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Date Posted: 12:45:11 02/08/00 Tue
Author: David
Subject: Re: Read this after you've finished
In reply to: Catherine 's message, "Read this after you've finished" on 11:42:16 01/25/00 Tue

This is a mediocre book that would have been an excellent short story. The stockpiling of coincidences, the flat, needless secondary characters, and the magnitude of the main conflict suggest to me a smaller canvas that would connect the question of friendship to evolutionary musings and limit the coincidences to the Galapagos islands and Martha’s presence there. A single conversation between Jane and Martha would resolve the issues at hand. The main idea here has potential, and one of the few connections I had to Jane’s personality—I rarely felt like she was thinking, talking, or narrating like anyone our age—was that insecurity about change that has been especially pronounced for me in the last few years. I can’t speculate on my future adaptive instincts, but I think change has been so routinized, even ritualized, in the past that only now, in my mid-twenties, am I regularly surprised by the turns my life takes. And just like Jane, I’ve tried to make sense of them with high-flying theories. I like how Schine evoked that nagging inner voice. Still, I don’t know who would prefer 210 pages of it to a more succinct narrative that used the unique situation to shed light on a familiar sensibility.

Part of my impatience with Jane’s ruminations stem from the narrow view of Darwin’s ideas and evolutionary theory. The metaphor of evolution seems to depend on a view of natural selection as fierce, individualistic, and opportunistic, and on a view of friendship as purposeless [“I wondered again what evolutionary value friendship could possibly hold. There are theories about cooperation, I know, but friendship is hardly that. I suppose it could be some remnant of parental love or sibling love or family love in general . . . Just a vestige, though . . .” (198)]. Schine uses those well-worked (and usually politicized) tropes about progress to explain the demise of Jane and Martha’s friendship: “The feud was genetic! Martha and I had inherited it! If this theory were valid, Martha had stopped being my friend because she had to.” (42). Even Martha explained the feuding Ritters and Wittmers as having “dutifully fulfilled their vulgar Darwinian destinies, struggling over territory, even over reproduction.” (105). And Martha, who was so admired by the other characters in the book, seemed the most “evolved”--if you take that to mean immune to the ebb and flow of relationships, well-adapted to her environment, and far from fretting about lost friendship.

My understanding of evolutionary theory is a little less malevolent. My friends (?) who study life sciences tell me that most sociobiologists work hard to strip away from Darwinism the dogma that Schine buys into wholesale. Friendship and companionship are not residual, savagely opportunistic, or needless. They’re essential. That they ebb and flow doesn’t mean that they are undependable. The major transitions in human evolution have arisen through cooperation, not competition, as the dominant force (there’s a new book by Alison Jolly, Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution, that argues exactly that). Trust between friends and love between kin fuel evolution: sexual reproduction, for example, involves giving only half of a genome in the interest of improving the next generation (as opposed to cloning); in all of our evolutionary “progress,” children are still dependent on parents long after birth. Instead of looking to evolution to explain why friendships change or end, Schine might have used evolution to explain why they form in the first place. As frustrating as it is that Jane and Martha’s friendship ended, evolution explains virtually nothing.

One “coincidence” in the book that leapt out at me: Jane’s grandfather and the Cuban connection. I have no idea why Schine made Jane’s mother Cuban. It added nothing to the family feud, nothing to the conflict between Jane and Martha. But Jane’s grandfather, Edwin, is described as leaving the family sugar import business to work at a Harvard-administered agricultural research station in a town called Limones. As some of you know, part of my dissertation research deals with a Boston family who owned a number of sugar estates around Cienfuegos. (I’ve been cataloguing the family papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and I’ve gotten to know some of the descendants.) One of the minor properties they owned was a cane farm called Limones. The patriarch was named Edwin Atkins, and in 1901 he donated a portion of the Limones land to Harvard to develop an agricultural research station. As far as I know, this was the only North American-operated research station on the island, and definitely the only one run by Harvard. I doubt that the overlap is mere coincidence, so I’ve written a letter to Schine. I’ll keep you posted.

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