Smiley's People
One thing you have to admire
about Jane Smiley, no matter what you think of her fiction: She puts her money
where her mouth is. Two years ago, Smiley published an essay in
Harper's --a manifesto, really--claiming that readers have been conned
into seeing Huckleberry Finn as the "definitive" American novel when
it's actually a mess and a moral disaster. Among her charges was the claim that
the bond between Huck and the escaped slave Jim was an evasive white fantasy.
Twain, she says, doesn't care what happens to Jim; Jim is just a dumb sidekick
and the novel a precursor to the kinds of buddy movies in which a sweet black
cop played by Danny Glover stands aside while a white hero played by Mel Gibson
saves the day.
What's
more, Smiley wrote, readers have always sensed that the happy ending is slapped
on, a cop-out; probably the book would have dropped out of sight if certain
self-promoting writers hadn't started talking it up early in this century.
These literary bullies--T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and later on, Lionel
Trilling--were invested in a single, skewed view of American writing. They
believed that its great theme was the struggle of the individual wandering
alone in the wilderness, and they turned Huck into a mascot for the Lonely
Searching Man. What made Smiley especially angry was how these canon-builders
dismissed all the 19 th century novels that didn't conform to this
guy-in-nature pattern (unless the novels were written by Henry James). They
decided that the once-beloved social novel--Smiley's prime example is Harriet
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin --was a weepy, feminine waste of
time.
Iremember reading Smiley's article at the time and
blanching. One hates to use a sexist's favorite word, but she came off as
shrill. On the other hand, if you set aside her excessive loathing of Twain,
some of her points are hard to argue with. She's , for instance, that until
recently, men who wrote about alienation stood a decent chance of being taken
seriously by critics, while a whole genre of social novels written by women got
pooh-poohed as earnest and sentimental.
Is it possible, or even
desirable, to revive the lost tradition of social fiction? In The All-True
Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton , Smiley has supplied a test case.
It's set in the Kansas Territory, shortly before the Civil War, when the area
was an anarchic battleground between Northern abolitionists, poor pro-slavers
from Missouri, and speculators out to make a buck.
The
eponymous heroine was born and raised in Quincy, Ill., and orphaned, just as
the novel opens, at the age of 18. Lidie is tall, homely, a tomboy--and
somewhat anachronistically aware of all the 19 th century clothing
and marriage customs that infantilize women. She's a burden to her extended
step family, so when Thomas, a serious-minded man from Massachusetts, passes
through town on his way to Kansas, she marries him within the week. She knows
he's running guns for abolitionists (blond, effeminate, and brave, he's the
Northern counterpart to Gone With the Wind 's Ashley), but she's totally
unprepared for the hardscrabble life she's chosen. The first few chapters are
gripping re-creations of the hideous journey to Kansas and the daunting task of
building a cabin from scratch while drunken strangers jeer at you and threaten
you with rifles.
From her diatribe in Harper's , you'd
think Smiley was out to revive Stowian melodrama, with its coincidences,
angelic children, and neat distinctions between good and evil. Wrong. At every
point, Smiley upsets the usual expectations. Coming from the no man's land of
Illinois instead of North or South, Lidie represents the realist's take on
slavery--in her heart she's against it, but she finds the abolitionists smug,
intoxicated by their own abstract words. Instead of love at first sight,
Lidie's romance with cold, fussy Thomas is slow and confusing, and halfway
through the book, just as she's prepared to investigate the possibility that
they're in love, he's suddenly murdered. (I might not have revealed this plot
point if it weren't announced on the book jacket.)
Here the
story turns into a kind of absurd picaresque: Lidie, driven by rage at her
loss, disguises herself as a boy reporter in hostile Missouri and sets out to
find Thomas' killers. But Smiley blocks her path with various obstacles, until
Lidie ends up broke and dying on the side of a road, and a slave-owning family
takes her in. Unwilling to give up the notion that she has a mission, she
embarks on a final escapade: She tries to liberate Lorna, the family's angry,
put-upon slave-maid.
At which point, it becomes obvious that Smiley isn't
writing a traditional "social novel" at all. She's writing a sendup of
Huckleberry Finn . The parallels are obvious. Lidie equals Huck, and
Lorna equals Jim--Lidie even has a mischievous young cousin who's a stand-in
for Tom Sawyer--and the whole point of the book is to shine the harsh light of
reality on Twain's irresponsible fantasy. Unlike Huck's adventure, Lidie's ends
in disaster. Lorna is caught and sent down the river to a violent fate in the
South. And Lidie learns, learns, and learns her lesson: She's been selfish and
. Desperate to escape the plantation where she's been recuperating but lacking
the willpower, she has selfishly accepted the defenseless Lorna "as my reviver,
felt the cool, firm sensation of her hand on my neck as a promise."
The ending of Lidie
Newton is quite stunning as parody. But for someone so bent on unmasking
pieties, Smiley is not above her own kind of sanctimony. In its curious, modern
way, this novel is a sermon. It attacks sentimentality, ideology, and piggish
male heroism, preaching ambiguity in their place. "No one could describe what
was true in Kansas and Missouri," the newly mature Lidie announces at the end.
The message is deep--Smiley may be the subtlest didact ever to write a novel.
But was it worth taking down Huckleberry Finn for? Only if it serves as
a building block to a better Smiley novel in the future, one in which her
brilliant lessons of disillusionment fly faster, because they're spurred on by
a bigger, warmer imagination. This would be the real coup: to unite Smiley's
cold, corrective realism with the joy--still unmatched--of that increasingly
misunderstood writer Mark Twain.
If you
missed the links within this review, click for the of how critics dismissed a
"whole genre of social novels written by women ... as earnest and sentimental."
And 's a comparison between Lidie Newton and an early Smiley novel,
Duplicate Keys .
