- Light of the Moon
- by Luane Rice
- Bantam, 400 pp.
- CLR Rating:
CUE KNIGHT ON A WHITE HORSE
Readers seldom come to a book empty-handed. Rather, we arrive with a matching luggage set of expectations in tow. Plucking our books out from a crowd of millions that are published each year, we greet the first page cordially and then lay down the law.
“You are a crime novel – I expect fights, guts, and the hard-bitten hero to make it with only minor flesh wounds.”
“You are chick lit – the best friend shall triumph, anyone overly pretty will receive their comeuppance, and chocolate should figure prominently.”
“As for you, well, you are a new novel called Light of the Moon by Luane Rice. And I suppose I can call you, for lack of a better term, femi-lit.”
Femi-lit doesn’t make as many headlines as its younger sister, but it shares certain familial traits. The protagonist is usually a woman in her thirties or forties, intelligent, independent, and confronted with the crises that arise in one’s middle years – the aftermath of a divorce, the death of a parent, a loveless relationship, the seesaw of work and family, the lack of a child. And as with chick lit, it is often love or a change of place that proves the catalyst for change.
Sounding familiar yet? What if I were to list authors like Anita Shreve or novels like The Horse Whisperer or Message in a Bottle? Or bring up recent romantic adaptations like Under the Tuscan Sun? Or cross over into television to highlight Hallmark Channel movies?
It is in this light (pardoning the pun), then, that Luane Rice’s novel can be examined. The question is not whether Rice creates an unusual piece of literature, but rather how well she does within the realm of femi-lit. After all, there are many novels – Jane Austen’s Persuasion might be classed as a very early example – that use its limitations to full advantage.
Light of the Moon begins with the aftermath of a miracle. Susannah Connolly, an unmarried anthropologist and the book’s heroine, travels to the Camargue region of France to fulfill the dying wish of her mother and visit the shrine of Sarah. According to mythology, Sarah was the servant girl who, with Jesus’s aunts, Mary Magdalene, Martha, and Lazarus, washed up on the shores of Europe. She is also the saint who blessed Susannah’s mother with fertility.
Susannah, who is running away from painful memories and an irritating suitor, arrives in Stes.-Maries-de-la-Mer and is made welcome by the Romany residents. Sarah has a special significance for the Gypsy people of the region, giving our heroine an immediate entrée into a “closed” world. There is a kind of logic at work here: an inquisitive anthropologist is going to be much more interested in the culture and legends of an area than, say, a saleswoman. And Rice is very keen on incorporating the history and myths of the region into her plotline.
But this is femi-lit, and unlike, say, Sally Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel, which also explores the overlap of legend and modernity through the eyes of a middle-aged woman, Rice prefers to stick to certain unspoken rules. Susannah is childless, parentless, wounded, and wondering about love. She is in a region famed for its horses, a place imbued with the exoticism of the secretive Romany people. Readers therefore expect, and are given, a knight on a white horse, a young girl – half Gypsy, half American – without a mother, and a rift in the Camargue fabric that only an outsider can heal. While Vickers went brilliantly askew with her character, Rice goes straight down the middle.
The knight’s name is Grey Dempsey, an American cowboy who runs a ranch near the marshes of the area; the girl is his daughter Sari, the product of a love match between him and a famous Gypsy rider named Maria; and, to no surprise, Sari was traumatically injured when her mother left. After falling off the knight’s horse, named Mystère, while in pursuit of Maria, she has been unable to see color.
Leaving aside the connection to The Horse Whisperer for the moment, credit should be given to Rice for her hard work she has put into the book’s construction. Sari’s physical disability, as an example, is a reflection of her father’s ambivalent stance toward the Romany and her mother. It places Sari firmly in the novel’s environment, with its silvery marshes, white horses, and moonlit nights – an atmosphere that Rice evokes well:
They lived on the edge of a world of water, the sea-silvered marsh sliced into a puzzle of islands by hundreds of dark creeks. He liked this time of night, when the colors drained away, when his daughter could see what everyone else saw.
During the course of the narrative, Rice works to reconcile her metaphors, myths, and her characters’ relationships. Sari pictures her inner demons as a legendary dragon, with the red taillights of her mother’s fleeing car as its eyes, and holds tight to the story of Saint Martha, who soothed the dragon with song. Maria now lives with her lover in the desert of Nevada, as far from watery Camargue as possible. Susannah, whose specialty is cave drawings and prehistory but who can also, like Maria, leap onto horses in a single bound, is the healing link between them. The plot plans for this book must have taken blood, sweat, and tears.
So what’s the problem? Perhaps it is not so much the substance of the book that fails, but the style. It is possible for a reader, even one with a heavy dose of irony, to forgive a woman with a fluttering red ribbon being rescued by a cowboy if the subsequent relationship evolves into something more complex, but the love affair between Susannah and Grey is sometimes painfully awkward. Here are two examples:
There is nothing quite like diving into a secret cave with a man with whom you’re falling deeply in love…It was primal, and intense, and beautiful, and reckless, and made them realize they were part of something huge and everlasting.
They’d been apart for so long, nearly a month, and every night she’d dreamed of this – of kissing him, her body against his, his arms around her. He felt so wonderful and familiar, as if he’d somehow become part of her those weeks last month, as if without him, she had lost part of herself.
Leaving the agony of “nearly a month” aside, these descriptions of love are trite and they don’t do the book any favors. Femi-lit treads a fine line; a little wobble and it can easily fall into the romance category. In addition, when you plonk your heroine in an exotic locale, you run the risk of sounding like the tourism board. Rice knows that these traps are there; whether you think she steps over them is probably a matter of personal taste.
On a more prosaic level, a few pertinent marks from an editor wouldn’t have gone amiss. Invariably eyes “grow wide” or “flash,” rain “pounds,” and the sky is “spooky” – though such conventions make for a fast pace, they tax our patience. One might have noted, too, that comments like, “his French accent was soft, alluring, and sexy, but she barely noticed,” are just slightly contradictory. And a conversation might have been had about some areas where Rice repeats her histories or overindulges in another of femi-lit’s standards – lavish descriptions of domestic décor.
Now, there is a certain argument that says these examples are just typical shorthand for femi-lit, that readers want speed and satisfaction, and that Light of the Moon provides it in spades. One could find the idea of the universe being kind to Susannah, who as an older woman knows far more about life than any chicklet, a comforting one. One could state that the book’s purpose was not to create tension (Will Sari heal? Will Susannah and Grey make it?) but first to lay out the pieces of the past and then go about assembling them in an orderly fashion.
Nevertheless, there is something to be said for care and craft, and to label a novel as an example of femi-lit is not to excuse it from the criteria we apply to every book. Does its view of life convince? Has the author given us something new to chew on? Would it be on our shortlist if we were going to be stranded desert island?
With Light of the Moon we observe that Rice obviously has the muscle to write well-plotted novels; now it would be nice to see her stretch.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:37 am
This article is filed under France, Fiction Reviews, Anthropology.
Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black. But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions — the pinnacle of stealthy technology. [Washington Post]
In the past few months some tantalising, and mind-boggling, ideas have emerged: that there should be two dimensions of time, not one; that time could grind to a halt in a few billion years; or, most radical of all, that time does not even exist [Telegraph].
In cutting their funding of the physical sciences, and devaluing science education, the US and UK governments are committing ‘scientific vandalism’ [Spiked].
February 20th, 2008 at 9:57 am
This article is filed under Physics, Blog, Anthropology.
It is scarcely news that in a vast, pluralistic country like the United States, minorities should feel themselves threatened with absorption into the larger society, and that they should cling to some form of cultural identity. It begins poignantly when school children pledge allegiance to “ … one nation, indivisible, with freedom and justice for all.” Or used to. Experience, however, suggests that this ideal remains but an ideal after 200 years, and ethnic groups stubbornly identify themselves by their language, music and dance, art, religious practice, “traditional” cuisine and (holiday) costumes. Ethnicity, if it is not language, education, or religion that differentiates a group from our English-speaking society, has been politically conflated with “race,” and the identification of race with “culture” throws up unfortunate consequences.
On one hand it raises questions of adaptation and assimilation; on the other, it evokes nostalgias reinforced by the pressure of prejudice and racism for lost “homelands” beyond the seas or south of the border and through the entire southern hemisphere. Worse, when a group feels its cohesion threatened and fears the loss of its cultural identity, its anxiety seeks comfort in “traditions,” although their preservation detached from their native landscape is usually a ritualized observance, self-conscious, and often absurd. For the individual, the price of confusion over identity can be steep.
Most struggles to maintain ethnic identity through “cultural” activities display a synthetic quality; they are would-be, and lack vitality. Nostalgia yields kitsch, stereotypes exploited for trade and tourism, pop variations ad infinitum in music, costume, fashionably dressed in political, commercial cliché. Worse, criticism of the productions of “cultural entities” can be risky, compromised by hypocrisy and bad faith, which vitiates standards. How do you review an incompetent theatrical performance, when it has been supported by a corporate grant to a repertory theater that is obliged to mount plays funded by such grants, in order to qualify for municipal monies allocated to satisfy minorities’ political demands for representation? The aspiration of minorities for economic opportunity and political equality is turned into instruments that suppress critical thought when their cultural expression is confused with the demand for social justice. Most of what was the theater of ideas during the past century, for example, has devolved into slick agit-prop for very narrow ideologues, including movies and television, and the “hundred flowers” of porno-fashion ads.
When, as today, large numbers of individuals from minority groups seek to attain higher levels of education and enter a professional class, the question of “culture” can be painful. The necessity to acquire fluency in the dominant American culture in order to rise above the poverty of the urban ethnic enclave entails the dilution, if not destruction of an individual’s ethnic and racial legacy. Indeed, there may be no imminent, let alone reasonable solution to the dilemma of the minority individual who, despite a superior education afforded by our egalitarian mores, seeks to remain ensconced in ways of home and family, even while challenged with integration into the class-structure of Western society of a post-industrial, media-homogenized, consumerist country.
Because the culture of our larger society is by and large white and commercially-driven, including the latest rapsters and their globalizing clones, the present generation of ethnics strives to find cultural preservation in the university environment, which has been under pressure for thirty years to admit all the diversities, so to speak. In consequence, what has been achieved is largely the intellectualized product of “culture” resurrected from records. An “archival” culture, however, has something of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster about it; it may revenge itself on the society that created it.
How does higher education in California cope with the problems raised by the demands of minorities? The University of California, which consists of 10 separate, autonomous universities, has declared that the “knowledge and awareness of the history, roles, culture and contributions of ethnic groups in the development of California and the nation are essential components of an undergraduate education …. ” Furthermore, it wants to say that while “California bears a strong orientation to European civilization … it is also oriented — historically, geographically, economically, and culturally — to the Asian and Latin American Worlds in a way that most of the United States is not.”
How is this principal put in obscurantist academese?
“Campuses should develop curricular change and other policies that enhance the international, multicultural, and global learning experience of students…[because] California is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic community that is continually fed by new ethnic groups that grow at a rate far greater than that of the population at large. The presence of ethnic groups makes of California complex society where linguistic and cultural traits are maintained while the members of these groups attempt to participate fully in mainstream cultural activities. The maintenance of linguistic and cultural practices distinct from those of the larger population should not be seen as disloyal or conflictual, but as complementary and enriching.”
At UCLA, for example, we established in the 1960’s four Centers for the study of four major groups: the Afro-American Studies Center, the Chicano Studies Center, the Native American Studies Center, and the Asian-American Studies Center. These Centers were created as a response to the militancy of students during the ’60’s and ’70’s. Their activities are meant to provide bases for the production of documents to support a cultural awareness in general among the student population. The question, however, remains: Why should a Mexican-American, Japanese-American, Chinese, Indian, or even an Afro-American with 400 years of native-born ancestry, for instance, have to learn in school about his or her own history and culture? The answer may be because those histories and cultures have become increasingly etiolated as families or individuals, uprooted or emigrating from their origin elsewhere, grow remote in space and time from their beginnings. Exotic village cultures are as lost as the era before World War II. Our various “cultures” today exist in scattered regional enclaves, but principally in records maintained in the university libraries of our archival civilization. The cultural power that students dream of finding or saving is something (re)imagined in poetry and fiction, or in poetry (re)constructed from a fading oral tradition and recorded by curators and ethnologists who imagine themselves poets.
Or else you find that large language classes in Japanese, for example, are attended by only a handful of Caucasians, the rest being Japanese-Americans who have no need to learn the grammar of a language still spoken at home. Easy “A” grades for them.
The University expects, rather hopefully,
“to develop ethnic courses and integrate them more fully into the general education component of an undergraduate education … [since] the lack of knowledge about ethnicity in general, and of the ethnic groups that likely will make up the majority of the state’s population by the turn of the century, has created an atmosphere of serious misunderstanding, an atmosphere that is the pathway to misconceptions, stereotyped characterizations, prejudice, discrimination and oppression…. [T]he history of the experiences and expressions of ethnic groups … is .. .knowledge vital to the understanding of contemporary California society and indispensable for the improvement of the lives of minorities. Such knowledge is best gained through formal presentation of material in … structure[d] course[s].”
All that is anxious, wishful thinking. Ethnics, whether Chinese or Egyptian Arab, may study social anthropology in order to learn about what they once were, or for greater self-awareness, or as a means of therapy, a way to bolster self-esteem or restore pride in their lost past, as if the ghosts of vanished societies can be redemptive. A sharp thinker once wrote, “The past is a foreign country.” Emerson put it perfectly when he said of a museum exhibiting dummies dressed in the clothes of his grandparents’ day, that it was lifeless, lacking the brilliant gleam of a living eye. But students intent on acquiring the knowledge they need for professional life — engineers, business majors, science majors — are seldom interested in the Humanities, let alone Ethnic Studies, since they realize that knowledge is acquired to increase a person’s economic viability and autonomy in today’s swiftly-changing technocratic society.
It may be hypocritical to assert that courses dealing with ethnicity are designed to foster what is imagined by university professors to be “culture.” As the product of two generations of neo-Marxist teachers, the idea of teaching ethnicity is not very different from the “folk” cultures fostered under Stalinist bureaucracy. Ethnic Studies might be educationally useful for some white Americans of what is disingenuously termed our “mainstream culture,” since perforce they know little or nothing about the ethnic groups proliferating in their midst. Conceivably such courses could be helpful in accommodating social tensions because they afford a democratic means of political manipulation, for supporting “culture.” Notwithstanding, Ethnic Studies is quintessentially a university notion: it mistakes documents for reality. And providing an Ethnic Studies center or department is your typical administrative device for defusing the unhappiness of minorities in a pluralistic society headed always towards the Western achievement (eclectic only in dress, music, arts, and cuisine). It is also a vicious product of the ignorance and anxiety of our school bureaucrats — scientists and sociologists — for, by politicizing scholarship, it avoids critical thought about values. In essence, our Ethnic Studies centers exist to placate political demands; unfortunately, academics rush to develop and elaborate courses of study that are products of their long hours of lucubration in a library … or surfing the worldwide web’s inchoate cloaca of unfiltered documents.
And, what sorts of “culture” do they promote? Apart from open-air dance and music at the noon hour, together with stands offering samples of “ethnic cuisine” for luncheons on the grass, and corridors of tables, behind which stand students and others proselytizing religions from everywhere, arts and crafts, advertising, clothes, documentary films, they feature a culture constituted, rather re-constituted, by academics and students. It may not be “authentic”; yet it is not altogether ersatz; rather, mere quasi-kitsch, and not irredeemably commercial. The Getty Museum of Los Angeles, to maintain some public for its limited collections of art, and aping the sort of shows found in our natural history museums, has gone into the same business since 2000.
Which isn’t surprising, since what is reflected by society is first developed and manifest in our colleges and universities. “Culture” today means consumer items in the form of handicrafts; museum exhibitions; and most commonly, “folk” performances; in short, “showbiz.” Such are the products of our archival approach to the ways of all the other worlds that once were and are no longer, or exist in resurrections by the archæologist, dressed-up and preserved for makers of tv “documentaries,” or tourists venturing forth an hour or two from a cruise ship.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
This article is filed under Education, Sociology, Literary Themes, Essays, Anthropology.
The Indians are coming: India nevertheless accepts that it cannot compete directly with China’s substantial financial clout, and is instead aiming for a more nuanced partnership, based on “south-south” reciprocity, as opposed to a colonial-style “north-south” relationship, which is seen as more typical of China and the West. [Economist]
