{"id":144846,"date":"2020-05-06T14:14:22","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T18:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144846"},"modified":"2020-05-06T15:19:21","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T19:19:21","slug":"the-lord-of-the-flies-family-book-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/05\/06\/the-lord-of-the-flies-family-book-club\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018Lord of the Flies\u2019 Family Book Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the column Inside Story<\/a>, parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s unnerving how books mutate. You look up from your life\u2014from these weeks of homey terror\u2014and find a cherished old novel transformed into a bulletin from the front.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I have twin sons. They\u2019re twelve years old and identical. When the crisis started, their school hadn\u2019t done enough; my wife and I needed to fill the day, an Ozarks of empty time. We\u2019d start a family book club.<\/p>\n

My own seventy-five-ish mother\u2014a lady you might see lugging Judith Krantz paperbacks from an exurban library\u2014agreed to join. That made five of us. Different ages, tastes, places to shelter in.<\/p>\n

I pushed for Orwell. Or David Mitchell\u2019s Black Swan Green<\/em>; the boys came back with Lord of the Flies. <\/em>This may be hard to believe, but the pick didn\u2019t seem so fraught then.<\/p>\n

A bookshelf is a photoshopped self-portrait. The novels people exhibit are there to portray us as we hope to be seen. Hip, smart, wide ranging. All I\u2019ve got are books I\u2019ve loved or books I think I will. And books I incorrectly remember having loved. But such memories can be the prosthetic noses and spirit gum of the reading racket.<\/p>\n

As soon as I pulled down Lord of the Flies <\/em>I realized I\u2019d forgotten it. \u201cOh yeah,\u201d I\u2019d said when we made the choice, \u201cgood novel.\u201d Now my earlier opinions flowed back; in junior high I\u2019d kind of hated the thing.<\/p>\n

My sons\u2019 complaints were echoes, I realized, of my own: The book never says what happened to the adults. It\u2019s very coincidental that it is only kids who survived. The crash is too expedient. All this seemed like a flaw, at first.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I assume you\u2019re familiar with the basic material. At the start of the twenty-first century, Lev Grossman described the book in Time<\/em>\u2014when it made the magazine\u2019s best-of-the-century list, and the BBC\u2019s, also the Modern Library\u2019s\u2014\u201cA planeload of young boys is marooned on a nameless tropical island and are forced to fend for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

After this longline, Grossman continues:<\/p>\n

If the novel had been written in the 19th century it would have been about the cheery, whimsical never-neverland the boys created. But in Golding\u2019s version, the veneer of childish purity wears away quickly in the absence of adults, and the boys become two warring tribes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, Golding was parodying a particular<\/em> nineteenth-century kids\u2019 novel: R. M. Ballantyne\u2019s The Coral Island<\/em>. But then Golding\u2019s bull\u2019s-eye grew wider; Lord of the Flies<\/em> ended up parodying all of us. There\u2019s a Lord of the Flies<\/em> island in all our heads. That was the news Golding brought. And we\u2019d all go lawless in under a month, were we to find ourselves in the wrong circumstances.<\/p>\n

*<\/em><\/p>\n

But, again, Lord of the Flies <\/em>has its problems: it\u2019s too schematic; it reads, at times, like an outline for a longer, more spontaneous work. In the exactness of its implementation it can make you feel the writer is trapped on an island, too.<\/p>\n

Which is to say, as with certain short running tracks, the end is always in sight. Not that we know, for sure, the precise details\u2014but the ironic reversal, the Hobbesian epiphany, the (for us enlightenment fans) dramatic comeuppance. All of that arrives, as expected.<\/p>\n

The problem with schematic stories isn\u2019t that they aren\u2019t well carried off; it\u2019s that they feel preordained. The strong authorial hand inhibits energy. Irving Howe called this \u201cthe clarity of limitation.\u201d (Though I think a better term would have been \u201cthe limitation of clarity.\u201d) George Saunders likes a quote from the poet Gerald Stern. Stern: \u201cIf you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and hit the target, then you\u2019ve succeeded only in writing a poem about two dogs fucking.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a way, Lord of the Flies <\/em>is a two-dogs-fucking kind of book.<\/p>\n

And yet, it has lasted. A classic: it must have something else to it, and does.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis book, I don\u2019t know,\u201d my son Beau said. He didn\u2019t say anything else. But his face and his voice also spoke\u2014and they said the novel had made him anxious.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d my wife asked. One way Susannah shows love is getting the boys to express themselves.<\/p>\n

We were sitting in the living room with the blinds up; April sunlight, the couch, a typical setting. Our books and Kindles were open; my mom\u2019s Judith Kranz\u2013loving face smiled to us from a MacBook screen. Meeting no. 3 of the Strauss Family Lord of the Flies<\/em> Book Club. We were deep into the novel now.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like reading it,\u201d Beau said. At twelve he has light eyes and what Saul Bellow, in More Die of Heartbreak<\/em>, calls \u201cthe magics,\u201d compassion, na\u00efvet\u00e9, an appealing soul. Softness, most of all. He wouldn\u2019t have lasted three days on the island.<\/p>\n

We had reached the part where \u2018The Beast\u2019 (an aviator\u2019s corpse still wearing a parachute) appears: a representative image. The true \u201cbeast\u201d in this story is actually\u2014dun dun dun<\/em>\u2014the boys themselves. The evil latent in our nature. You know, a symbol.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of\u2014boring<\/em>,\u201d my other son, Shepherd, said. \u201cYes!\u201d his brother yelped.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoring?\u201d Susannah and I said.<\/p>\n

The book, like this sudden era, shows that the laminate of society is disconcertingly thin. After a couple of days, the kids on Golding\u2019s island worship and make sacrifices to a beast; they start killing one another. Boring<\/em> was a big misread.<\/p>\n

And yet I\u2019d found Lord of the Flies <\/em>kind of boring, too, at the beginning\u2014until it got terrifying. Maybe my kids were stuck thinking about the sunny parts? It seemed they didn\u2019t get the punch line. They\u2019d grabbed only the setup.<\/p>\n

Still, there was a nagging fact. While finding the novel a drag, my son Beau was also really disturbed by it. And I think I\u2019ve figured out why.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The opening is what I keep coming back to. Those plane-crash kids, the tropical light spanking off the waves, kids in the briny ocean\u2014that is evocative. There\u2019s a joy in all this. The mango-and-unsupervised days. This joy, if we remember how much these characters have uncaringly lost, discomfits.<\/p>\n

Boring? There are times when a misread can turn out to reveal a profound truth. Beau\u2019s take matched his experience\u2014the experience of so many in this crisis. He\u2019d stumbled onto what\u2019s ominous in how those with luck or privilege are living through this.<\/p>\n

For so many now\u2014and the numbers say that, so far, most of us have been lucky\u2014the lockdown has been, embarrassing as it is to disclose, actually kind of uneventful. People I\u2019ve spoken to have talked about feeling a bit heartless. Blockaded, in this unusual adjournment of the everyday, some of us actually feel untouched. Or, touched only hypothetically. (This will change, of course. Maybe even by the time you read this.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s too normal,\u201d my son said about the opening of the book. \u201cThey\u2019re just having a good time. It doesn\u2019t feel like anything bad just happened.\u201d The people trapped on that island should be taking the state of affairs seriously, and aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I live in New York; I just saw pictures of a mass grave on Hart Island. And then I went on YouTube and watched a Key and Peele skit. And then I wrote this essay. I\u2019ve lost no one yet.<\/p>\n

Lord of the Flies<\/em> has a very odd power. The scenes from the book that I dream about are those pacific ones: laughing, swimming, palm trees, jokes. And I slam awake, with my heart going very fast in my throat.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Darin Strauss will publish <\/em>The Queen of Tuesday\u2014 his sixth book and the follow-up to his best-selling, NBCC-winning <\/em>Half a Life\u2014in August with Random House. He is a clinical professor for the NYU creative writing program.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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