River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part three

This novel, which I introduced previously, is a kind of novel only a practicing and experienced scientist could write.

 

The author, Stan Rice, explains all the science in the book, even high-performance liquid chromatography, so that anyone can understand it. He does a particularly good job of explaining evolutionary biology, which is not surprising since he is the author of nonfiction books about evolution such as Encyclopedia of Evolution. One example is when one of the characters explains the evolutionary basis of the human aversion to incest. But what Rea’s stepfather tried to do—rape her—is not biological incest, since she is genetically unrelated to him.

The characters all have a healthy sense of humor—except Earl, of course.  For math teachers Conway and Thurman, the sense of humor is an unstoppable spring. Science offers lots of opportunities for humor, especially the Meeh coefficient and the way Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used trigonometry to measure the buttocks of an African woman rather than to touch her. The Meeh coefficient, the wacky mathematicians insist, requires the measurement of the surface area of a naked human body. Rice takes his fellow scientists no more seriously than did the British humorist David Lodge, author of novels such as Small World: An Academic Romance. The academic world is a place where you can be weird.

Unlike some of Rice’s other novels, this one does not have a lot of religion in it. But, like probably all Rice’s novels, it addresses the meaning of life. As Rea tells her audience at the end, “A happy life consists of doing ordinary things in a grateful manner.”

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously (cover), introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.