The Atlantic – September 2019

38 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC

BOOKS

38 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC

especially these days.

But who doesn’t yearn

for an answer?

If ever a place

could claim to be

an incubator of rare

goodness, Paxson

seems to have found

it: a small plateau in

COVER TO COVER

The Plateau

MAGGIE PAXSON

RIVERHEAD

“COULD THERE be
communities that
were somehow resis-
tant to violence, per-
sistent in decency?”
That question, which
drives Maggie Pax-
son’s one-of-a-kind
book, sounds wishful,

south-central France

called Vivarais-

Lignon, where a long

tradition of extraor-

dinary kindness to

strangers peaked

during the Nazi occu-

pation. Town and

rural folks risked their

lives giving refuge to

hundreds, perhaps

thousands, of people,

many of them Jewish

and most of them

young. Group homes

for children, who

arrived from all over

Europe, sprang up.

A forebear of hers,

Paxson discovered,

took charge of one in

the fall of 1942. Daniel

Trocmé, still a restless

soul at 30, seized the

chance “not because

it’s an adventure,” he

wrote to his parents,

“but so that I would

not be ashamed

of myself.”

An anthropologist

by training, Paxson

hoped that fieldwork

among the many

rescuers’ descen-

dants might help

reveal how a group

ethos of “uncommon

decency” thrives. But

her social-science

quest propelled her

onto fraught, personal

terrain. Trocmé’s

moral odyssey roiled

and inspired her. So

did a growing need

not to analyze, but to

engage her “very own

soul,” as she does

with asylum seekers

who now find refuge

in the area. The result

is a lyrical book, by

turns ungainly and

graceful, dark and

uplifting—right in step

with the struggle “to

be good when it’s

hard to be good.”

— Ann Hulbert

together, taking us into their vile embrace. Nature
had gone amok here.” That feeling of wrongness in
nature is entirely new to her. Later, we learn that she
had won a prize at school for an essay about trees,
which did not seem then to embrace her vilely.
Quite the contrary: “In our country we depend on
trees for our lives,” she wrote.

For shelter in rain and for shade in sun. For food

of many kinds. They are our second home ... But

the most important aspect of the tree is the Tree

Spirit. Ancestors who have died live there and

govern lives. They ward off evil. If these sacred

trees are harmed or lopped or burnt, ancestors

get very angry and sometimes take revenge.

Crops fail and people go hungry. “Don’t step on

the spirits,” my brother Yusuf would say when we

did spells in there, tiptoeing over the bony roots

that wound and knitted together. It was always

at evening time. Birds did not roost there, but at

certain times sang some song that was both inex-

plicably sweet and melancholy.

She dreams of this essay, at a moment when the
very trees—her second home—have turned alien
to her, malign. And when she wakes, in the Ji-
hadis’ camp, she tells her diary: “I will never get
out. I am here forever. I am asking God to please
give me no more dreams. Make me blank. Empty
me of all that was.”
This is a vision of hell: a girl, hardly begun
in her life, wishing to be emptied of all that was.
O’Brien has always been singularly alert to that
sort of bleak emotion, especially when the despair
is visited upon the young. It’s no more of a stretch
for her to imagine the feelings of a Nigerian teen-
ager than it was for her 16 years ago to fi nd her

way into the mind of another girl undone by war,

in her play Iphigenia, adapted from Euripides. Is

the experience of a contemporary African girl re-

ally less accessible to a European writer of the 21st

century than the Trojan War and the worldview

of the ancient Greeks? Iphigenia discovers in the

course of the play that her father, King Agamem-

non, means to sacrifi ce her in order to appease

the gods and, he hopes, reverse the fl agging for-

tunes of the restive military he commands. That’s

a girl whose world has turned on her. Iphigenia

naturally pleads with her father at fi rst: “Do not

destroy me before my time ... I love the light ... do

not despatch me down to the netherworld ... hell

is dark and creepy and I have no friends there ...

I am your child ... I basked in your love.” But by

the inevitable end, she’s telling her mother, “One

must not love life too much.” She’s been emptied.

War does that to people, and war, O’Brien

knows, is a constant in history. Not all confl icts

are the same, but their eff ects on the human spirit

have a terrible sameness. It would be a shame if

her attempt to assume the voice of an African girl

were to be seen only, or even primarily, as an act

of cultural appropriation. O’Brien’s understand-

ing of, and sympathy for, girls in trouble tran-

scends culture— the place she’s made for them in

her fi ction is practically a country of its own. But

if Girl earns her a scolding from some quarters, or

even stirs up a bit of a scandal, that’s something

she has spent her whole long career learning to

live with. She’ll survive, in that room of her own

where the words come to her, out on the rim with

all her lonely girls.

Terrence Raff erty is the author of The Thing

Happens, a collection of writings about movies.

I can’t think

of another

writer who

so late in her

career has so

thoroughly

reimagined

herself and

the practice

of her art.