A Lost African Childhood

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. By Helene Cooper. 352 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.00
Cooper’s memoir of her tumultuous childhood in Liberia and her life after fleeing to this country as a teenager in the 1980s is an uneven book saved by the power of its story. Cooper’s resume is impressive; she has been the Diplomatic Correspondent at The New York Times since 2006 and wrote for The Wall Street Journal for twelve years before that. I have been struck by the incisiveness of her reporting and by her ability to make complex political issues comprehensible. But in this book Cooper confronts more personal material, a challenge evidenced in the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of past and present that characterizes the tone of the narrative.
Some readers may remember the excerpt of Cooper’s book that appeared in The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. It ended with her return to Liberia to find her lost foster sister Eunice, whose memory she had blotted out in remaking herself as an American. It focused on Cooper’s early life as a member of the Liberian elite and her relationship with Eunice, who was brought into the family to keep her company, and also described the country’s sudden descent into chaos capped by the soldiers’ arrival at the house at Sugar Beach, an event detailed with emotional restraint that does little to diminish its horror. The book fills in the rest of the story, including Cooper’s reunion with Eunice, who had experienced the full brunt of a country gone mad.
What emerges is a picture of a colorful but hopeless country and of a bright indulged child whose parents loved each other but could not stay together, whose extended family defined her identity and whose survival skills enabled her to remake herself into an American woman with a successful career in a high-powered profession. All you have to do is read Cooper’s description of herself as a stranger in an American high school—in the south, no less—to realize the extent of her achievement. Yet I can’t help wondering if the immensity of her experience helps to explain the tonal inconsistencies that one reviewer identified as a disconcerting flipness, most evident to me in her description of being embedded with the troops in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which her Humvee was crushed by a tank. “Flipness” suggests an attitude of dismissal on the part of a writer, a reduction of deep emotion to something less. In Cooper’s case I sense no lack of feeling; rather, it’s as if she can’t find the language to join together the extremes of her relatively short lifetime. But I can’t believe she won’t keep trying, and I expect she will succeed. This book is so good that it seems cruel to ask for more, but few reporters have her life experience, and if she can bring together her powers of observance, her linguistic gifts and her obvious depth of feeling Cooper will astonish readers even more than in The House at Sugar Beach.