Euphoria

After reading and loving Lily King's Writers & Lovers, I had some like-minded readers tell me they prefer her earlier novel, Euphoria. So I have now read it and can't honestly say if I liked one more than the other--they're entirely different books, with different aims and ambitions. But King is a hell of a writer, I can definitely say.

Euphoria is a fictionalized account of a specific time period in anthropologist Margaret Mead's life and career. I know little about Mead, but it doesn't seem to matter (although the novel did lead me to request a bio of her from the library). The premise is that she, her husband, and another young researcher end up in a bit of a work and love triangle in a remote area in New Guinea. The fictional Mead, Nell, is a renowned researcher married to Fen, a jealous (both professionally and personally) researcher who hasn't got her acclaim, and Andrew, who's just learning the ins and outs of studying people in remote areas. 

It's amazing to me that this book is only 257 pages long. King packs a lot in: The ethics involved in anthropology, societal mores, relationships between Western men and women in the early part of the twentieth century--that's just some of what's going on in this thought-provoking book. 

The one quibble I had is that the bulk of the story is told from Andrew's first-person point-of-view. There are a few places where Nell has the narrative, either through third person or through diary entries. I would have liked to be in her side of the story more. She was a fascinating character, and maybe even more of the diary entries would have been enough. But that's a quibble. Otherwise, this was a great read, and like I said, so very different from Writers & Lovers, and it makes me wonder what King will do next.