{"id":67290,"date":"2016-09-21T14:33:05","date_gmt":"2016-09-21T21:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=67290"},"modified":"2026-02-27T14:22:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:22:19","slug":"fictional-cults-lack-verisimilitude","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=67290","title":{"rendered":"Fictional Cults Lack Verisimilitude"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This review article is adapted from the original version which appeared in <\/em>Litro Magazine<\/em><\/a>, and is reprinted with permission.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Girls<\/em>
\nEmma Cline
\nRandom House, 368 pp, 2016<\/p>\n

Children of Paradise: A Novel<\/em>
\nFred D\u2019Aguiar
\nHarperCollins 384 pp, 2015<\/p>\n

White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em>
\nSikivu Hutchinson
\nInfidel Books, paper 325 pp, 2015<\/p>\n

Jonestown<\/em>
\nWilson Harris
\nFaber & Faber (UK) 1997<\/p>\n

\"the-girls\"<\/a>Charlie Manson and his \u201cfamily\u201d provide the historical backdrop for Emma Cline\u2019s first novel, The Girls<\/em>, just published with a multimillion-dollar book deal for the white American author, born in 1989. Jim Jones and Peoples Temple serve as real-life fodder for fiction published last year by Guyanese-Canadian Fred D\u2019Aguiar (reviewed<\/a> on the front page of The New York Times Book Review<\/em>) and a small press contribution by African-American Sikivu Hutchinson. Why do cults so fascinate the reading public, and why, when actual history begs one\u2019s imagination with its rawness, does fiction carry such great weight in their portrayal?<\/p>\n

In Cline\u2019s new offering, the first-person protagonist offers the inside story of a 14-year-old girl in the late 1960s drawn to a charismatic older man, Russell, who plays bad guitar and attracts females like flies to offal, groups of them clustering in his wake. Cline also imparts the perspective of age, if not wisdom, as the contemporary story unfolds, a 50-something Evie looking back at her adolescence when confronted by unexpected young guests, including a teenaged girl who recalls her former self, in thrall to a bad boy\/man.<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

The Evie we meet on the first page is white, a child of money, bored at the beginning of a Northern California summer, lonely and more or less ignored by recently divorced parents, both of them with new partners, desperately seeking personal fulfillment while their only child languishes with too much freedom and zero responsibilities. The fictional Evie, who has no counterpart in the Manson story, allows the reader to pry inside the mind of an impressionable female who just might go so far as to join in a brutal mass killing. Then again, she might not.<\/p>\n

All three novels have in common the desire to understand what the facts don\u2019t sufficiently explain. In Manson\u2019s story, well-heeled, intelligent females carve Xs in their foreheads and murder strangers for the man they worship. The followers of Jim Jones \u2013 nearly 1,000 Americans, a racially mixed group, one third elderly and another third children \u2013 either commit suicide voluntarily or are forced to ingest poison in a Guyanese jungle. Countless non-fiction books — covering genres from religious history to sociology to psychology and more \u2013 recount \u201cwhat really happened\u201d and attempt to impose order on the chaotic, murderous behavior of groups of twentieth century Americans. But \u201cthe truth\u201d fails to satisfy.<\/p>\n

Cline\u2019s version, written in lucid, shining prose, allows us to inhabit the skin of a mostly passive teenager, dabbling in drugs and drink and wondering if sex will bring her into the adulthood she thinks she craves. Unfortunately, the first-person narrative, while most immediate of all points-of-view in fiction, works less well if the reader chafes inside that particular character\u2019s skin.<\/p>\n

As a child, I had once been part of a charity dog show and paraded around a pretty collie on a leash, a silk bandanna around its neck. How thrilled I\u2019d been at the sanctioned performance: the way I went up to strangers and let them admire the dog, my smile as indulgent and constant as a salesgirl\u2019s, and how vacant I\u2019d felt when it was over, when no one needed to look at me anymore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The above is the elder Evie reflecting on her childhood in a curious blend of nostalgia and angst. We don\u2019t actually meet the grown-up Evie for the first 130 pages of the story. However, Evie\u2019s wistfulness persists, whether she is 54 or 14; she never got what she was looking for, it seems, and a melancholy passivity suffuses the entire novel.<\/p>\n

Further reflecting on that girl with the dog, Evie muses:<\/p>\n

I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until somebody noticed you \u2013 the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Waiting, in fact, is what Evie does most and what she does best. For readers impatient with such inertia, Evie\u2019s tale, though always beautifully written, sinks into its lassitude.<\/p>\n

\"daguiar\"<\/a>Children of Paradise,<\/em> the first novel published by a Guyanese author in the United States to deal with Jones and Jonestown, launches itself into magical realism as it makes one of the key protagonists a gorilla, Adam, based on the chimpanzee Jones kept caged in the jungle. D\u2019Aguiar speaks from the animal\u2019s perspective, attempting to give the reader an entirely \u201cother\u201d perception of Jones and his mania. The two female characters, an African-American mother and daughter who bravely make the best of an impossible situation, where they are always hungry and fearful of the leader\u2019s mood swings, allow us some insight into the ineffable. Two human beings who love one another, bear the burden of hope, though we suspect their story will not end well, as we know the brutal revelations of November 18, 1978, the 900+ bodies bloating beneath the equatorial sun.<\/p>\n

\"harris\"<\/a>Another approach entirely arrived in 1996 from the British-Guyanese author Wilson Harris, who is not primarily interested in the members of Peoples Temple who invaded his South American homeland. Wilson focuses on the people of Guyana and how the horror of Jonestown became yet another form of colonialism perpetrated on the people of this small country, once known as British Guiana and the world\u2019s foremost exporter of bauxite. Profits accrued to the British, leaving most Guyanese impoverished, and the debacle of Jim Jones and his followers\u2019 impact on the country similarly devastates the Guyanese. Like D\u2019Aguiar, Wilson\u2019s approach is through magical realism, which Wilson uses to impart the sensibility of the Guyanese characters in the novel; the Americans remain out of focus here, as they should.<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

\"hutchinson\"<\/a>Of all of these novels, it is the relatively unknown scholar of secular social justice Sikivu Hutchinson who manages best to present a simulacrum of life as it might have been in the jungle compound of Jonestown. Jones\u2019s eponymously named village began in 1973 as Eden-in-exile, the Utopian strain of American history this time intertwined with the goal of ending racism, making an egalitarian paradise anew, forging a New World out of the jungle.<\/p>\n

Of course, it didn\u2019t happen like that. The inner circle of Jones\u2019s administrators is all white, with occasional black token figures. Jones, like Manson, had a predilection for sex with multiple partners, all of whom \u00ad\u2013 with one exception \u2013 were white. Unlike Manson, Jones included men in his conquests, many of whom returned his favors with undying loyalty, including the Jewish doctor who mixed the cyanide-Flavor Aid concoction (not Kool Aid, as the phrase has come down to us in popular parlance).<\/p>\n

Protagonist Taryn, who embodies the role of skeptic and seer, laments:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re the only ones dumb enough to leave the States en masse without a plan for a way back. In fact the government is probably saying to Jim, why can\u2019t you take some more Negroes with you? While you\u2019re at it, take all the ghettoes of Watts, Newark, Detroit and Harlem and dump them in Jonestown. What the fuck do we care about a bunch of spooks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps Hutchinson\u2019s novel carries more heft as a fictional depiction of an historical tragedy because her characters are stakeholders, invested and doomed, not passive onlookers. D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s characters are similarly involved, though the trope of the anthropomorphic Adam makes for difficult reading, the suspension of disbelief not possible. While Cline purposely chose a protagonist who did not participate in the fictional version of the Tate-La Bianca murders, her choice of leading character lent an air of avoidance rather than engagement with the grit and horror of the original story.<\/p>\n

(Annie Dawid, the author of three volumes of fiction, has completed a novel of Jonestown entitled <\/em>Resurrection City, which was one description of Jonestown in its early days, offered by a visiting journalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

(In one form or another, the book has been a finalist in multiple contests through the summer of 2016. Among them: Black Lawrence Press (twice); Leapfrog Press (as \u201cJonestown Perfume, a collection of stories\u201d); Elixir Press (twice); Faulkner Society Contest, (for the novel and a novella, “Mrs. Jim Jones: One Possible Biography\u201d);\u00a0Santa Fe Writer\u2019s Project; GlimmerTrain Fiction Open (\u201cTen Days Before the End,\u201d); Snake Nation Press, and Gold Line Press for the long story, \u201cJonestown: Thirty Years On.”<\/em><\/p>\n

(Three short pieces of the book have been or are soon to be published: “Jonestown, Japantown” in\u00a0the San Francisco edition of Joyland<\/em> Magazine; \u201cJonestown: Thirty Years On,\u201d in <\/em>Best American Writing 2015; and \u201cKnowing What I Know,\u201d in\u00a0<\/em>Driftwood: A Literary Journal of Voices from Afar, <\/em>2006<\/em>. <\/em><\/p>\n

(Annie Dawid\u2019s complete collection of articles for this site may be found <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>She can be reached at <\/em>annie@anniedawid.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This review article is adapted from the original version which appeared in Litro Magazine, and is reprinted with permission.) The Girls Emma Cline Random House, 368 pp, 2016 Children of Paradise: A Novel Fred D\u2019Aguiar HarperCollins 384 pp, 2015 White Nights, Black Paradise Sikivu Hutchinson Infidel Books, paper 325 pp, 2015 Jonestown Wilson Harris Faber […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":67515,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-67290","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67290"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134222,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67290\/revisions\/134222"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}