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It's hard not to envy the Berlinskis. They have degrees from places like Princeton, Oxford, and Berkeley; they speak English, French, and German; they've lived everywhere from San Francisco to Paris to Bangkok. Father David, a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, is a philosopher-mathematician who writes popular science books like A Tour of the Calculus (1996), taking on Darwinists like Richard Dawkins in his spare time. Daughter Claire, an expert in international relations, is the author of Menace in Europe (2006), a journalistic exposé of Islamic radicalism, anti-Semitism, and moral decline in the New Europe. Son Mischa, a classicist by training, is set to follow in his father's and sister's literary footsteps.
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As if that's not enough, the Berlinskis are also talented novelists. David is the creator of the Aaron Appelfeld mysteries, a series of politically incorrect novels about a hard-boiled San Francisco investigator (all published by St. Martin's). Claire is the author of two spy novels published by Ballantine: Loose Lips (2003), a clever page-turner about love and betrayal at the CIA, and Lion Eyes (2007), an even cleverer follow-up featuring a protagonist named "Claire Berlinski," author of a book called "Loose Lips." Then there's Mischa, whose first novel, Fieldwork, was published earlier this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All of the Berlinski novels are compulsively readable, but only Fieldwork is a work of "serious" fiction—serious enough to have been nominated for a National Book Award.
Even before its nomination, Fieldwork had won accolades from publications as diverse as The New York Review of Books and Entertainment Weekly, where it received an unlikely plug from Stephen King in his "Pop of King" column. Praising the novel as "a Russian doll of a read, filled with stories within stories," King wondered why it was stuck at No. 24,571 on the Amazon list. The culprit, he opined, was the novel's publisher, FSG, which had opted for a drab title and a green smear on the cover. Publishing houses like FSG, King complained, stubbornly refuse to market their books to "the ordinary reader," succumbing to "elitist twaddle" about the difference between "literature" and "popular fiction." Maybe King's column helped. By Thanksgiving, Fieldwork had climbed all the way to No. 9,452.
What Stephen King liked about Fieldwork was its delicious murder-mystery plot: an American missionary to the Dyalo people of Northern Thailand, David Walker, has been shot and killed by Martiya van der Leun, a Dutch anthropologist doing fieldwork among the Dyalo. From the outset, the mystery confronting the novel's narrator—an American journalist named "Mischa Berlinski"—is not who dunnit, but why she dunnit. The answer to that question is artfully postponed until the end of the novel. The rest of the book is a studied contrast in worldviews—that of the missionary who seeks to convert the Dyalo, and that of the anthropologist who seeks to lose herself in their world. To "Mischa Berlinski," David Walker and Martiya van der Leun are every bit as exotic as the Dyalo themselves; investigating them is his own version of "fieldwork."
As for the real Mischa Berlinski, he, too, did his share of fieldwork in Northern Thailand, where he lived for a time in his twenties. Indeed, Fieldwork began as a work of nonfiction. As Berlinski tells us in a note at the end of the novel, he had originally set out to write a history of the conversion of the Lisu tribe to Christianity. The conversion of the Lisu was the lifework of the Oklahoma missionary J. Russell Morse (1898-1991) and his many descendants—the prototypes of the fictional Walker family, whose history is recounted in part 2 of Fieldwork. In his note, Berlinski thanks several of the living Morses—including David Morse, J. Russell's grandson—although his primary source was a memoir written by J. Russell's first wife, Gertrude (The Dogs May Bark, but the Caravan Moves on, College Press, 1998).
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