Far Afield by Susanna Kaysen is a great example of the kinds of book I was hoping my 2010 literary resolution would allow me to read. I owned this book since my second year in college but I am only now reading it as my current portable book to read on the public transit. This is also my fourth and favorite anthropological novel I’ve read so far.
I did twice before try reading this book but I found it impossible to get past the dreary and slow beginning. There was also the issue of wrong expectations. The first time I tried reading the book was immediately after I bought it. And the sole reason for buying this book was that it was a Susanna Kaysen novel, the author of Girl, Interrupted. Since I loved her memoir, I somehow expected, despite the blurb in the back, that it’d be another coming of age book portraying psychological angst. Reading the first 20 pages or so not about that, therefore, has been disappointing. All I felt reading the beginning was an overwhelming sense of grayness coming off the pages and permeating reality. So I don’t really blame my younger self for not reading on to find out that this book was precisely about coming of age and psychological angst of the (usually intelligent) young people.
I couldn’t penetrate the grayness of the beginning on my second try either. But now I see that the beginning was so difficult because it was so compelling: I was transplanted into Faroe Islands feeling trapped by its coldness and humidity. Reality seemed to takes on different hues like their “unnatural” sun. Susanna Kaysen’s writing is so effective that I found myself travelling with Jonathan, the main character. I felt the ennui and the dread that Jonathan felt about his year ahead. All of this made me want to close the book only if to escape this world, and so I did not succeed finishing the book on my second try either.
Oh but on my third try, I kept reading, perhaps because I started this time with an adjusted set of expectations, but more likely because I was stuck on the train with only this book and I didn’t want to make eye contact with the other New Yorkers. And at this moment, I empathized with Jonathan, although he was a little arrogant in his youth and also a bit spoiled, because I, like him, wanted to avoid the very people I was sharing a city with. And so I was hooked.
This story is unlike the other three anthropological novels I’ve read so far. Instead of meeting a young protagonist anthropologist thirsty for knowledge and (more or less) eager to go native, Jonathan, our thesis researching novice anthropologist, feels more ambivalent about becoming a participant observer. Yet he gets sucked in and even in the thickness of his involvement with the culture, Jonathan has doubts, fears, and still continuing and consuming ambivalence about the whole anthropological enterprise. It was refreshing to finally meet a more believable grad student who seems too well read, too neurotic, and too young.
And Susanna Kaysen doesn’t disappoint in writing another psychological story. The acute observations I loved in Girl, Interrupted are what made me feel a connection with Jonathan. I especially loved the inner dialogues Jonathan had with his overly academic self, overly critical self, overly untrusting self, and finally a self that resigns himself to the conditions, both glorious and pathetic, of life itself. I ended up rooting for him but found the book too depressing at times since Jonathan’s problems can so easily be generalized to the human condition I am trying to ignore in my youth.
Jonathan’s way of making all the concerns of the twenties abstract and academic especially rings true with me since I as well as a few close friends of mine have a tendency to trap ourselves that way. Is making everything abstract our way of avoiding life itself? Well then, perhaps we need an awakening similar to Jonathan’s filled with poop, blood, and animal slaughter, essentially a confrontation with the realities of living outside our books.
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