I always open a novel that includes Peoples Temple as part of the plot with trepidation. How will they use it? Will they get it right? At the same time, I always open a Jane Smiley book with anticipation. A great storyteller, she also creates wonderful characters . . . In the case of Early Warning, Peoples Temple and Jonestown are encompassed in Smiley’s sweep through twentieth-century history. Her second book in a trilogy about the Langdon Family starts in 1953 in Cold War America. One of the characters works for the State Department, and McGeorge Bundy even makes a brief appearance in the book. The novel ends in 1986 during Ronald Reagan’s second term as president.
While there is a pious Evangelical Christian in the book—Lois, a salt-of-the-earth farm wife who knows how to bake a pie, and how!—what is interesting to me is the inclusion of Peoples Temple. Smiley introduces the Temple, along with Jim Jones, in 1973. One of the characters, Janet, belongs to the Temple in San Francisco, and lives communally with other members. In 1977, Janet’s Aunt Eloise, an old-time leftist, helps her niece return to Iowa after an article critical of the Temple appears in New West magazine, but apparently Janet’s African American lover Lucas has gone with the others to Guyana. Each chapter is headed by a year, so we know that 1978 will include the deaths in Guyana, but strangely, the word “Jonestown” never appears in the novel. Smiley describes the agricultural project as the “piece of property” and the “Guyana compound.” Nevertheless, the narrative does not dehumanize the members because we meet several of them as living human beings rather than as faceless corpses. The book directs animus toward Jones instead. While I have a number of quibbles, the larger question about the book is why Smiley inserts Peoples Temple into her account of the twentieth century. She appears to use Peoples Temple as a paradigm to represent the turn toward alternative religions, politics, and lifestyles in the 1960s and 1970s. In Peoples Temple, idealism, political activism, and pathology all coalesce into a universal type of human tragedy. Smiley might have employed Synanon to encapsulate the drug culture, or the Children of God to exemplify sexual freedom; she might have utilized the Black Panther Party to embody political activism, or one of the hundreds of utopian movements that flourished and then died to illustrate youthful romanticism. Peoples Temple encompasses all of these tendencies, and thus works well as a single exemplar. More broadly, though, religion appears more or less irrelevant in the novel. It is either dangerous, as in Peoples Temple; or bland, as in the evangelicalism of Lois. We don’t really find a religious character with depth. I don’t mean depth of conviction, I mean depth of character. That may be a weakness of the entire novel, though. Jane Smiley. Early Warning. New York, 2015.
Rick Freeman
9/14/2015 05:41:48 pm
thank you for such a sensitive review of a novel that, I promise you, I will never read.
Rebecca Moore
9/16/2015 05:14:54 pm
I'll respond with some picks re Jonestown literature, but here's a link that lists just about everything except Smiley's book: http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=18186 Comments are closed.
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Author Rebecca Moore is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. She is currently Reviews Editor for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions and Co-Director of The Jonestown Institute. Archives
December 2021
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