Review: News of the World

News of the World by Paulette Jiles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s no formula for great fiction, but I think I want it to do two things at once: tell a good story and wrestle with a worthwhile idea. A lot of almost-good work does one or the other of those, and a lot of less good fails at both.

This is a really good book, one that grew on me until I found myself admiring it very much. For starters, it has a good story. Captain Kidd is an aging veteran of multiple American wars when he gets drafted to return a Native American captive to her family hundreds of miles away. Johanna is only 10, and she no longer remembers her family or her native language. The two have to ride through post-Civil-War Texas, confronting natural and human threats at every turn. At that level alone, it’s a compelling story – and the shootout on the mountain with the three men who want Johanna as a child whore is nail-biting in its intensity.

But this is also a reflection on the idea of what it means to be an American. Johanna’s first language is not English but German. The country they journey through is not quite the United States; it’s a Texas trying to sort out it larger allegiance. And the people they meet are uncertain how to identify as part of a larger community. I’m going to assume that Jiles has read Benedict Anderson’s famous Imagined Communities in which he proposes that it takes a sense of the “news,” a sense that some stories concern “us” and some concern “others,” to create the concept of a nation.

In that light, Kidd’s occupation as a reader of news – he’s a 19th century aggregator in the spirit of Huffpost or Yahoo News – makes him an applied Andersonian. He’s set on giving his audiences an awareness of the boundaries of their own communities. He does so as an entertainer, but also as someone aware that he is part of a process by which a jagged collection of peoples will come together after the war that has so recently divided them.

In the way of great fiction, then, this book balances both the thrill of something happening with ideas that give those happenings weight. Like Laila Lailami’s The Moor’s Account and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, this is a book that imagines an America before it has coalesced into the nation we know. Its story entertains because it shows our protagonists at risk in a changing world. Its ideas amplify those crises by reminding us that we, as Americans today, are the result of the decisions the people of their world were making. And, it gives life to the excellent but dry thinking of someone like Anderson, taking his idea of the Imagined Community and showing us a community in the act of imagining itself.

I’m not going to say this is as effective as A Mercy. I do think Jiles blinks a bit at the end when, for understandable reasons, she falls in love with her characters and gives them endings different from what the tendency of the story would have offered. Also, this does start a bit slowly with too much exposition and an adventure that, while looming, doesn’t pick up its gravitational force for a while. Still, there’s a lot to admire here, and I’m torn only between liking it very much and flat-out loving it.

In any case, I certainly recommend it.


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