I was disappointed in UNFAMILIAR FISHES, an opinion that hurt me more than it hurt her (well, that's probably true anyway) -- but it wasn't the kind of disappointment that would cause me to give her up for good. And as with all her books I was impressed at the level of research she put into it; she told Leonard Lopate, who moderated, that this was a body of knowledge where she had started practically with no background and worked up from there over several years. "The point of what I do is learning -- that's when I'm happiest," she said, adding that she believed the nonfiction writer shouldn't be having fun throughout the writing process in order to produce the best book. For Vowell, the most fun part of writing is working over the second and further draft(s), which in this case she did after shaking the sand of Hawaii out of her shoes back in Manhattan where she lives. To that end, she spent most of her trips to Hawaii "as one would imagine, wearing a cardigan sweater going through archives." (Someone in the audience referred to a Wall Street Journal article she'd written describing herself as "the only person dressed like Lou Reed" wherever she went in the state.)
Most of the audience hadn't read UNFAMILIAR FISHES (by a show of hands) so Vowell gamely recapped many of the book's main points -- the missionaries who brought literacy and religion to Hawaii, but also capitalism and greed; the troubled ruling families who were already struggling with their own traditions when Westerners arrived; the unpacked analogy of President Obama attending the missionary-founded Punahou school and inviting its band to play at his inauguration. She seemed comfortable, not bored discussing the book; the only off note was struck when she said that because of Western-harbored disease, 85 to 90 percent of native Hawaiians "were dead within 100 years" of the missionaries' arrival (I mean, they would be anyway -- it got a little garbled there). She even diplomatically handled the comment -- not really a question -- from a man whose movement is trying to end Western land ownership in Hawaii by returning to pre-statehood land laws ("Basically, their lease is up," he said), putting in "I think you have a case, and good luck with that."
Vowell didn't give any clues as to her next project but preemptively shot down my secret private idea for her, which was that she should go to Europe and spend a few years writing about corrupt aristocrats and leading families to cleanse her palate from all the Puritans. Okay, I didn't actually tell her that, but she was pretty open in this interview about her distaste for royal families, even though in UNFAMILIAR FISHES she comes to sympathize with the rulers of Hawaii, being cast out of their own kingdom as authors of a revolution they never would have pulled off anyway. I still think it would make a spectacular next project, but American history is her terrain, and for all my differences with UNFAMILIAR FISHES I can't wait to see what she tackles next.
A few other choice Vowell bon mots I couldn't work in anywhere else:
- "When you believe cleanliness is next to godliness, you have a lot of laundry to do."
- On MOBY DICK, one of her favorite books: "There's all this violence and bloodshed and it's all pretty disgusting. Killing animals is disgusting. Men living on a boat for two years is disgusting."
- On the sons of the original missionaries in Hawaii: "While they were mostly Christians, they weren't so hardcore about it."
- Characterizing herself as "a certain kind of Northeastern killjoy" and her fellow Montanans as outdoorsy to the extreme of "9-day backcountry treks with nothing but a granola bar and a knife."
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