often invites moral blindness. Though it is not quite as charming as I remember it on first reading, it is an excellent book, and short enough to be ideally suited to the busy city reader.

I will not say much about Jane Smiley’s newest novel, Horse Heaven. While I enjoyed it a lot, and take it to be another proof of Smiley’s enormous talents as a writer, it is a very long and complicated novel with literally dozens of characters that must be kept in mind. In A Thousand Acres and Barn Blind, Smiley showed us that she knows farm life intricately, just as she shows us equally clearly how well she understood university life in the seventies with her hilarious and perceptive Moo. Horse Heaven is a book about the racing of thoroughbred horses—about training them, owning them, loving them, even communicating with them. Like Iris Murdoch, Smiley does not hesitate at all to talk through the eyes of animals, and at least I as a reader had no doubts at all that I was getting the real scoop as I listened to the horse-talk.

There are some interesting undercurrents about the utter shallowness and frivolity of the rich in this novel and of the contempt for the ignorant rich owners by horse trainers and others involved with the rearing and racing of the horses, but the focus really is on the magnificent horses. It is so clear that Smiley knows what she is talking about, and that she has spent literally thousands of hours around racetracks and racehorses.

I doubt that Old Mole listeners are much into horse races; I know I certainly was not until I read this book. But I found myself fascinated by the Breeders Cup in late October, knowing as I had not before, that this is the king of horse races for those in the know, eclipsing the Kentucky Derby, and what is referred to as the Triple Crown. Breeders, owners, trainers and the devotees key towards this set of races (I think eight races, all held on the same day in New York). I found myself unable to keep in my seat as I watched these races of different lengths, on different turfs, and with horses from all over the world. Certainly, Smiley has opened a new window for me, and now I know what horses would say if they could talk.

Would I recommend this book? Well, certainly I would to Smiley fans. She is one of the really great writers of our times, and she has the political and social savvy required of great writers. Still, this is a very long book, almost six hundred pages, and because of the staggering number of characters and complexity of events, it needs to be read in quite a concentrated period of time—not over the weeks or months needed by many limited-time city-readers. So, take a look at it if you can, save it up for a vacation, or perhaps just put it on your ‘maybe’ list.