The Evolution of Jane
Recently divorced Jane Barlow has been sent by her mother on a tour of the Galapagos Islands to recover her peace of mind. These are the islands to which nineteenth century naturalist Charles Darwin traveled on the famous voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, the ship sent by the British navy to map the southernmost coastline of South America. It was on the Galapagos Islands, an area that had not been studied by scientists, that Darwin had the opportunity to study the infinitesimally slow changes in plant and animal life and develop his theory of evolution through natural selection.
Jane, an inquisitive and intellectually curious young woman, finds herself following in Darwin’s footsteps in a group tour of those same islands. She gets a shock immediately on arrival when she finds out that the tour leader is Martha Barlow, her old childhood friend and cousin. As children, the two of them spent a series of idyllic summers together in the seaside town of Barlow, New England, named after the founding family fathers. However, they have had no contact for ten years, ever since Martha, without any explanation, broke off their friendship when they were both fifteen years old. Since that time, Jane has racked her brains to figure out what caused the split between them, but after all these years, she is none the wiser.
The central metaphor of the book is the question of how a species is defined. Jane, who has been fascinated by Darwin and his theories since she was a girl, puzzles over this again and again. How is it that mockingbirds, who all look similar, in fact make up several different species? Conversely, why are a greyhound and a Pekinese, who look so dissimilar, members of the same species? Who decides what belongs to one species and not to another, and how? What is the difference between a species and a subspecies?
Was the wing of one fly slightly bigger than the wings of its cousins? How much bigger did the wing have to be to make the fly a member of a new species? If the wing differed just a smidgen, perhaps the fly was a member of a subspecies. Or could it simply be an individual of the same species which varied slightly from its peers, a fly with a big wing?
The running joke is that no one on the trip takes Jane’s questions very seriously. However, Jane herself does, and her inquiry is related to the other question that occupies her: the evolution of friendship, specifically of her friendship with Martha. Originally, she and Martha were not only related but also joined virtually as one in tight friendship. Yet at some point they bifurcated and became two separate, in a sense unrelated, entities, two species rather than one. As Jane tries to understand the nature of the evolution of species, of how one thing becomes another, she also grapples with the equally mysterious question of how a human relationship can change into something very different from what it formerly was.
The story itself, which is told in Schine’s finely honed and witty prose, unfolds on two levels. On one level, there are frequent flashbacks to Jane’s childhood, showing the two girls meeting for the first time and becoming friends. The relationship as sketched by Schine is charming and thoroughly believable, exactly capturing the way the child sees the world and the people she encounters in it—naïveté held together by a weave of childlike logic.
To sustain the reader’s interest, this part of the narrative is kept going by frequent references to a...
(This entire section contains 1892 words.)
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family feud that goes back two generations. Although the feud was part of the landscape of the young girls’ lives, young Jane was never able to find out what it was about, although she and Martha would jokingly exchange theories about its origins. As a grown woman, Jane wonders whether the family feud had something to do with the sudden rupture in her childhood friendship.
The second level of the narrative is the exploration of the Galapagos Islands undertaken by Jane and the group of people with whom she finds herself thrown together. Schine enjoys tossing in a wealth of minutiae about Darwin and about plant and animal life on the Galapagos, making it interesting by filtering it through the speculative, questioning mind of her protagonist. Jane cannot read a fact in her guidebook or observe a natural phenomenon without its triggering ideas and questions. Her mind also goes back and forth from natural selection to human relationships. Regarding the family feud, for example, the habit of the blue-footed boobies (large brown birds) she observes is for the oldest chick to push out the younger ones from the nest. Perhaps, Jane speculates, it had been the same with the three Barlow brothers, including the great- grandfathers of Jane and Martha—a kind of inevitable feud that was programmed into the family DNA, in which case she and Martha were genetically incapable of remaining friends.
Thrown into the mix is the unusual collection of tourists that are Jane’s companions. Here Schine is at her best; all the characters come across as individuals, even though in this short novel the author does not have much space to elaborate on them. The biggest role is allocated to Gloria Steinham, a middle-aged high- school science teacher, whose appearance is distinctive because her clothing is drawn from so many different cultures that it resembles a kind of ethnic fair or United Nations bazaar. Gloria shares a cabin with Jane and serves as a sounding board for Jane’s restless questioning, to which she responds sometimes with common sense, sometimes with flat-out contradiction, sometimes with another theory that has not occurred to Jane.
Schine’s description of Gloria reveals her comic technique of applying Darwinian theory to her characters. She comments that once an organism has branched out in one direction, it cannot retrace its steps or leap across to another branch. Gloria however, appears to contradict this:
She appeared to encompass all the branches of evolution at once. Her earrings were feathers, her necklace was shells, her bracelet was seeds. She was adorned with claws and suede pouches and tiny gourds. Her hat was printed with tropical fish. Wrapped around her, a cloth of a primitive African pattern created an ostentatiously primitive skirt. Her shoes had been woven by an aboriginal Asiatic desert tribe.
The other notables among Jane’s companions are the Cornwall family. Widowed Mrs. Cornwall, who carries her husband’s ashes around with her, is accompanied by four members of her family. They include her son Jack, who is Jane’s age and for whom she forms a brief and vague romantic attachment, until she finds out to her chagrin that Jack, unknown to everyone except his family, is secretly engaged to Martha. Then there is Martha herself, as seen through the eyes of Jane. She is friendly in a detached way, knowledgeable, efficient, confident, as Jane remembers her from her childhood. Martha, though, shows no inclination to respond to Jane’s many hints about a past friendship so abruptly sundered.
This leaves Jane to ponder a variety of different possibilities. Could it have been because of an ambiguous note she once left in Martha’s room, when Martha was on a trip with her parents? Or was it perhaps because of an essay she wrote that mentioned Martha? Jane sent it to her friend and never heard from her again.
The issue is finally resolved with the help of an entry in Darwin’s journal decrying the notion that the length of the day is adapted to the duration of human sleep, rather than the other way round. When Jane reads this, she realizes that she is looking at the issue upside down. It was nothing that she, Jane, had done, that had caused the rupture with Martha. It was simply that Martha had her own life journey to make, involving travels of which Jane had no knowledge and for which she bore no responsibility. Therefore, there was no need of forgiveness. The ending of the friendship was just an accident, like natural selection, that had no meaning other than its unintended outcome.
This realization comes hard on the heels of Jane’s resolution of her present feelings about Martha. Sick from sunstroke, Jane vomits violently. When Martha cleans up the mess with quiet compassion, Jane feels only a vast gratitude for her.
As for the feud, it is finally revealed that the cause was a mundane one: money. In a business transaction, one branch of the family deprived the other of its rightful share. Another family secret, which is revealed when Martha lets slip what their great- aunt Anna said on her deathbed, is that Jane’s mother and Martha’s father were once engaged to be married. The engagement was broken off because, as the result of a complicated (and no doubt random) glitch in family relationships, they turned out to be brother and sister.
In the final page of the novel, Schine suggests a twist to the ideas that she has been exploring throughout her narrative. She has established that, following Darwin, there is no design, no plan, no meaning in evolution. There is only chaos. Yet Jane’s mother invests the word “chaos” with positive meaning. When Jane was a child, she would often observe her mother murmuring “chaos” to herself in the mornings, when she was gardening or involved in some other pleasant or mundane activity, and smiling as she said it. Little Jane therefore took “chaos” to be an expression of joy. In the last sentence of the novel, the word recurs, again spoken by Jane’s mother, as she looks at a photograph that Jane took on her trip. It is a serene picture of some pigs; the sun is setting in a bright pink sky, amid green grass and the shadows of trees. “Chaos,” says Mrs. Barlow, with a smile. It is as if Cathleen Schine is deconstructing the whole edifice that she (and Darwin) have built. Everything may be random, everything may be a chaos, but out of chaos emerges a kind of joy, a kind of beauty that has its own value and its own meaning.
The philosophical subtlety of The Evolution of Jane, as well as its delicately comic tone, will undoubtedly enhance Schine’s reputation as a novelist of distinction. This, her fourth novel, exhibits the same wit and elegance that Schine displayed in the popular The Love Letter (1995), in which she explored the public and private aspects of love. The Evolution of Jane, however, has more in common with Schine’s second novel, Rameau’s Niece (1993), a comedy of manners that was also a satire of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. That novel, like The Evolution of Jane, possessed a teasing philosophical depth that can only come from solid learning, and reflection on that learning, on the part of the author.
Sources for Further Study
Booklist. XCIV, July, 1998, p. 1831.
Library Journal. CXXIII, August, 1998, p. 134.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 4, 1998, p. 2.
New York. XXXI, October 12, 1998, p. 128.
The New York Times Book Review. CIII, October 11, 1998, p. 13.
Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, July 13, 1998, p. 59.
Seventeen. LVII, October, 1998, p. 116.
The Wall Street Journal. October 2, 1998, p. W14.