A Door in the Earth, by Amy Waldman

All fiction is lies. I’m comfortable with this. But when I read Amy Waldman’s brillian novel, A Door in the Earth, I realized that I have a rule about this that I didn’t know I had before. I’m comfortable with lies when I know they’re lies. I don’t like liars if I don’t know they’re liars. (This explains why, to this day, I still loathe James Frey and Greg Mortenson.) The protagonist of this novel, Parveen Shamsa, has to learn how to discern truth from lies the hard way when she follows a story to Afghanistan, to do something great like the author of Mother Afghanistan. She is warned by everyone from her favorite professor to her family and friends, but she goes anyway, only to discover that her hero was not so heroic.

Parveen arrives in the village where Dr. Gideon Crane had the life-changing experience that led to his writing Mother Afghanistan and setting up a foundation to build clinics for women in rural villages without any kind of Western health care. It’s a noble goal and Parveen wants to be a part of that. She’s not a doctor or nurse. She has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and vague plans to do some kind of follow up on all the good Crane’s project must have done. Except, when she gets there, Parveen discovers that the clinic is only open once a week, the sole doctor has never been paid, and a lot of confused villagers who don’t recall Crane’s visit the way it’s depicted in Mother Afghanistan.

I found Parveen equally endearing and exasperating. On the one hand, it’s hard to fault someone who really does want to go good for others. She’s curious, which appeals to me, and stubborn enough to secure funding and escorts to get to the middle-of-nowhere Afghani village. But on the other hand, Parveen is very naive. It takes her a long time to stop thinking about Crane like a messiah and finally listen to what people tell her in response to her odd (to them) questions. Slowly, Parveen learns not just that Crane is a fraud, but also bigger lessons about the futility of trying to “save” people with gestures that lack the infrastructure and education to make them bear out. I’ve seen a lot of other characters learn this lesson the hard way, as in The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay, perhaps because this is the kind of lesson that can only be learned the hard way. Idealism has to be balanced with pragmatism. Above all, the desire to do good has to be tempered by the humility to truly learn about the people one wants to help.

As I read A Door in the Earth, I was also reminded of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. Jamison talked about the performativity of empathy. For a lot of us, being seen to do good is as important (or more) than actually doing good. If we can make other people believe that we are good, then maybe we can become good in spite of our more selfish behavior. This desire is what drives Crane, so much so that he invents an entire personal mythology for himself. This kind of think is also represented in the novel by General Trotter, who wants to “win hearts and minds” by building a road to the village regardless of what the locals want or the problems it will cause. Trotter is more interested in doing “good” for the audience back home in America that he runs roughshod over the Afghanis, with disastrous consequences. Parveen, as she wises up and starts to let go of her rigid black and white thinking, is witness to a lot of bad behavior done in the name of good. It rattles her deeply, even if we readers might not find it so surprising.

While I have seen some of the ideas in A Door in the Earth before, I don’t want to give the impression that this book is unoriginal or derivative. I loved this book a lot. In fact, I hope I can pursue a lot of readers to pick it up because it has so much to say about things like charity, cultural understanding, the occasional futility of idealism, hope, truth and lies, corruption, and unintended consequences. It also makes Afghanistan come to life in a way that I’ve never seen before. Waldman does incredible work recreating a complex culture in an even more complex juncture in history. This book is pure brilliance.