Jill Lepore’s The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (Vintage
Books, $16) should really be called “The History of Everything.” She moves digression to the realm of
art. These essays, many appearing first
on the pages of The New Yorker,
provide an interesting and exhilarating journey for the reader who dares to
follow Lepore’s blazing trail of prose through the meanderings of human history
and experience.
“This book is a
history of ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the
grave,” Lepore writes in her Preface. We
should forgive the cliché. It may be
history, but the book also has a free-associative quality that keeps surprising
the reader at every turn. There are
intricate connections and themes that link figures and events, and Lepore
obviously finds joy in her work because it is present on every page. Her prose is often humorous and barbed as she
explores her subjects. She is a story
teller, and therefore, the best kind of teacher. In fact, it is her stated mission to make history
an argument with story; story, history, argument: a trinity well worth its weight in gold.
Lepore begins with The
Checkered Game of Life. Literally, she
examines board games, many created by entrepreneur Milton Bradley. Through games like Life and chess, players “learn
foresight, circumspection, caution and perseverance,” she writes. She tells the fascinating history of Bradley’s
ancestors, probably the best stories in the book. Indians murdered Daniel Bradley. The wife of Daniel’s son was kidnapped twice,
forcing her husband to travel hundreds of miles to ransom her from the
Indians. “To be rescued from captivity
was to be redeemed,” Lapore writes.
Joseph’s wife was no wallflower when it came to her own redemption. While eight months’ pregnant, she scalded one
attacker and killed him with boiling water.
On her trek with her kidnappers, “she lived on nuts, bark, and wild
onions.” When she gave birth, she
squatted and expelled the child in the snow right there on the trail. The Indians killed the infant. After two stints as a prisoner, the next
Indian who came to her door faced an angry woman with a blazing gun
barrel. “She lived to be ninety,” writes
Lepore.
The book has a
loose-limbed structure tied to the rambling framework of life and death. She tells us about the human discovery of our
own origins, linking Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson’s iconic pictures in Life magazine to the work of William Harvey and later, to the film-maker Stanley Kubrick. She dissects the art and history of
breastfeeding. In another chapter, we
follow the odyssey of E.B. White as he writes and publishes Stuart Little. White is antagonized by the woman who
invented the children’s section in the public library, Anne Carroll Moore,
according to Lepore. Margaret Sanger,
Planned Parenthood, and forced sterilization take center stage in another
chapter. Lepore ends her book in a
warehouse of cryogenically frozen human popsicles hanging upside down in
sleeping bags floating in tanks of liquid nitrogen at 320 degrees below
zero. They are waiting to be defrosted
and resurrected somewhere beyond the horizon of history in a time not yet made. Heady stuff, and that’s only a pie slice of
Lepore’s scope in the book.
Endings of chapters
offer a kick to the gut; Lepore excels at tying disparate subjects together in
a hangman’s noose—deadly and decisive.
At the end of “All About Erections,” her son asks if one needs a “conundrum”
for oral sex,” obviously mistaking one word for another. “I put down my newspaper,” Lepore tells us, “And
then, carrying on an ancient and honorable family tradition, I whiffed the
bejeezus out of that one.” There is no
corner too dark, a subject too ribald or character too eccentric for Lepore’s
laser analysis and observation. In her
chapter on birth control, she bemoans that a century after Sanger, “in the
United States, one set of ideas about parenthood [exists] for the poor and
another for the wealthy.”
Jill Lepore ends her
book by circling back to the beginning. “I
have come to believe that what people make of the relationship between life and
death has got a good deal to do with how they think about the present and the
past,” she writes. “If history is the
art of making an argument by telling a story about the dead, which is how I see
it, the dead never die; they are merely forgotten or, especially if they are
loved, remembered, quick as ever.” She
reaffirms, on the pages of The Mansion of
Happiness, that the past tells us what the present means, and if we pay
attention, what the future holds far away beyond the curve of the horizon in a
time to come.