River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part three

This novel, which I introduced previously, is a kind of novel only a practicing and experienced scientist could write.

Rice explains all the science in the book, even high-performance liquid chromatography, so that anyone can understand it. He does a particularly good job of explaining evolutionary biology, which is not surprising since he is the author of nonfiction books about evolution such as Encyclopedia of Evolution. One example is when one of the characters explains the evolutionary basis of the human aversion to incest. But what Rea’s stepfather tried to do—rape her—is not biological incest, since she is genetically unrelated to him.

The characters all have a healthy sense of humor—except Earl, of course. For math teachers Conway and Thurman, the sense of humor is an unstoppable spring. Science offers lots of opportunities for humor, especially the Meeh coefficient and the way Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used trigonometry to measure the buttocks of an African woman rather than to touch her. The Meeh coefficient, the wacky mathematicians insist, requires the measurement of the surface area of a naked human body. Rice takes his fellow scientists no more seriously than did the British humorist David Lodge, author of novels such as Small World: An Academic Romance. The academic world is a place where you can be weird.

Unlike some of Rice’s other novels, this one does not have a lot of religion in it. But, like probably all Rice’s novels, it addresses the meaning of life. As Rea tells her audience at the end, “A happy life consists of doing ordinary things in a grateful manner.”

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously, introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part one.

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.

The Purpose of My Fiction

For reasons I explain on my science blog, I have decided to publish my fiction on Kindle. The advantages are numerous, and they follow an ecological and evolutionary pattern: for me, my cultural evolutionary fitness would be greater on Kindle than it would be if I continued to pursue traditional routes of publication.

What I want to write about here is the purposes of my fiction. I am not writing fiction that is merely entertainment or escapism. I want my fiction to be significant in the lives of readers. On the other hand, I don’t want it to be heavily scholarly or pedantic. My fiction is, and will continue forever to be, fun and funny. Laugh and learn. This is my philosophy as a retired educator, a scientist, and now as a writer of fiction.

I want my fiction to lift people up, to help them deal with their lives by watching my characters deal with, or fail to deal with, their lives. I will also confront numerous political, social, and environmental issues, without (I hope) being preachy. Readers should feel better, and more empowered, after reading my fiction than they were before. They should also learn a lot.

To take just one example, which I have released on Kindle: the novel Meet Me in Strasbourg. One of the two protagonists is a young woman who is painfully shy and gradually breaks out of her shell. Maybe some of my readers will identify with her. She is also trapped in poverty and medical debt. This is an important issue in America, one that seldom happens in European countries. And she, and her young male partner, discover how music can express the meaning of life. There is so much fiction that degrades and discourages people; I want all of my fiction to lift them up.

I also champion the people who are less than beautiful. The young woman in this novel can hardly be described as sexy. (Most of my other novels have beautiful women in them, however.) In most of my novels, the protagonists are not socially or politically powerful, even if they are beautiful. If you feel like everyone else is more powerful or more beautiful, read one of my novels and feel encouraged and uplifted. That is what I hope to accomplish.

This novel, and all my others, also defends the concept of True Love. Love is not just an excuse for lust. It is a reality that is so strong that it can totally transform the lives of lovers. The young man pursues the young woman halfway around the world. There is so much fiction that is cynical, and it almost gets the reader to distrust everyone, to not love anyone. In my novels, readers will see that love is worth taking a chance on.

And one other thing. Modern fiction almost never takes religion seriously, whether for good or bad. Most modern fiction considers religion to be irrelevant and stupid. But in my novels—almost all of them—religious issues are vitally important. The meaning of life—yeah, I’m serious about that stuff. Usually, the powerful religious leaders have it wrong; and they are not just silly but evil. In my novels, the reader is not left in comfortable atheism, but is forced to confront religion—even if they remain atheists.

As my novels become available, I will announce them, and target readers to whom questions about love, the meaning of life, and of religion are important.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part three.

Now, in the final sections of the novel Glass Cathedral about which I have written previously, Misty and Emilio have to figure out how to tell the world that God appeared in the sky. They decide to build a glass cathedral out in the desert, near the site of The Appearance of God, and invite people to come and find out about what happened. This undertaking is more humorously difficult than either of them had guessed it would be. Misty and Emilio ended up with lots of money and had to figure out what to do with it. They planned a religiously-themed restaurant that served Jesus Pizza with lamb, tomato sauce, and Ezekiel 4:9 crust. They also planned to make their glass cathedral a giant tropical greenhouse. Both Emilio and Misty—now pushed far outside her comfort zone of shyness—went on speaking tours.

Dan went out into the desert to visit Misty. They meet in the desert springtime and see the flowers that grow rapidly in the rain then die a few weeks later. Misty realizes that Dan is in fact doing what Jesus said to do, but what few Christians do: to consider the lilies of the field. Dan realized that just one of the little wildflowers was more beautiful than all the works of man. Job had asked why God put beautiful flowers out in the desert where nobody can see them. Both Dan and Misty realize that this is a very good question.

But mainly they organized a gigantic opening ceremony with hundreds of high school bands and choirs. They supposed they had thought of everything, but with a hundred bands (several hundred tubas) playing the fundamental note of the resonant frequency of the building, the cathedral shakes from its foundations and blows away in a storm like a jellyfish in the surf. In the ensuing chaos, Misty gets trampled and disabled.

Once again, it’s not supposed to happen like this. But Emilio remains ever bubbly in his faith. No more giant cathedrals. He runs a homeless shelter in L.A. along with his nearly unresponsive wife Misty. When all the main characters unite at the end, including Margaret who has married Dan, they all agree that what God wants us to do is just to help make the world a better place.

You all knew this, of course, in principle. But in this delightful novel, you can watch diverse characters discovering this simple truth for themselves.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part two

Two of the main characters in Stan Rice’s Glass Cathedral are Dan and Misty. Dan is the atheist and Misty is the Christian, only of course it is not that simple. They are real people who are working through big questions, not like the stifling two-dimensional characters of Pilgrim’s Progress.

By the time God appears in the sky—or not—outside the California desert town of Susurrus, Dan is already an atheist. So what he sees is an unexplained natural phenomenon. But he does not arrive at his atheism thoughtlessly. His whole view of the natural world began when, as a kid, he saw a horsehair worm several inches long protruding from the anus of a cockroach. Nature, he realized, was an arena of struggle and parasitism. (He thus earned the name of Buttworm Boy.)

He did not have a comfortable atheism. He meets, is fascinated by, and is then attracted to a Mormon girl named Margaret. Dan never alters his strong opinion that Mormonism is the stupidest piece of illogical thinking he had ever encountered. But Margaret is not stupid. And as they slip into a physical relationship closer than either had expected, Dan finds himself wanting to believe as Margaret does. But he cannot. Dan’s background story is truly funny. He and Margaret end their contact as he goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Misty, also at UCSB, begins as a dreamily idealistic Christian who lived for her weekly Bible studies and for her fiancé Dwayne. Dan meets Misty just long enough to fall in love with her. Misty and Dwayne plan a mission trip to Ecuador, to convert Catholics to evangelical Protestantism, something of which the Catholics were not fond. Neither were the communist terrorists, who kidnap Dwayne. Just as they release him back into Misty’s loving arms, the communist terrorists shoot him dead, splattering Misty with fragments of the man who was her life.

It’s not supposed to happen this way, Misty thinks. Long after Dwayne’s death was no longer in the national news, Misty visits her old UCSB Bible study. She has changed; they have not; and she realizes how they all had such easy answers to the big questions. She grabs a Bible from one of them and reads from the book of Job, in which God Himself tells Job, you think you have all the answers, don’t you? Well, you don’t. That was her message to her former compatriots as she stomps out.

Misty encounters Dan and they have, despite their religious differences, a truly meaningful conversation. They end up working at the same newspaper out in the desert, where God appears—or not—in the sky. This event seems to wipe all doubt away from Misty’s heart. Or does it? Does it need to? That’s what the rest of the book is about.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions with Humor, part one.

Usually, books that address such questions as Why does God allow suffering and Why does God hide Himself are preachy and heavy. See, you are already bored with it, right? This is true whether the books are Christian (or Jewish or Muslim), or atheistic, such as the books by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. These books all have their place.

But in the recently published novel Glass Cathedral, Stan Rice uses humor to explore these questions. It takes the form of a three-way banter among an evangelical Christian (Emilio), an atheist (Dan), and a Christian who has recently had her faith severely shaken (Misty). They more or less agree that the problems would be solved if God would just appear in the sky and explain Himself.

Or not. Would this make any difference?

This is the author’s summary from Amazon:

The newspaper staff writers of a small desert town assume the strange light in the sky is merely sunlight refracted by ice crystals: atheist Dan Hardy; the spiritually-searching Misty Barbour; and even the confirmed Christian editor Emilio Villanueva. Then the light turns out to be God—maybe. This is enough to make Misty leave her doubts behind and marry Emilio. Dan, who was hoping to win Misty’s affection, is skeptical, especially since God showed up on no photographic images, and everyone in town saw God differently. The government authorities declare the light was a mass hallucination.

Emilio and Misty raise money to build a glass cathedral in the desert, near the place they think God appeared. When thousands of people come for the inaugural celebration, a storm pulls the glasshouse into the sky. Misty gets trampled. At the end, Emilio and Misty, who is now disabled, conclude that God’s work is to help people, not to build a cathedral, and even Dan agrees.

 

The setting is that a bright light appears in the sky in the eastern California desert near the town of Susurrus. Dan assumes it is a natural phenomenon. Misty doesn’t care. Even Emilio does not suspect the light is, in fact, God appearing in the sky. God appears only in Susurrus, appears differently to each observer, and refuses to answer questions. But Emilio considers it a vindication of his faith, and Misty is convinced and marries Emilio. Dan, and all the civil and military authorities, consider every possible physical explanation. Meanwhile, Emilio and Misty decide to start a ministry to tell the world that God appeared in the sky in the desert.

As part one of the novel (The Susurrus Event) ends, Emilio and Misty have to confront the fact that their message is not, in fact, a fundamentalist Christian one. There is a part of the gospels in which Jesus says, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. You can find this in Matthew 5: 29-30. Emilio and Misty flee from a fundamentalist church that does precisely this: plucking out their eyes and chopping off their hands.

There is hardly a page without humor. For example, a heavenly chord fills the sky when God appears. But it is not what humans would consider a beautiful chord. As a matter of fact, it sounds “as if a cosmic butt had seated itself upon the celestial organ keyboard and unstopped every note.”

These discussions and events do not take place on blank slates. Both Dan and Misty have life experiences that strongly determine their reactions to these events, and to one another. That is what my next essay will be about.