When there was all the buzz about the Palin biography, most of the websites (for instance
here,
here, and
here) that mentioned it, also had a
link to the first chapter. I linked, read, and said, "Oh dear."
But do I need to blog about it? I'd like to think I subscribe to the "if it isn't doing anyone any harm, and if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything" school of blogging. I've even been accused of being
too compassionate to Vic Kohring. (See first comment.) My response was that I'm not here to judge or to condemn, but to understand, to learn, to figure out how to do better next time. But, does writing a review on the book do any of that?
First, book reviews are an honorable tradition. They steer us to good books and away from bad ones. And this book is newsworthy. The
most popular governor in the US, talked about as a potential Republican vice presidential candidate. The first ever biography of her. But I could only find one other
review online. It was from a Sarah fan (actually, I, personally, think she's been exactly the governor we needed) who seems to be similarly unimpressed with the book, which he apparently got an advanced copy of.
Second, I also think that writing a good book is really hard. So another potential value of reviewing the book is to figure out why this doesn't work for me and perhaps offer something for other authors to consider. This fits the "how to do better next time" criterion.
(As I think about this, the process of writing itself is a way to think through something and understand it better. For me it's like solving a puzzle - why do I think this book is boring? Another problem is that I know Kaylene Johnson, the author. While we hadn't seen each other in years, we did have an enjoyable conversation not too long ago. The book didn't come up.)
So why did I find it boring? The sentences are all complete and the grammar works.
It's taken awhile to figure this out. There are several problems for me:
- An impersonal, omniscient narrator who isn't (omniscient)
- Facts that don't really add up to anything significant
- A general sense of inauthenticity
It is hard to write a biography. You have to get in all the relevant facts that will help the reader understand who the person is and why she does what she does. You have to deal with chronology - do you do it in order, or skip around and confuse the reader? You have to document what you write. You have to give the context. This is just the mechanical stuff. Then you have to breathe life into the prose.
1. An impersonal, omniscient narrator who isn't. Some anonymous, all-knowing voice is telling us what happened and summing up the important things we should know.
These mountains would become, like other wild places in Alaska, a place of sustenance and renewal for her boisterous and busy family.
In 1969, the Heaths moved to southcentral Alaska, living for a short time with friends in Anchorage, then for two years in Eagle River before finally settling in Wasilla.
They had a white cat named Fifi and a German shepherd named Rufus, a canine sidekick to the kids who shows up in many family photos. The children often hiked the “Bunny Trail” to the home of a distant neighbor who had kids the same age.
Once a year, the family accompanied Chuck Sr. on a week- long class field trip to Denali National Park, where camping in view of majestic Mount McKinley left indelible memories with the Heath children.
This omniscient narrator doesn't know everything. She doesn't know that much at all. She is dependent on scraps of facts she got from the Heath family.
“Dad never stopped lining up new adventures for us,” Chuck Jr. said. The kids caught Dolly Varden off a nearby dock. Chuck Jr. loved to catch the Irish Lord, an ugly, creepy-looking fish, for the pleasure of holding it up to his little sisters’ faces and making them scream.
When the family wasn’t running or hiking, it was hunting or fishing. “We could literally go hunting out our back door,” Chuck Jr. said.
The Heath kids and their friends spent many hours playing ball.
There's lot that we don't know. The kids like each other and no one is telling us what really happened. Just the things that will make their sister look good.
If this were fiction, the narrator could be omniscient. But it isn't. (Well, maybe that's debatable too.) So Johnson needed to talk to us readers now and then. To explain her project, the obstacles, what she tried to do and how. "Hey, I have to write this biography of the governor. I talked to all the family members, but they didn't give me much to work with. And this is an authorized biography, that means I agreed to . . . " We don't know what she agreed to and Johnson doesn't tell us the rules. Did Sarah or someone in her family get the right to cut out stuff they didn't like? Did she have a deadline and so had to make it presentable in two months? She doesn't tell us. At least in chapter 1, where we might expect this author's voice to talk to us, it doesn't.
2. Facts that don't really add up to anything significant. As you can see from above, Johnson got random snapshots. But when she puts them in an album, there are lots of blank spaces. OK, so there's a dog and a yellow porch. So what? Yes, little details are important, but they also need to add up to something. It appears Johnson had so little, she had to put whatever she had into the book, even if it just fills some of the blank spaces in Sarah's life, but leads nowhere in our quest to understand the governor. There just aren't enough dots to connect.
There are some exceptions - dots that might actually give us some insight into Governor Palin. She's quoted talking about the Miss Wasilla contest she entered for the scholarship money (we know that is the reason because her brother says so):
“They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts,” she said in a 2008 interview with Vogue magazine. “I couldn’t believe it!”
If Johnson had gotten more quotes like that the pages would turn. Not because the governor says 'butts' but because it sounds candid and authentic. But Johnson didn't get this quote from the Sarah, she got it from Vogue magazine. They were able to get real stuff from Sarah, why couldn't Johnson?
But here's something from sister Molly that potentially offers insight:
From the time she was in elementary school, she consumed newspapers with a passion. “She read the paper from the very top left hand corner to the bottom right corner to the very last page,” said Molly. “She didn’t want to miss a word. She didn’t just read it—she knew every word she had read and analyzed it.”
If it's true (how many of you read the paper diagonally?), it tells us that Palin does her homework. I think Molly believes this and it may even be true. But how would an adoring younger sister know for sure if her sister "knew every word" and "analyzed it?" Did she give her quizzes, or did it just seem like that?
I can't help thinking, if she read everything and analyzed it, how come she was surprised by the sexist nature of the beauty contest?
Johnson didn't have enough paint to cover the whole wall of Sarah's childhood. Instead, she should have just painted one good Sarah story that she could do well with the little paint she had. Something in-depth that would give us a sense of the future governor without trying to cover the whole family history.
3. A general sense of inauthenticityThe beauty pageant 'butt' quote is the only truly authentic fizz I got. All the rest sounded flat. If this were a movie, it would have been filmed in Hollywood, not Alaska, and those "snow covered mountains" with "the soft alpenglow" would have been painted on a set. That's how it reads. Even the part about camping a week with views of Mt. McKinley. Johnson is an Alaskan so I would expect her to say Denali. And Alaskans know the only campground where you can see Denali from is Wonder Lake. Were they always there? But even there, it's a rare day, let alone week, where the mountain is visible. But on that Hollywood set, we can paint over those details.
The contrast between the omniscient pose and the narrator's lack of in-depth stories sounds fake, like painted mountains.
The family stories are second hand and sound like Chuck Jr. and the rest were editing as they spoke. It's not from the heart. It's painting the scenery to reflect well on their politician sister. I don't blame them. They certainly aren't going to make her look bad. But where are Lyda Green's impressions of Sarah? Or one of the losing Ms. Wasilla contestant's?
This book reads like an inspirational book aimed at 14 year old girls. "Sarah Palin - Hero Governor of Alaska and how growing up in the wilderness made her the woman she is today." This is a political biography written in Sound of Music prose.
Johnson didn't have an easy task - write an approved biography of the most popular governor in the US who's still on some people's lists for McCain's running mate, so getting it out by May - when the Governor is going to become probably the first sitting governor in US history to have a baby - was a high priority.
I think that given the buzz on Palin nationwide, a fair number of copies will be sold. (Just one hundred per state would be a reasonable press run.) Those people who really want to find out who Palin is, will buy it for the scraps they can glean. But if the whole book reads like Chapter 1, I'm guessing a small percentage of people who buy the book, will actually read the whole thing.
And T and J brought wine made from sticky rice and grapes. A taste, like asparagus, that you have to develop a taste for. It was a very enjoyable evening with people doing interesting things. It's too bad we're just about to leave. But we have an invitation from J2 to visit his elephants when we come back. And it was nice to know that we didn't have to wash all the dishes, though everyone helped get them into the kitchen and we got most of the gunk off of them.
