I get that this is a fictional account of Margaret Mead and her time doing anthropological work with her second, and the man who would become her third, husbands. Her name has been changed, as have theirs, as has the title of her book that so excited attention and brought her both fame and notoriety. I get that you take liberties to tell the story you want, as a novelist. I get that.
I just can't help being a little bit angry that the book decided to truncate her life, making her the memory of a lost love by the guy who would never get to be the third husband, because she dies. It does this instead of dealing with the messiness of the rest of her life, the ways in which she continued to be an interesting person. Taking her story away and making it someone's memories of her by killing her off decades earlier than she died in real life does not sit well with me. She was not just men's memories of her, obviously, and so the choice is irksome.
I didn't know much about Mead before reading this book, and only did a token bit of research afterwards, but still, it's a weird choice. In this book, her stand-in is Nell Stone, who is in Australia with her second husband doing anthropological research when they give up researching one indigenous tribe, and move on. They meet the narrator of the book, who in real life, married Mead later on, and we get a tempestuous stream of desire as he sets her and her second husband up with a new tribe, made to order for the type of research she wants to do - and of course, treating groups of people like they're trading cards is irksome as well, but the book does to some degree recognize that.
There, her husband is fixated on a relic from the last tribe they were with, which he sees as his own property, arguing that an elder in that tribe gave it to him, and never seeming to realize that maybe just reaching out and taking whatever you want is not really the best idea. Nell immerses herself in the life of their new tribe, coming up with a framework of divisions of gendered power and labour that offend her husband greatly, because they differ from what he expects to find - men in charge, women not. The new anthropologist on the scene sees the same things she does.
Of course, the history of anthropology is beset with problematic ideas, and Euphoria does not a terrible job of acknowledging this, but it is far more concerned with the European love triangle (which includes queer sexuality) than it is with the objects of Nell and Fen's interest. The indigenous tribe they stay with are mostly set dressing, and there to set the anthropologists in opposition, rather than this being anything like a story of those people.
As a whole, I just felt uncomfortable with the focus of the book, and that only grew after I did some research. I was troubled by the ways in which Nell's story is not her own, given that this is a book of mourning her, and of course, by the larger issues of how the story still uses indigenous Australian culture as a prop and backdrop rather than fully engaging with the difficulties and colonialism of anthropology as a field in the early 20th century.
The problem is, I think, that it felt like this kind of story, with these characters, could be told anywhere, or about completely fictional characters. When the author tried to intersect with historical actors, I felt the strain.
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