Perpetual Motion

A serious writer, wrote W. H. Auden, “is of two kinds. One is the kind who spends most of his life preparing to produce a masterpiece. . . . The other kind is engaged in perpetual endeavors. The moment such an artist learns to do something, he stops and tries to do something else, something new.” That second kind of writer is Geraldine Brooks, author of three critically acclaimed books, each belonging to a distinct genre, each a radical departure from the last.

Her first was Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden Life of Islamic Women (1995), written while she was still a Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal—a probing, well-reported, back-room view of Islamic life, as seen from behind the chador. The second was Foreign Correspondence (1998), a highly evocative memoir of Australian girlhood in which Brooks tracked down her old pen-pals—an Arab boy, an Israeli Jew, a French country girl, and a young anorexic from Maplewood, N.J.—to say some very lucid things about the tug of adventure and the grit of real life. Her most recent publication is a historical novel set in plague-ridden, seventeenth century England, Year of Wonders (2001), praised on these pages as “sophisticated and utterly absorbing.” From foreign correspondent to memoirist to storyteller, Brooks is clearly a writer with protean abilities—a tireless quester for “something new.”

Her father was an American big-band singer with a scandalous romantic past; the calumny grew to such a proportion that he eventually was forced to put himself on the other side of the globe. When his agent advised him to change his name, he looked out a window, saw a sign for “Brooks Brothers,” and reinvented himself entirely. He served in the Australian army in World War II. After the war, he married for the fourth time, had two baby girls, and settled down to a quiet life as a proofreader for a Sydney newspaper.

A sickly child, Brooks was partly homeschooled by her mother, a vivacious former radio announcer who acted out Shakespeare and taught the girl to read and write as she puttered about the garden. But it was the smell of ink—“that black mist hanging in the air” when the eight-year-old visited her father at the paper— that captured her imagination. “He reached out to the conveyor, picked up the freshly printed paper, and handed it to me. I’ll never forget the feel of it—warm in my hand.”

She was determined to become a reporter, “a choice very much at odds with my excruciating shyness.” Nevertheless, she managed to graduate in journalism from the University of Sydney, win a scholarship to the Columbia School of Journalism, meet her husband, Tony Horwitz (author of Confederates in the Attic), get hired by the Wall Street Journal in 1983, and shortly thereafter be sent to Cairo to cover the Middle East. For many years, she wrote about that volatile region as well as about Bosnia, Somalia and Eritrea. Reporting on the Shell Oil scandals in Nigeria in 1994, she was arrested and thrown in prison. “Lying there on the concrete floor, I decided that if I ever got out, the first thing I would do was get pregnant.” One son, seven years, and three books later, she is at work on a novel that straddles three continents and six centuries—as Auden might say, still “engaged in perpetual endeavors.”

Marie Arana