#a visit from the goon squad

Euphoria by Lily King

I did not anticipate a tale about three anthropologists mired in the tribal cultures of 1930s New Guinea to be a one-sitting read. As you may have garnered from reading my other blog posts, I am often wrong. 

I should have known from anthropologist Nell’s observation about half way through that things were bound to end painfully, but I simply couldn’t stop myself. She says, “Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?” (140).  And there is some terrible mistake, but who made it exactly, I’m not entirely sure. Was it one of the three scientists triangulated against the others? Was it of timing? Of place? Of circumstance? Or was it a mistake of more innate inevitability, of humanity, a mistake we ourselves didn’t make, but are doomed to pay for forever. 

That inevitability, as tangible as it was, pulled me through the pages. Navigating the river for hours in the oppressive heat and blackness, plagued by bugs and desolation in equal measures, the anthropologist Bankson notes: “Sometimes at night it seemed to me that my boat was not being pushed by the engine but that boat and engine both were being pulled by the river itself, the ripples of wake just a design, like a stage set moving along with us” (38). 

This is exactly how the novel drew me mercilessly onward, slapping at pesky and painful bugs, forcing in fetid thick air when it got difficult to breathe, like an anthropologist myself, determinedly highlighting passages I was hoping would uncover some mystery to the book or humanity, I’m not sure which. 

If Virginia Woolf had written Heart of Darkness, with editing by Jennifer Egan of a visit from the goon squad, the result might be this book. Yesterday evening, discovering I had turned the final page, I groaned - out of pain, or satisfaction, or surprise. I’m not sure which. And maybe I found that place of “euphoria” where Nell says you think you know everything - but really you discover you know nothing.