Project Steev

All Over Creation, by Ruth Ozeki

I've been reading a lot of really great fiction lately. Perhaps I'm so disappointed in the latest nonfiction book (I'll write more about that later) I was reading that by comparison I'm overjoyed at these novels.

I'm now 2 books behind on reviewing, and the one on the top of the stack is Ruth Ozeki's "All Over Creation." I was loaned this book by a friend after having a chat with her about The Fountain at the Center of the World, which I wrote about over 2 years ago(!) on this blog. And indeed, the 2 are very similar, in that they deal with modern activism, the struggle against corporate hegemony, and they both deal with family.

Ozeki's 2003 novel centers on 3 characters or groups of characters that all converge on a little farming town in Idaho. The real main figure of the book is Yumi, or Yummy, Japanese-American daughter of Lloyd and Momoko. Their neighbors Cass and Will round out this first group. Then there's Elliot, a PR flack who does work spindoctoring for big agribusiness and who used to be Yumi's high school history teacher 25 years ago. Finally there are the Seeds of Resistance, what one might call an affiinity group of eco-activists who travel around the country in their customized motorhome, the Spudnik, doing anti-biotech actions and teaching themselves and others more about sustainable agriculture.

Yumi ran away from home when she was 15 when she had an affair with her teacher Elliot that ended with an abortion. She never came back until 25 years later, when the book opens and when her parents are both having health problems. Meanwhile Elliot is sent back to Idaho to investigate activists mobilizing against his client, a big pesticide company called Cyanco (that is obviously a fictionalization of Monsanto - they even have a pesticide product called GroundUp).

The Seeds, meanwhile, are indeed on their way to Idaho, not only to mess with Cyanco, but also to meet Lloyd and Momoko, who have become unexpected heroes. Lloyd's main occupation had been potato farmer all his life, but on the side he and his wife started a seed company with very old-fashioned, natural ideals. The Seeds show up to learn from the wisdom of curmudgeonly Lloyd, who eventually becomes their ally, while Yumi is trying to figure out what to do with him and his heart problems, along with Momoko's Alzheimer's.

The book gets very complicated and fascinating, and I won't go into all the details. There's intrigue, there's sex, there's humor, there's lots of great references to watershed events and concepts in recent anti-globalization struggles (like with Fountain at the Center of the World, it ends with the activists going off to Seattle for the big 1999 WTO protest).

However, in addition to all that I think what got to me about the book is the personal and family aspect of it. I kept thinking that if you replaced potatoes with corn and moved it to Iowa it would have still worked almost as-is in my home state. My parents weren't farmers and I grew up in a small city, but from my earliest childhood farming was in the air, as well as the sadness and risk and heartache of farming. The news of Iowa farmers getting their land foreclosed and then some shooting themselves and their families are some of my oldest recollections from the media. Plus my stepfather went back to Nebraska to help farm the family land every summer, often taking me and my brothers along.

Add to that the facts that my grandparents recently died, my grandmother with Alzheimer's, and that my mom has really been hit hard by the process of dealing with this and lots of other dying relatives and friends and her own health problems, and that I sometimes see my self as sort of a prodigal son in relation to my home state and family, and you can probably see how this book was pretty heavy for me. I will admit that I got choked up quite a bit while reading it.

I guess that's enough to say, really, other than: it's an excellent book; It's sort of over the top, almost mythic, in how it portrays activists, but maybe that's what is needed right now. And yet it's also extremely real and down to earth about its characters and the interactions they have with each other. I was really impressed and touched by this book. Highly recommended.