This review was originally posted, in a slightly different form, on Goodreads in June 2025.
This book is a capable history of New Thought in the Christian church, particularly in America. The author first sketches how she grew up around a lot of New Thought and mistook it for Christianity. Then, she sketches how after she realized many of these beliefs were wrong, for some years she was calling them New Age because that’s what everyone else called them. She discusses how she learned of the term New Thought and how it differs from the New Age.
Both belief systems partake of Gnostic/Hermetic cosmology and theory of human nature. However, New Age embraces neopaganism and the occult, whereas New Thought instead tries to cast these Hermetic ideas in “Christianese” and read them back into the New Testament. This is made easier because many New Testament writers were talking directly back to Gnostics, and even re-purposing their terms.
Melissa unpacks the Gnostic/Hermetic assumptions behind such common “Christian” practices as the Prosperity Gospel, visualization, affirmations, “I am” statements, and the like. But instead of just dismissing these practices as “ppf, that’s pagan,” she actually shows where they originated and how they differ from orthodox Christianity.
This book does not dive deeply into the pagan side of Gnosticism and Hermeticism. It doesn’t discuss these philosophies’ relationship to Western mysticism, Eastern mysticism, Kabbalism, or German philosophers like Hegel. It doesn’t discuss the attempts in the early centuries after Christianity to integrate Gnosticism with Christianity. The history of these philosophies is a huge topic that could take up a lifetime of study.
Melissa’s book is not meant to be an intimidating doorstop of a book that covers all of this. She’s zooming in on one little twig on this big, ugly tree: New Thought and its influence on American Christianity. Her book gives well-meaning Christians the tools and vocabulary to recognize this kind of thought and to talk about it. I have bought copies to give to all the women in my family. New Thought can be difficult to talk about because it portrays itself as “what Jesus actually taught.” If you know someone who is into New Thought, you cannot just dismiss it as “No, that’s Gnostic.” Even though you are right, to them it will sound like you’re just brushing them off. This book might be useful in such a situation.
If you want to find out how Hermeticism gave birth to Marxism through Hegel and Marx, there is a fantastic series of lectures about it on YouTube by James Lindsay. I also recommend Melissa’s YouTube channel and the YouTube channel Cultish.
I have a friend who, shortly after he was married, came down with a mysterious illness. It was causing fatigue, pain, digestive problems, and a bunch of other debilitating symptoms. This guy is young (or was when he first became sick), handsome, and looks fit. He is not in a demographic that you would expect to have trouble being believed, but he had trouble. He’s been accused of faking. He’s been yelled at by a doctor. He and his wife used up all their money, and the illness made it difficult for him to work his job as a builder. Finally, after years of seeking solutions on their own, outside the traditional medical establishment, my friend found a doctor who was willing to look at his blood under a microscope.
Turns out, he has Lyme disease.
It took him fifteen years to get this diagnosis.
As I found out when I read this book, this sort of experience is not unusual for a Lyme patient.
Let’s start with another Lyme testimony
The author, Kris Newby, and her husband were both bitten by Lyme-bearing ticks while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard in 2002. It didn’t take them 15 years to get a diagnosis … but the disease did ruin their professional lives, use up all their money, and cause them to search through more than ten doctors.
We had brain fog: we couldn’t think, multitask, or remember simple things. The crushing fatigue continued. Our necks felt like they were locked in a vice-grip. Paul’s symptoms were more muscle and joint related. He didn’t have the strength to lift his leg over a bike or press the trigger of a portable drill. Mine were more neurological. I was no longer capable of reading books aloud to my sons before bedtime … I’d run into the side of doorways and had trouble recalling the current month and year. … One day I found myself at a stoplight unable to remember what the red, yellow, and green lights meant.
Rather than admit defeat, Dr. B decided that I was an attention-seeking, hysterical female whose husband was suffering from sympathy pains. He diagnosed us with a “psychosomatic couples thing.”
I spent weeks pulling strings to get an appointment with another infectious disease specialist, this one at Stanford University School of Medicine. Our first few appointments were with a young physician/fellow whom I’ll call Dr. C. …During my final appointment, Dr. C told me, “You’d have more chance of winning the lottery than both of you getting Lyme disease.” Then he strongly recommended that we both seek psychological counseling for the depression we were experiencing.
Dr. D came in at the end of the appointment, handed me a box of tissues, and said, “Sorry, we don’t have the tools to fix what is wrong with you.” Then he dismissed us as patients.
ibid, pp. 85 – 88
As it turned out, most Lyme ticks are also infected with rickettsia, another tick-borne illness that is even harder to detect than Lyme in a blood test: “If you’re not looking for it, you won’t see it.” (231) More in a moment about the reasons for this double infection.
Years later, when Newby had been researching Lyme and rickettsia, she found herself again sitting in front of Dr. D., this time as a journalist rather than a patient.
As I sat in his office, I wondered if he remembered me, but I didn’t mention our previous meeting.
At the end of the meeting, I took a chance and asked him, “Are you screening for any rickettsias?”
He said he didn’t know. The genetic sequencing was being done at Columbia University … Dr. D. opened the study protocol on his laptop and realized there were no rickettsias on the screening list. He said he’d see if rickettsias could be added to the search.
As I got up to leave, he added, “When you came by my clinic before, we weren’t allowed to treat chronic Lyme disease. It was department policy. I’m sorry.”
ibid, pp. 236 – 237
The diagnostic standards: made-up
He was not wrong. The diagnostic standards for Lyme specifically deny that chronic Lyme exists.
In the Infectious Disease Society of America guidelines, chronic Lyme isn’t classified as an ongoing, persistent infection; it’s considered either an autoimmune syndrome or a psychological condition caused by “the aches and pains of living” or “prior traumatic psychological events.” These guidelines were often used by medical insurers to deny treatment, and many of its authors are paid consulting fees to testify as expert witnesses in these insurance cases. In some states, the guideline recommendations take on the force of law, so that Lyme physicians who practice outside them are at risk of losing their medical licenses.
ibid, p. 121
It gets worse. In preparation for her documentary Under Our Skin, the author put in a FOIA request to obtain emails between CDC employees and IDSA guidelines authors. She got the runaround for five years, so they completed the documentary without it. Eventually, she received 3,000 pages of emails which revealed that “a majority of the authors of the 2006 IDSA Lyme diagnosis and treatment guidelines held direct or indirect commercial interests related to Lyme disease … tests or vaccines for which they were patent holders. ” (124) Furthermore, “part of the group’s stated mission … was to run a covert ‘disinformation war ‘ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists … ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks.'” (123)
This pill is not just red, it’s black
The Jen of ten years ago would have been very skeptical of this kind of expose. It would have struck me as too similar to Marxist conspiracy theories where all the bad stuff in the world is caused by “capitalists,” which means primarily “big corporations,” but then is applied to anybody who doesn’t want socialism. Journalists, and Hollywood movie directors, love their government/big business conspiracies. It’s one of the very few kinds of story that get them going. Ordinarily, when I am presented with a “corrupt capitalists” narrative, I sympathize with the supposed villains of the piece because I know that the authors of the piece, if they knew my views, would probably villainize me just as readily.
However, when it comes to health, the Jen of ten years ago has seen some stuff since that time. I’ve met people with Lyme (my friend above is the most poignant example, but there have been others). I’ve met people, particularly women, who have had an extraordinarily hard time getting autoimmune type physical complaints taken seriously. I’ve even had that happen, on a small scale, to myself.
Then there have been the scandals. The ADD drugs scandal, the depression drugs scandal, the cross-sex hormones scandal, and the one we don’t talk about, which involved financial incentives for drug companies to discredit victims of their product and doctors who tried alternative treatments almost exactly like the incentives in relation to Lyme described in this book.
So yeah, I’m not that Jen anymore. I do think Newby is a little leftie (maybe a lot leftie), but that’s not why she wrote this book. She wrote it because she got Lyme disease and a series of doctors called her crazy.
My friend with Lyme also has a lot of food allergies and substance sensitivities. During You-Know-What, when one of his kids broke an arm, he was worried about bringing her to the hospital, because they might force You-Know-What on her as a condition of treatment. They got the arm treated without a jab; happy ending. But we live in a relatively red state. This is a horrible position to be in: where you’ve basically lost all trust in the people you need for critical care.
And that’s not even the bad part.
The Bad Part
Most of Bitten is neither about IDSA scandal nor about the author’s personal experience with Lyme. Instead, it follows the life of Willy Burgdorfer, a Swiss-American scientist. Chapter 2 opens with Willy’s triumph when, in 1981, he discovered spirochetes, similar to those that cause African relapsing fever, inside the midgut of a blacklegged deer tick. Burgdorfer became a hero in the medical and scientific communities after he and his team proved that these tick-borne spirochetes were what was causing the mysterious Lyme disease. He received awards and honorary degrees. (13 – 15)
Willy called his discovery “serendipity,” a happy accident.
Shortly before his death, Willy was videotaped saying that he believed that the outbreak of tick-borne diseases that started around Lyme, Connecticut, had been caused by a bioweapons release. [This] could explain why the condition we call Lyme disease is so hard to diagnose and treat–and why the epidemic is spreading so far and so fast, [but] Willy’s confession was vague and fragmented because he was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease.
ibid, pp. 15 – 17
The book then backs up and starts with Willy’s childhood in Switzerland and his Ph.D. work there on ticks mailed from East Africa which caused relapsing fever and African swine fever. He does a postdoctoral program at the University of Basel (25), then accepts a research position at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever. More ticks! In fact, the biggest tick collection in North America. “The U.S. Public Health Service, which would later be renamed the National Institutes of Health, paid for the lab by developing, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines for … diseases transmitted from animal or arthropod vectors to man.” (35) As the chapters roll by, we follow Willy as he falls in love with and marries a fellow scientist who is a U.S. citizen. Already working for the U.S. government during the Cold War, he soon found himself involved in programs testing nerve gasses and biological weapons.
America’s first deployable incapacitating biological weapon was an aerosolized mix of a toxin, a virus, and a bacterium, designed to create a prolonged period of incapacitation across a population. The first component … SEB, was a toxic waste product of the bacterium that causes food poisoning. In three to twelve hours, [victims] would come down with chills, headache, muscle pain, coughing, and a fever as high as 106 F. The second component, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, would, in one to five days, cause a high fever and weakness and fatigue lasting for weeks. The third component, Q fever, would cause debilitating flulike symptoms for weeks to months … Q fever could be chronic and sometimes even fatal.
When exposed to this mass-produced germ cocktail, theoretically, few people would die, but it could put a significant percentage of a population out of commission, making an invasion easier. And no city infrastructure would be harmed. Later, Henry Kissinger questioned how nonlethal these weapons could be and wryly noted that they would be nonlethal only for someone with two nurses.
ibid, p. 145
In other words, this was a way to bomb civilians without bombing civilians.
In other words, weapons developers were mixing different germs and toxins deliberately and putting them into a form that could be easily spread.
Meanwhile, Willy was force-feeding pathogens to thousands of ticks.
Near the end of his life, Willy was interviewed on video by Tim Grey, an indie filmmaker, who later shared the tape with Newby.
“If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?”
“Yeah. It sounds like, throughout the thirty-eight years, I may have …”
Finally, after three hours and fourteen minutes, Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: “Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper … the paper from 1952?”
In response, Willy crossed his arms defensively, took a deep breath, and stared into the camera for forty-three seconds–an eternity. Then he looked away, down and to the right; he appeared to be working through an internal debate. The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, “Oh, well.” Then anger flashes across his face. “Yah,” he said, more in German than English.
ibid, pp. 100 – 101
So now you know why I’m blackpilled when it comes to “science” and “medicine” and the NIH. This is why Lyme is going around ruining people’s lives. Because it was designed to.
Black-pilled, but still not a hippie
The book closes, as all hippie books must, with the obligatory chapter blaming Western colonialism.
Big Hole [Montana] was the site of one of the bloodiest conflicts between the U.S. government and the Nez Perce. … U.S. soldiers ambushed them while they were sleeping. The Nez Perce lost eight-nine people, mostly women and children, and the U.S. soldiers lost twenty-nine, with an additional forty injured.
Two months later, Chief Joseph surrendered.
The Native Americans who used to live here understood that they were part of nature, not the overlords of all living things.
When the white settlers arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, they clear-cut the trees around Hamilton for their houses, railroad ties, and mine shafts. This fostered the overgrowth of brush, which led to a proliferation of small mammals, the blood meal hosts for the wood ticks that carry Rickettsia rickettsi. The spotted fever epidemic at the turn of the last century was fueled by this disruption of a previously balanced ecosystem.
ibid, pp. 245 – 247
Now, you know that I have a special interest in American Indians, and feel as much sympathy for them as anybody. And just for the record, I am against the massacre of civilians. That said, it is ridiculous to imply that the settling of North America by Europeans is responsible for the existence of the Lyme epidemic, or of disease in general.
It is a fact of history that people groups move, expand, colonize, and kill each other. And as a result of these people movements, ecology changes, and new diseases spread or become prominent. All this is true. It does not follow that, before any given people movement, the ecosystem was perfectly “balanced,” or that there was no disease and no death. There would have been different causes of death, different diseases, and different wars. The Anasazi, for example, were severely malnourished. The Aztecs were systematically wiping out all the other peoples in central Mexico. Montana was not Eden. It’s a fallen world.
Rather than blaming the U.S. soldiers who killed the Nez Perce for the Lyme epidemic, let’s blame them for what they actually did; namely, killing the Nez Perce. And call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I feel that the blame for the Lyme epidemic should fall on the Cold War era government bioweapons bureaucrats and scientists who actually infected ticks with Lyme and rickettsia, and apparently allowed them to escape somewhere on Long Island. I feel that Occam’s Razor would lead us to point towards them as the culprits, rather than to something big and vague like colonialism. Just a thought.
And I do blame them. Despite my semi-defense of colonialism as the way of the world, no, I do not think it’s a good idea to create a cocktail of infectious agents that result in chronic, debilitating, hard-to-diagnose disease, and then to put this into a form that is easy to disseminate. You don’t have to be a naive, anti-war hippie to realize that this is a terrible idea that is sure to bring Murphy’s Law crashing down upon your head. In the same way, I am just a humble non-scientist but I don’t think it’s a good idea to create a genetic “vaccine” packaged in a lipid particle that instructs the body to make a disease, for which you cannot control the dosage or where it goes in the human body. And I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to stop testing this concoction halfway through, turn up your nose at long-term testing, bill it to the public as safe and effective, ignore contrary data, suppress alternative treatment methods, and then demonize and gaslight people who report injuries. It just seems that there are a few things that might could go wrong there. Just a thought.
The following review was posted on GoodReads on June 27.
I love Tony Hillerman’s Navajo police procedurals. A few years ago, I got to travel through Navajo country (Dinetah), which was amazing because for fans of Hillerman it’s like getting to visit Middle Earth. At the Navajo Cultural Center gift shop, they displayed many of Hillerman’s books, and this memoir. I picked it up, but it took me several years to get around to reading it.
Once I did, it went fast because this is a page-turner. Hillerman’s writing is understated and vivid (he started his writing career as a journalist).
It turns out that Hillerman is closer to the age of my grandparents. He grew up in the Dust Bowl during the Depression, fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Quite a lot of the book is devoted to his memories of France during WWII. He was then injured (legs, and eyes), spent some time in the hospital, and was sent home with crutches and an eye patch. He discovered that “Military Intelligence is usually neither.” He doesn’t dwell on it, but he had PTSD before that was a word. Nightmares, unable to keep his breakfast down. He recounts, in the 1950s, seeing a grisly car accident that made the police officer on the scene vomit, but Hillerman stood there unaffected.
Hillerman and his wife also adopted a number of children, and raised a big, happy family.
All of this is related with almost no self-pity, and it’s often very funny.
This book contained less about the Navajo than I expected. I guess Hillerman has poured his learning about them into his novels rather than into his memoir. But by the time the book reached his later years, when the Navajo became a big theme, I was not disappointed about this because the book itself had already been such an entertaining ride.
There is an appendix which lists a number of Hillerman’s books and sketches out the process that led to each one. They presented different kinds of problems that will be reassuringly familiar to other authors.
All in all, Tony Hillerman is a total mensch, a good egg, and it’s been an honor to get to know him.
This [hospital] ward had a tradition that no patient would be sent off to surgery without his fellows gathering at his bedside to hold a wake. The commissioned medical staff forbid this custom as insulting to them and contrary to good medical practice. However virtually everyone in the ward was a combat infantryman and the wakes went on anyway after the nurses had left. At these wakes, ambulatory patients would gather around the bed of the fellow due to go under the knife, discuss his character, and regale him with awful stories of ineptitude in military operating rooms (wrong organs tinkered with, arm removed instead of leg, and so forth). They would also establish “dibs” on his various possessions in the event he didn’t come back alive and compose a letter to his family describing his sins and shortcomings. The only nurse who didn’t consider this tradition barbarous was an old-timer captain. She thought it an antidote against self-pity–the worst danger in any ward full of badly damaged young males.
Tony Hillerman, Seldom Disappointed, pp. 140 – 141
As a matter of fact, I can dredge up nothing much to complain about in my formative period. We children spent those years of the Great American Depression/Great Oklahoma Dust Bowl living miles below the current poverty level but happily protected by love and the invincible ignorance of the young. Life in Sacred Heart then (and now, for that matter) was not complicated by any possibility of getting rich. Everybody was poor and when you’re a kid you don’t know you’re deprived unless you see someone who isn’t. That didn’t happen around Sacred Heart.
… oppida sua omnia, numero ad duodecim, vicos ad quadringentos, reliqua privata aedificia incendunt; frumentum omne, praeter quod secum portaturi erant, comburunt …
“All their towns, in number about twelve, and their villages, about four hundred, and the remaining private buildings, they burned. All their grain, except what was meant to be carried with them, they burned …”
… ut domum reditionis spe sublata paratiores ad omnia pericula subenda essent …
“… that they might be ready to undergo all dangers after destroying the hope of returning home.”
Yikes!
Taken from The Gallic Wars, trans. Franz Ruedele, pp. 12 – 13
Quick! Who do we know who’s a linguist, a former missionary, a gifted writer, and wants to capture in novel form the human condition and God’s grace to us in it?
Who is awkward, reserved, and can come off as rude and abrupt, but actually has passionate emotions, a deep love for others, and a rich inner life?
Who loves nature? Crosses cultures happily, but doesn’t fit in so well in the American evangelical context? Who has a secret desire to be admired, but also suffers from poor judgement about the opposite sex?
Why, Elisabeth Elliot, of course!
Me and Elisabeth Elliot
When I was college and just discovering the things I ranted about last Friday, like the fact that we as a culture could use some guidelines about the how the sexes ought to relate to each other, I came across Elisabeth Elliot’s book Passion and Purity. I devoured it.
This book was exactly suited for me at the time. I was just starting to grow in Christ. I really wanted to do God’s will. I also, unbeknownst to me, had a lot in the common with the author of Passion and Purity: socially awkward, ascetic tendencies, perfectionistic, a longing for old-fashioned values. This book is basically about the lessons Betty, as she was called at that time, learned during her five years (!) of waiting for Jim Elliot to make up his mind that God had given him the go-ahead to marry her. Their courtship story strikes many Christian young people as really spiritual upon first hearing, and then on a second look, it starts to look as if he didn’t treat her very well possibly. But I bought into it fully.
Anyway. Full of missionary zeal to win other young people over to the idea of an extremely awkward, chaste, long courtship, I gave this book to a friend. She read it, and her reaction was, “There are the Elisabeth Elliots of this world, but I am not one of them.”
That annoyed me at the time (someone had rejected my idealistic ideal!), but from my perspective now, that friend of mine didn’t know how right she was. In fact, not even Elisabeth Elliot herself was one of the Elisabeth Elliots of the world, at least not in the sense of having perfect wisdom and self-control. At the time she was writing this (early 1980s), Elisabeth was enduring an extremely controlling marriage with a man she married because she didn’t want to be lonely. She stayed with him for the rest of her life, despite an intervention by her family. It’s chilling to realize that the woman who wrote Passion and Purity could make such a foolish decision.
Before Passion and Purity, I remember as kid seeing black-and-white photos of Elisabeth toting her small daughter Valerie into the jungle to serve the Waorani people (then called the Auca), a few years after her husband Jim was killed by them. These were the photos taken by Hungarian photographer Cornell Capa. They, and the books Elisabeth wrote about the Waorani, had made her and her martyred husband Jim famous throughout the evangelical world.
Both greater and lesser than I thought
When you think you know a story, you expect it to be boring. I put off for some time reading this duology by Ellen Vaughn, until it finally floated to the top of my reading list. Once I opened the books, I found that I couldn’t put them down. Vaughn is an excellent researcher and a vivid and sympathetic writer, and though I had read a number of books by and about the Elliots, I certainly didn’t know as much of their story as I thought.
Vaughn, aware that she is telling a story the outlines of which are familiar to readers, moves skillfully back and forth through time, as in a novel (though in rough outline, the first book deals with Betty’s early life and the second book with her post-Ecuador years). Vaughn doesn’t try to tell every story–there are too many, many of which have been told elsewhere, and others of which are apparently too private and will stay hidden forever in Elisabeth’s prolific journals. In fact, as I read these books, I felt I was getting to know two fellow woman writers: Elliot and Vaughn.
When you are a former missionary, it’s difficult to read other missionaries’ stories without comparing them to your own. Usually, this means you are reading about people who were far ahead of you in dedication, selflessness, toughness, and in what they suffered. This is certainly true of the Elliots. At the same time, so much of their personalities and stories seemed shockingly familiar. For example, young Jim Elliot was, besides being a great guy, an insufferable holier-than-thou know-it-all, of the “I’m going to go read my Bible” type. Betty, as Elisabeth was then called, was quiet and reserved and often didn’t realize that she was coming off as standoffish. Jim’s family verbally eviscerated her after her first visit to their home in Portland, and foolish young Jim passed all these criticisms on to Betty in a letter. She was devasted, but thought and prayed over the things they had said, and then concluded that none of them were things she could actually change. Later, Jim couldn’t believe he had shared his family’s words with Betty. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon. What an imBAYsill.”
They were just people, you see. Not angels. Which means that “just people” can always serve God.
Jim Elliot, you beautiful dunce.
The things they suffered also rang poignantly familiar. They suffered setbacks that lost them a year of their work–for her, language work; for him, building a mission station. Neat and tidy Elisabeth at some points had to live in squalor, and felt guilty for the fact that it bothered her. Fellow missionaries (not all) and Waorani Christians alike (not all) proved manipulative and controlling. In fact, it was relationship difficulties that caused Elisabeth eventually to leave the Waorani, after spending only a few years with them. This was not Elisbeth’s fault: person after person found it impossible to work with Rachel Saint, her fellow translator. But she took on as much of the responsibility for it as she possibly could, agonizing before God in her journals, because that was the kind of person she was.
Elisabeth the Novelist
Now we are getting into events of the second book, Being Elisabeth Elliot. Elisabeth knew that she had a gift of writing. She had made so much money from her books Through Gates of Splendor and The Shadow of the Almighty that she was able to build a house for herself and her daughter near the White Mountains of New Hampshire (talk about living the dream!) and settled down to become a writer. She really wanted to write great literature, the kind that would elevate people’s hearts and give them fresh eyes to see the great work of God all around them in the world.
If I were writing a novel about Elisabeth Elliot, I would end it there, and let her have a period of rest, in the beautiful mountains, with her daughter, writing her books, for the rest of her days. I wish that was how it had gone. I kept hoping, as I read this duology, for there to come a point when Vaughn could write, “And then, she rested.” Alas, that moment never came.
Elliot was indeed a really good writer. Sometime in the twenty-teens, when I was a young mom who had come back from the mission field hanging my head over my many failures, and had unpacked my books and settled into a rented house to minister to my small children, I found on an upstairs shelf a slim volume that looked as if it had been published in the 1960s or 70s, called No Graven Image. This was the novel that Elliot wrote when she first settled down in New Hampshire. She wished, through fiction, to give her readers a more powerful, truer picture of missionary life than her biographies had done.
This is not the cover my copy of the book had, though it also had an image of a condor.
No Graven Image was not well received when it came out. It was the old problem of marketing. To what audience do you market a genre-bending book? The people who liked to read tragic, worldly novels were not interested in a so-called “novel” about a young missionary woman, probably expecting that it would be preachy. The Christians who liked to read missionary stories were shocked and dismayed by a novel in which the protagonist flounders around, makes mistakes, and ultimately, accidently kills her language informant when he has a bad reaction to a shot of penicillin. And then decides that her desire to have a successful language project had been a form of idolatry.
Some readers appreciated the novel (particularly overseas missionaries), but most found it shocking, even blasphemous. They wanted a triumphant novel, not the story of Job. They wondered whether Elisabeth had lost her faith.
When I picked it up, in the twenty-teens, it made me feel extremely understood.
One thing that killed me as I read of Elisabeth’s later years is that this was the only novel she wrote. She very much wanted to write others, and she got as far as making notes for another novel. But life (read: men) intervened, and she was in demand for speaking and for writing nonfiction books such as Passion and Purity. She wasn’t able ever again to get the extended periods of time to concentrate that it would have taken to gestate a novel. She convinced herself that she just didn’t have what it took to write actual good fiction (and perhaps, that it was selfish to try). I am so sad to watch this dream die. I believe that she would have been a good novelist. I don’t know whether her publisher would have kept publishing her books if she had turned to fiction, or whether she would have had trouble finding another publisher. Spiritual non-fiction was what she had already become known for. She probably would have made less money, perhaps found it difficult to support herself. But still … you know … it’s hard to watch. So many things about the second volume of her biography are hard to watch. At the same time, because of Vaugh’s amazing research and writing, it’s hard not to sit back and just stare at this major accomplishment.
Well, I will be thinking about this one for a long time.
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.
from the back of the book
The first thing to know about In Cold Blood that it’s incredibly well-written. Each paragraph is a work of art. Truly. It’s not ornate, which is why I don’t say “each sentence,” but it’s simply and eloquently told.
The book reads like a novel. It goes in chronological order – roughly – but it also slips through time seamlessly, like a good novel should, filling in glimpses of each character’s backstory just when it is needed, and in just the right dosage, no more. The details of the crime itself aren’t revealed until the last quarter of the book, though before Part II of the narrative, the crime has already taken place.
The other thing about this book is that it is really, really tragic. And not just because a family of four were shot in their beds. Just about every conceivable tragedy happens to someone, somewhere in this book. The only ameliorating thing I can say about it is that no indecent assault happens, as it were, “on camera.” We are given to understand that people have experienced it, but we have to read between the lines. The author uses the smallest effective dose.
The thing I really can’t forgive, though, is the way that Capote made me care about the murderer … one of them, that is. Dick Hickock is what today we would call a sociopath (the psychiatrist’s diagnosis is “severe character disorder”). I don’t give two figs for him, except that I wish he wasn’t crashing around the world, ruining everybody’s lives. The other one, though, is more complicated.
Perry Smith (“very nearly a paranoid schizophrenic” according to the doctor) is basically a lost man-child. He is “sensitive,” prescient, plays the guitar, and cherishes a dream, left over from boyhood, of finding sunken treasure. He “has a brilliant mind” (his words) and resents that he never got more than a third-grade education. (He got his high school equivalence during one of his stints in jail.) Perry travels with a cardboard suitcase full of books, journals, maps, and adventure magazines.
… his personal dictionary, a non-alphabetically listed miscellany of words he believed “beautiful” or “useful,” or at least “worth memorizing.” (Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psiloper = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large fingers; Myrtophobia = fear of night and darkness.”)
page 146
This is a remarkable list, especially if it was truly taken from Perry Smith’s papers. It is remarkable for the way that every single entry seems to have some special relevance to Perry. Taken together, they almost constitute his biography as it is starting to emerge from the book at this point.
So, what makes him dangerous? Perry has dissociative tendencies, and a substratum of rage that he’s not even aware of. He thinks of himself as a genius with spiritual depths whom nobody appreciates. His is the rage that comes from being inadequately parented. Perry came from an unstable home and spent time in orphanages, where (to take just a sample incident) the nuns would beat and humiliate him for wetting the bed. He’s never had a good mother or father, and has roamed the world trying to find a home. All this deprivation has made him weak, and so he is dangerous in the way that weak, conceited men are dangerous. He is too weak to control his own actions when it matters.
Dad snatched a biscuit out of my hand, and said I ate too much, what a greedy, selfish bastard I was, and why didn’t I get out, he didn’t want me there no more. He carried on like that till I couldn’t stand it. My hands got hold of his throat. My hands–but I couldn’t control them. They wanted to choke him to death.
page 136
Perry also suffers chronic pain. A motorcycle accident left his legs never the same again, and the pain in his legs (and head) tends to flare up when he gets emotionally disturbed, making it even harder for him to concentrate.
I started feeling the tragedy within a page of meeting Perry. The first thing the book tells us is that it’s his dream to learn to skin dive and find buried treasure, and I had a feeling that dream was never going to come to pass. Damn you, Truman Capote!
I may do a whole separate post about Perry as a character, but there’s one more thing I will say about this book. Both Perry and Dick are types of people that you meet very often today. Perry’s history, in particular, is mirrored by many, many others. In fact, his wild, nearly fatherless youth of knocking about the American West reminds me very much of the family history of some of my own cowboy relatives.
Both murderers are treated by the psychiatrist who is called to write reports about them as if they are uniquely mentally ill individuals. Perhaps at the time they were (or perhaps the fact that they had already committed murder made them seem more egregious), but as I look at our society nowadays, their mental landscapes seem more like the rule than the exception. Do with that what you will.
Read this book if you don’t cry easily and want to enjoy 343 pages of the most amazing writing. But just be aware of what you are getting into.
Out of Babel Books 