I knew about Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork when it was
released back in 2007. But like a lot of fiction that passed through my hands
when sorting through the hundreds of boxes while working for Borders, it did
not strike then as something I might read. And sadly, like hundreds of other
books that get released and ignored by 99.9% of the population, it may have
never sold more than a handful of copies
–well, beyond students of anthropology anyways.
But fate would intervene in Fieldwork's life of going from
hardcover (probably never to see the light in paperback) to the remainder bin.
In the April 15th 2007 issue of Entertainment Weekly, author Stephen King
praised the book and criticized the author’s publishers -Farrar, Straus &
Giroux- for their handling of the release: “Why, why, why would a company
publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it?
Why should this book go to waste? Is it because there are people in publishing
who believe that readers who liked The Memory Keeper's Daughter are too dumb to
enjoy a killer novel like Fieldwork? If so, shame on them for their elitism.”
He went on to write about the novel's complexity, its "narrative voice
full of humor and sadness," and suspense. It was, in some mind, a scathing
attack on its publisher for its poor marketing choices (mainly the look of the
hardcover version, which King claimed was dull. When Berlinski won the Whiting
Award, he had great "luck" because "the most famous
writer in the world, picked up my book because he didn't like the cover"). King went on to lament "As of March 26 (2007), Fieldwork was No. 24,571 on the Amazon
best-seller list, and not apt to go much higher. The reason why is illustrative
of how the book biz became the invalid of the entertainment industry, and why
fiction sales are down across the board (with the possible exception of chick
lit). Critics, with their stubborn insistence that there's a difference between
''literature'' and ''popular fiction,'' are part of the problem, but the
publishers themselves, who have bought into this elitist twaddle, are also to
blame."
Fast forward to 2012 and I’m strolling through Iliad’s Used
Bookstore in North Hollywood a month or so ago and saw Fieldwork on the $2
shelf. I grabbed it quickly, remembering that old King article back then. Now
finished with it, I can say I’m glad I read it, but I can also say that I
understand how the publishers might have felt back 2006 when they bought the manuscript,
as its more than the sum of its parts.
The novel is set in Thailand, and is told from the point of
view of a fictional narrator named Mischa Berlinski. It tells the story of a
tribe called the Dyalo, a family of Protestant missionaries attempting to
convert them to Christianity, and Martiya, an anthropologist who is studying
the tribe and who murders one of the missionaries and then commits suicide in
prison. Unable to get Martiya's story out of his head, Mischa digs up some of
her work, which is brilliant, and becomes obsessed with telling her story. As a
field worker with the remote Dyalo tribe, Martiya lived among her subjects,
adopting their ways and falling deeply in love with a Dyalo man. As it turns
out, the murder victim was also a Dyalo expert, albeit with a very different
mission.
The author notes in the Afterword that his original
intention was to write a nonfiction book on the history of the conversion of
the Lisu people of Northern Thailand to Christianity. But it seems the author
was stumped on how to proceed, so like a bunch of books released in the last
decade or so (probably starting with John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil, but you can also include the novel by Thomas Keneally that
became Schindler's List. Keneally always said he was a novelist, and not a historian, so that's why he chose to write that way) he decided to wrap a fictional story around real
historical happenings. Thus the Lisu become the fictional Dyalo, though my speculation
is most of the anthropological observations are combinations of many other real
tribes that existed in Thialand through the centuries.
The novel sparkles with original, eyewitness observations of
remote tribes and western missionaries alike, yet there are bumps along the
road, as the author struggles with all writers’ impulse to tell you everything
they know. It is funny at times and page-turning as well, and I highly
recommend the book, but there were times I did feel –especially in the middle
section- were I was reading more of an anthropology dissertation than a novel.
I suppose had not Stephen King reviewed the book, Berlinski’s
tome may have vanished in the mists of Fiction Hell. Most well-known authors receive
countless Advanced Readers Copies of books a week –sci-fi author John Scalzi
said on his Whatever blog he gets up to fifty a week- and many are passed over.
But it shows you as well that sometimes –like a bland cover- an author like
King saw beyond a publishers misstep in marketing and gave the author a chance
to play with the Big Kids.
