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Washington Post
2006-09-28
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Melissa Fay Greene levels with her readers early in There Is No Me Without You, telling us, "I had thought I would write a hagiography, a chapter for 'Lives of the Saints.' " And much of that spirit of moral simplicity infuses her tale about a good-natured heroine, an Ethiopian woman named Haregewoin Teferra who chooses decency in the face of unfathomable horror. The result is a work that, while seeking to speak broadly about the overwhelming problems faced by AIDS orphans in Africa, feels, in many places, like an unusually well-crafted UNICEF appeal.
But the life of Greene's heroine — and, as a result, Greene's story — takes a dark and fascinating turn at a point when the author appears to have been well into the reporting and writing of a 400-plus-page book. Teferra, the widow-turned-savior to Ethiopia's AIDS orphans, it turns out, has all-too-human failings. She is accused of becoming cold toward her children, mishandling money and, less plausibly, trafficking children and condoning sexual assault against her charges.
Until then, the arc of the narrative has a familiar, ready-for-Hollywood feel. (The film rights already have been sold to DreamWorks.) Teferra, a middle-aged, middle-class grandmother, loses her own adult daughter to a mysterious new disease, grieves terribly and then, at the verge of succumbing entirely, opens herself instead to a child orphaned by what came to be recognized as AIDS. Then another. Then dozens more, accepting poverty and social estrangement to help those afflicted by the same relentless plague that had claimed her daughter.
The characters, particularly the children, are strikingly well-drawn. And Greene — author of three other books, including her award-winning account of apartheid in McIntosh County, Ga., Praying for Sheetrock — resists stocking an African story with Westerners. She pushes readers hard to leap chasms of race and culture to see Africans as real people with real emotions and, at times, real failings.
In her quest to illuminate the inner lives of characters, Greene sometimes goes too far, offering exquisitely detailed description of scenes she clearly did not witness. She also often tells us, in the third-person-omniscient tone, what her characters — even very small children — are thinking.
Greene's elegant and profoundly evocative writing is never better than when it results from directly observing events rather than re-creating ones based on the well-intentioned but heavily massaged recollections of its participants.
A scene in which Greene attempts to demonstrate whoopee cushions to flabbergasted Ethiopians carries the tartness needed to leaven a story that sometimes veers into the saccharine. The same is true when Greene's own adopted Ethiopian daughter, Helen, now living in the United States, challenges her new mother: "If I wasn't going to have my own bedroom, why did you adopt me?!"
A similar stab of insight comes when Teferra, visiting Greene and Helen in suburban Atlanta, announces, "You have ruined her. She is no longer Ethiopian." This rebuke arrives despite good grades, achievement in sports and far more parental love than imaginable had Helen stayed in an Ethiopian orphanage.
But through most of the book, Greene works too hard to give mythic, uplifting power to a tale drearily predictable to those familiar with stories of the AIDS catastrophe in Africa: There are staggering numbers; frustrated and overwhelmed aid workers; cute, suffering, hopeful children. Greene also supplies a hefty dose of outrage at drug companies that seem to value profit over the survival of millions of people. And the West comes in for a beating for what Greene portrays as a lackadaisical response to African AIDS deaths. She enters the heads of patients waiting to learn the results of their own AIDS tests and imagining, naively, that once the outside world is alerted to the situation, it will ride to the rescue — "Because how could people know and not help?"
After a few hundred pages, there is something enervating about a book that seems to be as much a call-to-arms as a narrative account of one woman's struggle to fight the disease. Luckily for Greene, the late-breaking twist in Teferra's life sends a jolt of energy through the tale.
Teferra slides into disrepute through a combination of local rumormongering and the magnifying effect of the Internet. The allegations — from financial improprieties to child trafficking — multiply to the point that Teferra lands briefly in jail and loses control of her orphanages. To make matters worse (or, from the dramatic point of view, better), Teferra's fall flows directly from the author's intervention in her life. Before tackling her book, Greene wrote about Teferra for Good Housekeeping magazine, giving her hard-earned recognition but also a sudden dose of fame and fortune for which the Ethiopian was utterly unprepared.
The resolution of that crisis carries unmistakable power and makes the book worth reading. Yet readers may also wish that Greene felt prepared to ride this natural drama a bit harder and longer, while going easier on the mythologizing.
— Craig Timberg, The Post's Johannesburg Bureau Chief, Septem "nav_sub_2.php");?>
