The Greening of Ben Brown
~ a book review and discussion by Cherie Renae

Introduction

The Greening of Ben Brown was written by Willamette University college professor Michael Strelow. It is, on the surface, a story about a man whose skin was permanently turned green by an electrical shock. As the story progresses, however, it becomes apparent that it is less about a green man and more about the community around him. This month's activity includes a short biography of the author, a synopsis of the book, an excerpt from the book, a question and answer style discussion with the author and discussion questions for your participants.

Activity Alert: This book would make an excellent book club selection. It would also be a good weekly group reading activity. It has been compared with To Kill a Mockingbird as a classic of our time.

Props & Preparations

Get a copy of The Greening of Ben Brown, written by Michael Strelow, Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, publisher. You can get it from your library or bookstore. (You will probably need to special order this book.) It is also available at www.amazon.com.

About the Author

Michael Strelow was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised in a little town by Lake Michigan. It was a community comprised largely of his own relatives - he grew up with over fifty cousins. He attended college at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He began as a geology and zoology student. "It was Thomas Mann's Faustus that changed the course of my life. I read it as a sophomore, and it just knocked me out. I was so amazed by the story that I changed my major to English."

After college, Strelow traveled extensively in Europe. "I drove a Vespa. I think that in Europe, I received a sensuous education, visiting many of the art museums of the western era." He returned to the United States, received his Masters of Arts, married and returned to Europe. He taught English in Barcelona for four years.

When Strelow returned to the United States again, he received his PhD at the University of Oregon. He initially worked as the editor of the Northwest Review. In 1980, he began teaching English at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, where he continues today. He and his wife have two grown daughters.

The Greening of Ben Brown

What is life like if you are a green man? This is the question that started the author thinking, and it gives shape to the book The Greening of Ben Brown. Michael Strelow explains, "I heard a story about a man whose skin was permanently turned green due to an electrical shock from high voltage wires. He was the object of ridicule and harassment by teenagers and adults alike. I started wondering to myself, what would it be like to be a green man?"

In The Greening of Ben Brown, Ben Brown is the Green Man. He takes up residence in East Leven, Oregon after he recovers from an electrical shock that has left him alive but green. He befriends 22-year-old Andrew James, and together they unearth a chemical spill cover-up that forces the town to confront its demons and its citizens to choose sides.

This book, less about the green man than about the community around him, becomes a book about us - any town and our attitudes toward others and toward the environment. Despite its serious subject, it is written in a humorous style. The author says, "This is a funny book!"

Excerpt from The Greening of Ben Brown

In the town of East Leven, Oregon the sound of water is everywhere. From east and west every half-mile or so some creek works through the cane berries and bright fields of broccoli to join the Willamette River on its way to the Columbia.

Each creek came to have its ghost. A blood sacrifice was exacted by the water for the privilege of having the town here, as if along with the location of sewer and water there had been some deal recorded in the original plat.

One hundred and fifty years ago only a few settlers farmed along the Willamette because it flooded each spring, washing out among cottonwoods and stands of oaks, then receded and produced fields of blue camas flowers where the Calapooia Indians came to dig the bulbs. Farmers staked out the higher ground and East Leven was little more than a post office and general store on a raised spot with creeks y-ing into the river around it. Then in the 1930s, the Army Corps of Engineers regulated the water coming down from the Cascade Mountains in catch dams for hydroelectric. Citizens uneasily occupied the new dry spots as East Leven sprawled across the creeks with webs of bridges, then settled in to listen to the water.

Ann Doucette was one of the children whose story carried the strongest cautionary tale. She broke her sweet neck at the age of twelve trying to walk the wide bridge railing over Inman Creek. If she had fallen to the left that spring just after the camas bloom, she might have skinned both knees and torn her dress. But she fell to the right thirty feet to the creek bed where she broke her neck and - parents paused here in the story to make sure this registered well on a child's graphic sense of danger - she took two days to die, closing her eyes finally on the bad luck to have stumbled to the wrong side.

The wide bridge rails, those invitations to I-dare-you walks, had come with the WPA crews, all men, who poured into town from the camps by day to winch the wide timbers into place. The men sweating and shirtless, the apricot timbers leaking sap, hand forged iron chisels and drills, piles of fir curls - America was finding its way out of the unfortune of the Great Depression. The crews originated from everywhere in the West, and some WPA men took note of this place and its waters as a town to come back to when the hard times let up. You could hear the water at night any place in town from bedroom windows. Water with its price.

After the Green Man came, the sacrifice stopped suddenly. Maybe it was the new railings, unwalkable thin steel. But there was still the railroad trestle, the inner tubing through the rapids on the Willamette River, the rock skipping and creek wading and rope swings strung up to cotton woods so you shot from the trees along the bank and landed in the deep hole just before the highway bridge. Plenty of chances for bad choices, bad luck, but the sacrifice stopped with the arrival of the Green Man and for a while the whole town held its breath waiting for the next death that didn't come. Instead, the Green Man came to live in a cabin that looked out on the Willamette, bound on one side by old firs stepped down the hillside to the flood plain of the river and on the other, cottonwoods and alders that crowded the bank.

Question and Answer with the Author

Reviewer:	Professor Strelow, what is the book really about?
Author:	This book is about water. I believe that water is going to be, in the 21st century, the essential element. The top two issues in the Middle East are oil and water - fresh, clean water.
Reviewer:	What about water?
Author:	Where will we get it? Who will be in charge of water distribution? Who owns water? I'm not the first author to consider this topic. Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Edward Abbey, in many of his writings, also discuss this subject.
Reviewer:	Where did the idea for a green man come from?
Author:	A friend of mine grew up knowing of a man in an adjoining town who had actually been turned green in an electrical accident. Her brothers and their friends used to drive to that town occasionally and throw rocks at his house to get him to come outside.
Reviewer:	What is the medical explanation for his greenness?
Author:	I have researched this, and apparently it's related to the mask that some women get during pregnancy. It's a brownish hue, with a slight green tone. I just emphasized the greenness in my novel.
Reviewer:	So, what color was he, really? What did you envision as you wrote your novel?
Author:	(Laughing) I prefer to leave that to each reader's imagination. In most novels, you have a vague sense of what the people look like, but you fill in the details for yourself.
Reviewer:	Ben Brown's chemical sensitivity - is that part of the physiological response to electrical shock?
Author:	Actually, no. Growing up, I was sensitive to a lot of things. I was an asthmatic in a family of smokers. In that regard, I was the green man. That just worked its way into the book.
Reviewer:	So, tell me about the theme of community that runs through the book.
Author:	It's really an exploration of how communities form. They form around factories and farms, yes, but how else? Where do the town statues come from? How do town divisions arise? People get together and define themselves in many ways. How did these townspeople define themselves? How do we define ourselves in our town? Who's in? Who's out? Marge, the Green Man, Crazy Leo and Mary are all "out" - they are the river people vs. the "in" people who live in town.

Discussion Starters

Related Activities

• Front Porch Travels - The travels of Nell and Truman are always fun to read.
• Who Am I? - Read aloud the information about the mystery person of the month.
• Reel to Real - Our "Star of the Month" makes a good read.