Book Review: "The Ginkgo: An Intellectual and Visionary Coming-of-Age" by John Janovy Jr.

Review by Kathleen Rutledge

“The Ginkgo: An Intellectual and Visionary Coming-of-Age”
Author: John Janovy Jr.
Publisher: The Protistan Press

The Ginkgo,” a book with two iridescent leaves entwined on its bright green cover, has this to say on page 24:

“… think of her as a modern work of art, one that troubles you, confuses you, but sometimes without your knowing or understanding why, directs the behavior of those around it.”

With these words, biology professor John Janovy Jr. describes the once-in-a-lifetime student he calls The Ginkgo. These words could also describe his book.

You may be troubled from the very beginning, when Janovy explains that his literary agent didn’t want to touch this “evocative book of ideas” because such books make modern readers impatient.

And indeed, you may become confused in the opening pages as you try to figure out what this book is and where it’s going.

Is it fiction? Creative nonfiction? Did The Ginkgo write the essays that alternate with the professor’s musings, or did he? Does she really exist? He wants us to think so and even supplies her name and height and hair color in the afterword. Yet her hometown of Bodmer dots no map, there’s no Carson County in western Nebraska, no well-known cattle baron named Johannes.

What’s going on with this professor? Why does he disdain having helped students on their way to becoming doctors and physical therapists? What has happened to him as he roams the rural reaches of Nebraska looking for dragonflies? What has set his face so hard against the culture of small towns and ranches?

Is he burned out or can it really be that most college students these days are as numb, as programmed as Janovy describes?

“The rest of her generation … does not stimulate my desire to participate in their futures beyond what I already do by standing in front of them, assigning their scores to letters, writing short, courteous, but pointed, notes on their papers. They are intimidated by my presence, by their circumstances, and until they grow out of their fear, they cannot be taught much.”

Janovy may be weary of the unthinking ways of the world and the bureaucratic obligations of university life, but he makes clear in these intense and sometimes lyrical pages that he still burns bright for the life of the mind, for the power of inquiry and for the saving grace of doing things differently.

He does things differently in this book, creating his own form. He tells an absorbing tale of a student and her professor. He plays around with the soap-opera conventions of popular culture by imagining what happens beneath the small-town surfaces he observes in Bodmer. He favors his readers with a scientist’s long view of the land where his fieldwork takes him, passages of the sort that readers of his “Keith County Journal” and “Yellow Legs,” have come to love.

A sample:

“In the distance, sun reflects off the valley floor, off rivulets running around sand and gravel bars and through trees that have encroached on the channel. The river was once a mile wide here, but what used to be a flood plain is now hay meadow. Upstream dams have cut the flow; some describe these dams as ‘progress;’ others call them ‘make work for BuRec.’ Whatever they are, they’ve allowed humanity to control the floodplain. A lush blanket of deep green extends from the cottonwoods up to a long natural terrace that marks the valley’s edge. From where I’m parked, I can see five or six miles both east and west; all along the river, ranchers have used the plain for hay meadow. Around my ankles, digger bees dart erratically in low, tight, figure eights over the sandy roadbed; bees might have been making their little chimney burrow entrances on this hillside for centuries before someone came along and put a road through the Ginkgo property. Then the bees simply dug where they’d always dug, but now they’re in the road. In mid-afternoon on the road north of Bodmer, digger bees are the only active creatures I see; they make the only noise I can hear.”

With all of this and more, he constructs a framework for the writings of a young woman who smiles at challenge, who crackles with ideas. She writes first about a ginkgo, the plant she chooses for a class assignment. By the end of the semester she has written an allegory set a thousand years in the future when her ginkgo dies and a gardener named Spindler Martinez is assigned to remove it.

She illustrates what one student with raw potential can do with a teacher’s belief in the power of these words, “Here, tell me about this.”

Ultimately, this is a book about Janovy’s idea of a truly liberal education, of his conviction that he can tempt a student with the power of ideas and teach her to “mold herself into an unexpectedly insightful, influential, human being.”

This book might put you off at first, as it did his agent, but let it catch you up, and it will awaken your curiosity and compel your attention. If you accept Janovy’s invitation, you may find yourself asking questions with abandon and imagining with this idealistic professor “how the world might be a better place for us all to live.”

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