This is typical of Ms. Vowell’s relentlessly casual, David Sedaris-chatty style. And her highly personal approach — like her guest appearances on television programs like “The Daily Show” and the “Late Show With David Letterman” — underscores our blog-era culture’s appetite for spontaneity and subjectivity, its tolerance of self-absorption and craving for entertainment.
“Unfamiliar Fishes” is less history than performance art by a multiple-hyphenate writer-humorist-public radio personality, who acts in these pages as a hostess steering us through Hawaii’s past as though it were a marathon cocktail party, pointing out this or that personage or event, while keeping up a constant flow of conversational chatter about her own likes and dislikes, and dishing out plenty of free-associative riffs about her own life and travels. It’s the complete opposite of traditional history, which aspired to objectivity and wide-angled perspectives, and tried not to judge the past retrospectively through contemporary mores and ideals.
Ms. Vowell’s storytelling and descriptive skills enable her to convey the hubris of the missionaries from New England, who vowed to spread the gospel in Hawaii, to teach the natives to read, to translate the Bible into Hawaiian and to cover, as the missionaries said, “those islands with fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings, and schools and churches.” She conveys the swiftness with which change came to the islands and the “runaway death rate” among native Hawaiians caused largely by outbreaks of smallpox, measles and other diseases brought by foreigners (described in the resonant words of one Hawaiian educator as “large and unfamiliar fishes” from big countries who have come to devour “the small fishes” of the islands). She also does a nimble job of delineating the cruel political manipulations involved in America’s annexation of the Hawaiian archipelago.
Ms. Vowell’s impressionistic and highly selective narrative style, however, can be annoying in the extreme, calculated to amuse or titillate, while skimping on depth and context. She mentions the importance of the hula in traditional Hawaiian culture, for instance, but focuses on the sexual aspects of the dance and its chants — “they’re wonderfully metaphorical, enumerating the qualities of a particular king’s penis, using images such as a ‘large sewing needle,’ or a ‘bald horse’ ” — without really delving into religious and broader cultural meanings or storytelling techniques.
She similarly raises important questions about the evolution of Hawaii’s multicultural ethos, the inequities of land distribution in the 19th century, which left a majority of real estate in foreign hands, and the strategic importance of the islands as a military and commercial hub. But she declines to examine such issues in detail, electing instead to pelt the reader with extraneous digressions about “Moby-Dick” and a visit she once made to the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
At one point Ms. Vowell pauses to wonder if Chin Ho Kelly, a detective on “Hawaii Five-O,” had his cavities filled at the King Kalakaua Dental Center. At another, she prattles away self-importantly about having an undergraduate degree in French language and literature, asserting that “affection for the French Enlightenment kind of comes with the diploma, along with a map of the Paris subway and a foolproof recipe for Proust’s madeleines.” The reader can only ask: who cares?
Like Ms. Vowell’s earlier books “The Wordy Shipmates” and “Assassination Vacation,” this one is fueled by her interest in her own emotions and reactions, and her eagerness to entertain. Certainly at a time when ignorance and historical illiteracy are rampant, there is a place for books that make the past relevant and easy to digest for the casual reader. But Ms. Vowell’s determination to render history user-friendly often feels reductive and condescending, and her contemporary analogies can be strained.
She compares the mix of missionaries and sailors in 19th-century Hawaii to the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosting “the Values Voter Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously — for 40 years.” And she writes that “a missionary preaching the first sermon in an archipelago pretty much has to quote” a verse from Isaiah about “the isles” waiting for God’s law; otherwise, “it would be like a Bon Jovi concert without ‘Livin’ on a Prayer.’ ”
At least there are no analogies as cringe-making as the remark in her last book, “The Wordy Shipmates,” that the build-up to the 17th-century Pequot War (in which English-led troops massacred hundreds of Pequot Indians) reminded her “of what skateboarders call the frustration that makes them occasionally break their own skateboards in half” — that is, of “a destructive tantrum brought on by an accumulation of aggravation.”
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