Good.: From the Amazon Jungle to Suburbia and Back by FLuX and David Good

First up, this is not non-fiction; there's a disclaimer on the copyright page: "This book is a work of fiction inspired by actual events." It does use the real names of all of the people involved, was written or co-written by the main character, and roughly follows the real history as far as I can determine from news stories and the description of David Good's 2015 prose memoir The Way Around.

But there's something constructed at the core of the graphic novel Good.: From the Amazon Jungle to Suburbia and Back that led to that disclaimer. I don't know all of the details. But it's clear that this is not, at its core, true. And that's a puzzling thing for a book positioned as a memoir.

David Good is the eldest of three children of American anthropologist Kenneth Good and the Yanomani woman Yarima. The elder Good took his first trip into the Amazon rainforest to live with the Yanomani in 1975, and spent much of the next twelve years there, learning the language and being accepted by a local tribe, said acceptance meaning he had to marry a local woman. "Woman" here means maybe 12 when they were married and possibly as old as 16 when the marriage was consummated.

Kenneth and Yarima then lived in New Jersey for a few years - the mid-80s, if I have the sequence right - where those three children were born, while Kenneth was working on his PhD. Yarima was left, while Kenneth worked long hours, in a suburban house with three pre-school children, in an alien culture where she didn't speak the language well, while she still possibly wasn't old enough to drink legally. The family returned to the Venezuelan rainforest roughly once a year for a long visit - I'm going to guess each summer, during the long break of the academic year, and possibly partially funded by an ongoing research grant of Kenneth's - and, one year, for reasons and in a manner that seems to vary somewhat between retellings, Yarima refused to return to America, so Kenneth left her behind and took the children back north.

In Good., this is the dividing line: David Good was five years old when his mother faded back into the jungle instead of getting onto a small plane, and he didn't see her again until he was an adult. But it's not clear what Kenneth did, since the Yanomani were still the core of his academic work. Did Kenneth continue his fieldwork, visiting without his half-Yanomami children for the years in between? Did he visit a different Yanomani tribe - maybe the break-up of his marriage soured his relationship with this one?  Or did he just stop doing fieldwork after he got his PhD? None of that is clear in Good., which is the story of the child David rather than the adult Kenneth.

Meanwhile, Kenneth wrote his own book about his experiences, 1991's Into the Heart. I haven't seen a clear timeline of this whole thing, but that seems to be fairly soon after Yarima returned to the Yanomani. I've seen references to David being twenty-five in 2010, which would put his birth in 1984 or 1985, and make him five around 1989-90. Arguing for a slightly earlier timeline, the repeated "twelve years" of Kenneth's fieldwork, starting in 1975, could imply the break was around 1987 or 1988. Finally, a 1991 book would have been written at least a year or two before. (I found a NYTimes review of Kenneth's book, which implies its viewpoint is from before Yarima returned, and which provides more context to Yanomani life.)

That's the general outline of the story, consistent across what I've seen across all three books and various articles. How much, and what parts, of this story as told in Good. are fictionalized, I don't know. Good. doesn't make that clear, or explain why it was fictionalized. I haven't read Into the Heart or The Way Around, both of which were written with collaborators, as Good. was. I suspect that at least part of the fictionalization has to do with the "warlike" nature of the Yanomani people - the first major book about them, from the 1960s, was Yanomama: The Fierce People - and how that violence affected Good's family, since I've also seen references to his mother having been gang-raped during one of Kenneth's trips away from this tribal group. David Good's vision of his mother's people in Good. is entirely positive and sunny and happy: that's a beautiful vision, and inspires his charitable and other work these days, but no people in the history of the world are perfectly peaceful and happy.

I've also neglected to mention David Good's collaborator on Good., the gallery artist, cartoonist and illustrator who works as FLuX. (From the acknowledgements, I think his real name is John Malloy.) The book doesn't make their roles clear: the PDF I read has FLuX listed first in the author credit, while covers online have the reverse order. I don't know if Good scripted the book, or if he met with FLuX to talk through his story and FLuX scripted it, or some more complicated process. Somehow, though, these two men made this fictionalized version of David Good's story.

I think the fictionalization is to frame it. Most of Good. is told in alternating chapters: the longer ones focus on David, are presented in black and white and heavily narrated in his own voice, telling his story from childhood. In between are color-saturated, wordless short vignettes of Yarima's life, from her own birth, presenting an idealized vision of a paradisiacal life in the rainforest among a wonderful, loving people. (Until she moves to New Jersey with Kenneth, for a darker interlude that ends with her return to paradise.) As an adult, after a tumultuous adolescence, David seeks out his mother - the narrative doesn't emphasize this, but it's notable that it's another anthropologist, not his father, who helps him get into the jungle and find his mother's nomadic people - and that heals him and makes everything better. The book ends with a sequence marrying the two art styles, with David's narration boxes overlaid on the sunny, bright colors of the Yarima sections.

It's an uplifting story, a lovely one marred only slightly by that lurking question of how fake it is. It's probably mostly true. And David Good has dedicated his life to good works since then, pursing a PhD based on the Yanomani microbiome and starting a foundation in their name.

I just want Yarima's real story. This one is clearly fictionalized so far as to be a fantasy. It sounds like Into the Heart also had long sequences ostensibly from her POV that, I suspect, were equally "true." What I really want to read is what she really thought, what her life was actually like - including the violence of the Yanomani culture that Kenneth Good seems to have made a career out of minimizing (and, to be clear, it also sounds like researchers before him leaned heavily into the "noble savage" myth, going much too far in mythologizing and centralizing that violence). That would take an independent viewpoint - not a man related to her - and will probably never happen.

Good. is fine as far as it goes, and David Good's story is genuinely inspiring. I don't fault him or his collaborator for not understanding his mother, a woman from a completely different culture who he knew only as a very young child. But it's important to be clear on what Good. is and isn't: it's a cleaned-up, fictionalized version of this story, from David Good's viewpoint, presenting him as the hero and savior. That is a plausible reading of the story, admittedly: and much better than plausible if you happen to be David Good. But the Yarima sections of this book are just too cartoony, too kumbaya, to be believable, even if you don't already know that her people are famous in anthropological circles as "the violent people."