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Speaking Her Mind: The Eulogist

02 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: The Eulogist, by Terry Gamble
Morrow, 2019. 310 pp. $27

When fifteen-year-old Olivia (Livvie) Givens and her family emigrate from Ireland to America in 1819, disaster haunts them from the start. Their ship nearly founders in an Atlantic storm, so the captain jettisons most of their worldly goods, including a piano. When they finally settle in Cincinnati, Livvie’s mother dies in childbirth, and her father leaves on a river boat headed for New Orleans.

Livvie and her two brothers must now fend for themselves, barely possessing the proverbial pot, and, as she notes, the future looks most unpromising. Her elder brother James, astute, ambitious, and hard-working, may have a head for business, but he lacks both capital or gift for conversation, so he’s unlikely to attract investors, let alone a wife. The other brother, Erasmus, “not right in the head,” has no talents except seduction and debauchery and can’t be trusted to carry out any task James gives him.

However, James digs in, and over the years, his grit and determination pay off. Erasmus turns preacher, wandering off, abandoning his responsibilities, as usual. Livvie picks up various pieces of their lives and takes political stands that cause an uproar, as when she expresses doubts about God’s supremacy. The good people of Cincinnati don’t take freethinking lying down, and Livvie’s observations provide a vivid picture of striving America in those years, with all the flies, smells, and pretensions, not to mention political strife.

Cincinnati, seen from the north, 1841, by Klauprech and Menzel. The foreground depicts the Miami and Erie Canal; the Ohio River and Kentucky are in the background (courtesy New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s my favorite aspect of The Eulogist, how Gamble paints her American portrait with finesse and well-chosen detail. Even better, Livvie’s wit makes you laugh:

Clearly, she had her cap set on my brother. Hatsepha, with her wide, bland face and badly spelled name that gave a nod to the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Today, her head was a bowery of satin roses stuck all about. I fancied a swarm of bees might rush through the window in a frenzy of pollination.

But just when you think you’re getting a novel of manners, the narrative and tone shift. Cincinnati lies close to Kentucky, where slavery is legal, and as the years progress, that issue dominates public life. Livvie, who begins the novel naturally opposed to slavery while refusing to take a meaningful stand, becomes an ardent abolitionist, though for her safety, she must be discreet. I like how Gamble handles the transformation, which extends to Livvie’s influence on her family.

I also admire how, with authority over the smallest intricacies, the author demonstrates how the slaves suffer, how risky and terrifying their attempts to flee to Ohio, and the lengths to which patrols and bounty hunters searching for runaways and their “abettors” take brutal revenge. Along the way, Campbell creates memorable minor characters, like the cranky Kentucky store owner who’s an “abettor,” and Salmon P. Chase, the ambitious attorney well known to history, who defends a slave in a case in which Livvie has a central interest.

That said, The Eulogist’s shift in tone and substance comes as a surprise. I would have been better prepared had I consulted the jacket flap, but, as my regular readers know, I don’t until after I’ve read the book. In this case, I’m doubly glad. Not only does this one make the shortlist for the Worst Ever Jacket Copy Prize, going on forever and revealing far too much plot, you might think The Eulogist is more essay than novel, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Even so, I have to say that the two halves of the book don’t entirely fit, and not just because the voice changes. Does the first part serve only to cement Livvie’s iconoclasm, so that you can accept her unusual political stance and activities later? I don’t think that’s necessary; and I object to how the author contrives the mystery of certain characters’ origins, which involves a trick or three and yet another layer to a narrative that’s complicated enough. And as long as we’re talking about devices, neither Livvie nor her brothers even think of their late mother, the stillborn sibling who died with her, or their father, vanished forever. That seems a little convenient.

Still, The Eulogist makes for fine storytelling, and I think that those readers who pick it up will be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Blood Money: Savage Country

22 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: Savage Country, by Robert Olmstead
Algonquin, 2017. 293 pp. $27

It’s rural Kansas, 1873, and many farmers have gone bust, whether from overextended investment, rapacious creditors, or the swarms of locusts that have wreaked destruction of biblical proportions. Elizabeth Coughlin, recently widowed and deeply in debt, decides to try to recoup her fortunes by assembling a buffalo hunting expedition. Properly cured buffalo hides are worth a fortune, prized as leather for factory drive belts or other applications requiring particular strength or resiliency. And to lead her expedition, Elizabeth asks her brother-in-law Michael, newly arrived from his latest journeys as a big-game hunter. Against his better judgment, Michael agrees — and no sooner has he said yes than the party gathers and prepares to head south. Michael, it seems, would rather do just about anything than talk, and when he’s around, life-changing decisions happen in a New York minute.

Digitally retouched photograph dating from the mid-1870s of a pile of bison skulls, to be ground into fertilizer (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

But he anticipates the dangers that lie ahead. As they cross the so-called dead line separating Kansas from Comanche territory, Michael finds the remains of a couple wagons whose murdered and scalped occupants make a grisly display. You know right away that Elizabeth’s quest will be a struggle to the death, but, as it happens, the Comanches aren’t the main antagonists. When it comes to raiders, white brigands are the worst; and if something burns, bites, floods, or falls from the sky, the Coughlin crew will have their fill of it. But what’s in the human heart causes even more misery, for it’s the pursuit of wealth, especially wealth that comes through killing, which destroys the spirit as well as the body.

Savage Country shows this in its vivid, gruesome descriptions of the buffalo hunt in its appalling carnage, and the inevitable rivalries and prejudices that divide the expedition. For instance, when a group of sick, starving black escapees arrives from a turpentine plantation — a form of industrial slavery — Elizabeth hires them to skin hides as a kind of rescue. But you sense that violence will erupt sooner or later, because not all her employees share her outlook.

It’s violence that shapes Savage Country, and I say that even as I recall other unflinching novels about the West, such as The News of the World or The Way West, which involve their share of brutality. Olmstead’s tale will deter some, but I, who consider myself squeamish, didn’t recoil. Maybe it’s because the violence establishes its own context, and that the characters, Michael and Elizabeth especially, try to make sense of it. And Michael has seen it before:

Michael listened to what the reverend doctor had to say until his mind began to wander. He held no anticipation of punishment or reward after death. He experienced no terror of the underworld, of the afterlife. He had no dread of suffering upon perishing. He believed in the transition of souls into horses and in the second sight of dogs and their ability to see invisible spirits and witches. He believed in omens and dreams and warnings and instinct. He believed, contrary to the Gospels, the meek, however blessed, would not inherit the earth.

But Michael, the rock of the narrative, resembles that substance in his refusal to express anything, which grates after a while. His deliberate terseness sometimes comes across as harsh and unyielding as the weather. The narrative succeeds best, I think, in its vivid descriptions of life and death on the prairie, which are as tense and dramatic as could be. But when it comes to human speech, the characters — even those who show more of themselves — don’t speak as much as they declare, as if they were coining homespun aphorisms, or trying to. I don’t believe that late-nineteenth-century frontier folk avoided contractions like the plague or snarled their syntax to avoid saying an extra word. Here, their language can be so stilted as to sound pretentious, and these people are anything but.

Still, I found the novel worth reading, both for its depictions of nature and the way it dramatizes its central themes. As Elizabeth observes, “For all the slave lords the war had killed, a new generation was born in their ashes and born inside of the new generation was the enmity of the old.”

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Tepid Tropics: Conquistadora

04 Monday Dec 2017

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Review: Conquistadora, by Esmeralda Santiago
Knopf, 2011. 414 pp. $28

Be careful what you wish for. That might be the moral of this novel, but it would be hard to blame its nineteenth-century protagonist, Ana Larragoity Cubillas, for wanting what no other young woman of her time, place, and social class could normally dream of. The daughter of a Seville aristocrat whose illustrious sixteenth-century ancestor sailed with Ponce de Leon, Ana asphyxiates in an emotionally and intellectually stifling home where name and pride are the only things that matter. Her parents, angry that she wasn’t born male, see no reason to treat her with warmth or kindness, since she disappointed them and will never amount to anything they approve of. Ana’s sole refuges are the diary her conquistador forebear left behind and the occasional visits to her grandparents’ farm, where she comes alive in the garden, the barn, and the fields. Naturally, these are no pursuits for a girl of noble lineage. But she is determined not to encase herself in crinoline, marry a rich dolt older than herself, and die without seeing the world.

Rescue comes in Ana’s teenage years from a schoolmate, Elena. Not only does Elena provide the friendship Ana has never known, the girls become intimate in ways the nuns at the convent school would not even have the vocabulary to describe. The girls’ encounters are easily the most passionate scenes in the book, and Elena is the instigator, a nifty surprise given that she’s much more conventional than Ana. But that’s not all. Elena has two handsome cousins, twins of fine manners whose merchant father has commercial interests in Puerto Rico. It’s assumed that Inocente will marry Elena; Ramón proposes to Ana. But Ana has a plan: Why don’t they all move to Puerto Rico and run the sugar plantation that belongs to her prospective father-in-law? With the will and persuasiveness typical of her, Ana sells everyone on the idea and convinces her stuffy parents to permit her marriage to a mere merchant’s son.

The difficulty of reconciling a romantic education to the real world is a common theme in literature; Cervantes, Flaubert, and Sinclair Lewis come to mind as practitioners. So it’s a given that Ana’s plan doesn’t work out the way she intended, but she’s nothing if not adaptable. And though the plantation is in far worse shape than she imagined, she’s excited to be there:

She’d been moving toward this destination not knowing exactly where it was, what it looked like, but now Hacienda los Gemelos was spread below her, calling to her. She wanted to be on the ground, to feel its rich earth, to smell it, taste it even. Long before she reached it, she knew she’d love this land, would love it as long as she lived. She was eighteen years old, had arrived at the end of a journey that was also a beginning, one that she’d already decided was final. I’m here, she said to herself. I’m here, she told the breeze. . .

Corvera’s 1893 drawing of Juan Ponce de Leon, first governor of Puerto Rico (courtesy British Library, via Wikimedia Commons)

The vivid descriptions are one thing I like about Conquistadora. Another is the care Santiago takes with her minor characters. She creates touching portraits of the slaves who work Hacienda los Gemelos, many of whom carry traumatic memories of their abduction and transport across the ocean. (The ones who don’t remember were born on the island, often to mothers impregnated by the white overseer.) Since these people are virtually invisible to their owners–except when they try to escape–Santiago is plainly trying to rectify the imbalance, and I applaud that.

That said, however, I find Conquistadora a tepid novel. It reads more like a biography of Ana (or, more properly, Hacienda los Gemelos) than fiction, consisting of events that follow logically, even predictably, and reach no height of feeling, except, as I said, the schoolgirl love affair. There’s no character arc, because you find out all you will ever know about the characters early on, and Santiago tells their emotions more than she shows them, so it feels rote. There’s no story arc either, just episodes. If you drew a diagram of the tension, you’d have a sine curve, not a rising line.

I also dislike the tendentious aspect of the narrative. Ana’s descended from a conquistador, and the title is Conquistadora, after all. You see how she mistreats her slaves, and how they suffer. So how many times do you need to be told directly that she’s much like her ancestor, and that her wealth is built on the dead bodies of enslaved laborers? Quite a few, apparently.

Conquistadora is more interesting for its subject matter than as fiction.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Too Much Conscience?: The Second Mrs. Hockaday

13 Monday Mar 2017

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Review: The Second Mrs. Hockaday, by Susan Rivers
Algonquin, 2017. 254 pp. $26

After her half-sister’s wedding in rural South Carolina, seventeen-year-old Placidia Fincher makes a bold decision. She accepts a marriage proposal from Major Gryffyth Hockaday, a widower considerably older than herself, whom she has never met before and to whom she has spoken but briefly during the wedding reception. Over the next two days, Placidia has cause to wonder whether she made a mistake but also a sense that her heart has led her to her true love. Unfortunately, she has no time to figure out which, for the year is 1863, and the Civil War claims his attention. Recalled to his regiment sooner than anticipated, Major Hockaday leaves his bride in a perilous, unsettled situation. She must put aside her fears that he may be killed at any moment; raise his young son by a previous marriage; manage their farm, something she has never done; and face various threats to which she’s particularly vulnerable, as a young woman, alone.

What a splendid premise, and what a strong way to begin a novel. However, that’s not how Rivers approaches her narrative. Rather, she picks up the story from the major’s return from war in 1865, whereupon he discovers that Placidia has given birth to a child that couldn’t possibly be his, and that the law has charged her with murdering the infant. This is a pretty good premise too.

The Confederate flag flies over Fort Sumter, South Carolina, April 1861, from Alma A. Pelot’s stereoscopic photograph (courtesy Bob Zeller via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Nevertheless, about halfway through its short narrative, The Second Mrs. Hockaday goes wrong for me, despite having so much in its favor. I confess that I dislike epistolary novels, but that’s not my problem here; Rivers handles the form expertly, using letters, diary entries, and legal depositions to advance the plot. I also admire her prose, which captures Placidia’s voice beautifully, as when she dances with Hockaday at her half-sister’s wedding:

His hands were calloused and he held me at a distance in the way Abner [a slave] holds a fresh coonskin–like he was fixing to nail me to a shed before the smell made his eyes water. . . .He was telling the truth when he said he was a poor dancer and he was so tall I had to tilt my head back to see his jaw and his Adam’s apple while we danced. But as the music ended he guided me into the alcove in the dining room where his left hand slid down my back while his right hand pulled me to his side. I stumbled. He smoothly righted me with his hands on my waist. Didn’t I tell you I was clumsy, I said, and I must have been blushing because I fancied my hair was on fire.

Rivers further excels at creating a wartime ambience, based on painstaking research and telling detail. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and Major Hockaday’s Thirteenth South Carolina Regiment fights with stalwart pride, but the landowners she portrays strike poses while shirking their contribution to the cause. Deserters pretending to gather supplies for the army rob the countryside blind, and Placidia suffers their depredations.

So where’s the beef? Simple: Rivers gives the game away too soon. The reader sees how the case against Placidia will go, and though the why comes later, to me, that’s disappointing. I wish the author had let the crime and the mystery surrounding it hold center stage throughout. But maybe that’s the drawback of the epistolary style, whose very economy, though it drives the narrative at a good clip, undoes any chance to linger or spread out, so that the resolution comes too quickly.

But Rivers has something else in mind too, and that’s where I begin to lose confidence. Slavery gets a light touch here; too light, in my opinion. The racial divide tinges the narrative but doesn’t infuse it, as if Placidia were holding it at arm’s length, much as Hockaday held her during their first dance. And yet, this is the Civil War. Brutality against slaves occurs, but, with one exception, never at her hands (and she regrets it as an economic necessity). It’s always someone else, somewhere else, who supports the evil institution and will kill to preserve it, whereas Placidia, and the people she loves, at times sound like 1960s liberals, working for change.

Not only do I find this hard to believe, I see only the feeblest connection between this narrative and the crime of which Placidia stands accused. No doubt, it must be uncomfortable to write a novel in which otherwise good people are slaveowners, and I understand the urge to redeem them. But Rivers would have convinced me more readily had she not bothered and let the main story, which needs no adornment, carry The Second Mrs. Hockaday.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Not So Puritanical As That: The House of Hawthorne

26 Monday Sep 2016

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Review: The House of Hawthorne, by Erika Robuck
New American Library, 2015 402 pp. $26

Sophia Peabody has received a most unconventional upbringing for an early nineteenth-century woman, even for one born into Massachusetts intellectual circles. Her poor health has much to do with this. Sophia gets crippling migraines from random noises, commotion, or even by expending effort to concentrate–a pity, because she’s a gifted artist. Yet, on certain days, attempting to draw or paint bring on attacks that leave her bed-ridden. Her mother assumes that Sophy must give up all thought of marrying, because, if childbirth didn’t kill her, the work of keeping home and husband would. Consequently, she must devote her life to art and avoid any excitement other than what may be found in her sketchpad and books–only the appropriate sort, of course.

Fat chance. Sent to the reputedly healthful climate of Cuba with her sister, Mary, also of frail health, Sophy finds heat of more than one kind. Nature feels unleashed, more vividly savage, and the colors and marvels of the landscape stir her sensibilities as an artist and a person beginning to realize that she’d like to widen her experience. Living among the plantation gentry, the family entertains neighbors of their social class, who impress Sophy with their manners and bearing. But the slavery that supports these people and, by extension, her sister and herself, is always close at hand, and the revulsion Sophy feels for it, and the sympathy for the slaves, tells her that Cuba is no place for her. In a way, this comes as a wrench, because she’s formed an attraction for a plantation owner’s son, a shy, modest young man who seems to hate the system as much as she does. Nevertheless, the Peabody sisters return to Massachusetts.

Matthew Brady's photograph of Nathaniel Hawthorne, taken during the 1860s, not long before the author's death (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

Matthew Brady’s photograph of Nathaniel Hawthorne, taken during the 1860s, not long before the author’s death (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

Enter Nathaniel Hawthorne; talk about a thunderclap. They first meet in the company of Sophy’s sister, Elizabeth, who wants him for herself:

When I enter, Hawthorne’s eyes meet mine, and he rises. By the holy angels, I feel my soul at once aflame and reaching through my breast toward him. I falter, and he is at my arm, leading me to the sofa. I try to ignore the heat–the fire of our first joining–and lean back once I am seated. I tear my eyes from his to look at Elizabeth, and I see a pain in her face that makes me wish I had stayed in my room.

Thus begins a lengthy courtship of two people burning for one another, and I mean, they can’t wait to tear each other’s clothes off–except that they do wait, and for years. The House of Hawthorne is a charming novel, and this section is my favorite. Sophy must outwit her jealous sister and prod her intended to tell his family they’re engaged, something he’s extremely loath to do–and he has his reasons. Nathaniel and she must struggle to restrain passions that are positively transcendental. The future author of The Scarlet Letter tries hard not to be a Puritan and succeeds to a larger extent than his reputation might suggest.

I like the writing, which is simple and direct, much like the narrative itself. Notable characters from the Hawthornes’ literary circles, both in Massachusetts and abroad, play roles–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and the British poets Browning, for example. But none come fully alive, perhaps because Robuck never grants any more than a thumbnail sketch, generally a familiar one. Emerson is cold and pompous. Thoreau prefers his own company to that of society. Melville is a needy pain in the neck.

As with these characters, Robuck fails to make full use of the themes she introduces. Sophy’s artistic life before and after marriage makes the point, echoed by two characters and the woman herself, that she’s sacrificed to Hawthorne and his career what she might have achieved. It’s not that he discourages her art–far from it–it’s that she doesn’t have the time. But there sits the feminist argument, mentioned and mulled over a little but unfortunately not developed. Likewise, though the Hawthornes discuss slavery and feel deeply about it, especially Sophy, they take no stand, because they oppose war as the means to end it. But this resolution seems unsatisfying, particularly since their siblings, abolitionists all, were mad at them for it, as were, no doubt, their famous friends. I’d have also wanted more thoughtfulness about death, which strikes frequently during the narrative and causes the Hawthornes much grief. Again, they mention it, consider it, and utter a notion or two, but they don’t get down and grapple with it. They save the grappling for each other.

That’s not bad, just less than it could have been. The House of Hawthorne is a nice book, only lighter in impact than it could be.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Remembering Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger

06 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth
Norton, 1993. 630 pp. $16

Four years ago almost to the day, Barry Unsworth died, my favorite contemporary author. The New York Times obituary called him “one of the foremost historical novelists in English,” an ungenerous epitaph if ever I’ve heard one. Like any literary master, Unsworth told powerful stories that expressed timeless themes through the actions of characters whom you’d swear lived and breathed. To qualify or diminish his accomplishment simply because history pricked his imagination more than present-day life is to miss the point of literature.

I’ve just finished Sacred Hunger, the sixth Unsworth novel I’ve read, and it’s sublime. The title refers to the urge to profit no matter what morality, decency, or human sympathy might dictate. The chief business here is the mideighteenth-century English slave trade, so the moral divide is very stark, but Unsworth takes that further. Not only does he replicate forms of slavery among people who have no direct connection to the trade, he shows how men and women can enslave themselves to ideas that cause them to inflict suffering on others. This is brilliant, and what’s more, it’s subtle–you see it without Unsworth having to tell you. It’s also unbearably tense, because every human transaction in Sacred Hunger carries tremendous risks, and for every mistake, someone will pay.

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Any novel exploring the nature of evil must have a compelling, fully realized villain, and Sacred Hunger has two. Saul Thurso, captain of the newly launched slave ship Liverpool Merchant, lets nothing and no one touch him. Even to look him in the eyes is an affront, which he suffers only from his employers or social betters. He tolerates no attempt to establish rapport, for in his view, there are only masters and servants, the one controlling the other through terror. If the underling objects, it’s only to grab what rightfully belongs to the master. So when Thurso whips a crew man senseless, he believes he’s acting to protect his employer’s profit and, therefore, his own.

Erasmus Kemp, son of the Liverpool Merchant’s owner, shares one trait of Thurso’s, the inability to befriend anyone. However, Kemp craves that more than anything; he just goes to great lengths to deny it, burying it under his tremendous drive to make himself rich and successful. He can banter with other men and be genial when he thinks there’s money to be made, but in pursuit of love, he’s too raw to admit what he wants. Early in the novel, he courts a young woman as if she were a valuable commodity, albeit one who fires his passion. Impressed with his ardor, she takes him seriously enough to see through him and attempt to soothe his ill nature, if he could tolerate that. But there’s the rub:

Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch–even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation.

Like Thurso, then, Kemp’s a prisoner of his own false dignity. Both act despicably, though I understand why, not to excuse them, but to recognize them as real.

Enter Matthew Paris, Kemp’s cousin. Kemp despises him, first, because he’s served a prison sentence, and, second, because Paris dares to hold his head up. But Kemp, Sr., takes pity on his nephew and allows him a berth on the Liverpool Merchant as a doctor. Since Paris’s crime was distributing pamphlets questioning the Creation, he’s a free thinker and loud about it, so you know he’ll run afoul of Thurso. Sure enough, he tries to tell the captain that when a slave refuses to eat, it’s because he’s humiliated and melancholy, not, as Thurso would have it, to deny his captors their profit. You can guess how that exchange goes.

You might also guess that, with the tensions between captain and crew, captain and officers, and the entire ship’s company versus their human cargo, this voyage will end differently from the way Kemp and Thurso have planned. But just how differently, and how that unfolds, I leave for you to discover.

I’m so sorry that Barry Unsworth left us.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, where it had remained, unread, for an unconscionably long time.

Mistaken Identity: The Good Lord Bird

11 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
Riverhead, 2013.417 pp. $28

Young Henry Shackleford, who lives in the Kansas Territory in 1856, thinks he’s about twelve. He can’t be sure, because slaves don’t always know when they were born and often adopt January 1 as their birthday. But even in his brief life, Henry has managed to make quite a reputation for himself as a lazy, lying, good-for-nothing who cares only for his next meal and making sure that if and when bullets fly between pro-slavery and abolitionist militia, they pass harmlessly overhead. (They didn’t call it “Bleeding Kansas” for nothing.)

Enter John Brown, the legendary abolitionist who’s committed a few murders himself and whose likeness is plastered on Wanted posters in several states. An argument with Henry’s owner leaves the boy’s father dead, and Brown takes Henry into his band. Over the next four years, ending with the failed rebellion at Harper’s Ferry, the two repeatedly separate and find one another again, their fates bound in many an ironic twist.

John Brown, 1859, copy of a daguerrotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

John Brown, 1859, copy of a daguerreotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

That irony, often humorous, drives the narrative, starting with Henry’s character. He misses slavery, because the eating was regular, and, unlike his time with Brown’s band, he suffered few hardships. (In fact, he thought his master a good sort and reserved his dislike for his father.) Also, since this novel is about identity and disguise, McBride pushes the envelope and has Henry choose to pass as a girl, which will keep him out of the fighting–or so the boy thinks. Strangely, Brown calls him Little Onion and believes that God sent “her” as a sign. Crazy? Sure. But then again, the Old Man, also known as the Captain, sees what he wants to see and does what he likes, confident that he performs the Lord’s work with every breath. This extends to exposing himself to enemy fire carelessly, while his men hide behind any cover they can find:

He stood mute, as usual, apparently thinking something through. His face, always aged, looked even older. It looked absolutely spongy with wrinkles. His beard was no fully white and ragged, and so long it growed down to his chest and could’a doubled for a hawk’s nest. He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before . . withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. . . . In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness.

Brave as John Brown is in battle or by hewing strictly to his convictions, don’t ever ask him a direct question, because he’ll unleash a sermon that lasts for hours. Many are hilarious, and such is the fear he instills in his men, even his sons, nobody dares interrupt or hurry him to get to the point. I also laughed when Henry meets Frederick Douglass, whom the boy (still disguised as a girl) has to drink under the table to ward off the leader’s groping hands. Douglass comes off poorly in this book, as all talk about freedom but no action, whereas Harriet Tubman is another matter. She sees right through Henry, sensing his cowardice and belief in nothing except saving himself.

That’s the lesson that Henry learns, slowly, as he moves from frying pan to fire to another, hotter frying pan: that being a man means the willingness to act like one. But that prescription is particularly difficult when he’s trying to pass as a girl, though it’s laughable how easily he fools the men around him (albeit seldom the women, of course). His disguise carries a particular risk when he’s away from Brown’s band, for white men cozy up to him, and he can’t drink them under the table. So The Good Lord Bird isn’t just about racial identity; it’s about power and what it confers on those who wish to use it, sexually or otherwise.

Much as I like McBride’s prose and the picaresque aspect to a brutal subject–both of which remind me of Joe R. Lansdale’s Paradise Sky–they don’t sustain The Good Lord Bird at its considerable length. Henry’s adventures feel repetitive after awhile, with no new point to make, no further envelopes to push. To be sure, McBride’s a marvelous storyteller, never letting his protagonist off the hook, but by the midpoint, the only question is whether Henry will escape before Harper’s Ferry, and you know how that will turn out even if you haven’t read the jacket flap.

All the same, The Good Lord Bird is worth a look. I’ve always wondered whether John Brown was a maniac or a prophet just before his time, and McBride’s portrayal has given me a lot to think about.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Man Divided: A Friend of Lincoln

22 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, by Stephen Harrigan
Knopf, 2016. 411 pp. $28

On a recent trip to the nation’s capital, my son and I visited the place where Lincoln died, a boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theater. It’s a museum now, as you might expect, whose exhibits testify to the immense power Lincoln’s memory exerts, regardless of political belief. Conflicting visions of his motives and character roll off the presses year after year. In fact, the museum has built a pile of books two stories high, a brave project, given that sooner or later, the historical Babel must punch through the roof. What a fitting metaphor for the man who towered above his contemporaries in more ways than one.

Consequently, it’s fair to ask, “Why another?,” even as the echo rebounds, “Why not?” But Stephen Harrigan has made a  strong case with his novel about the political formation of his hero in 1830s and 1840s Illinois. However, for better and worse, the story begins just after his assassination in 1865, as the town of Springfield mourns over the coffin that has made its sad voyage from Washington. Two friends of his–one fictional, one real–talk about setting the record straight about their late friend, a task that Harrigan seems to have zealously taken up. That too, is for better and worse.

Thomas Hicks painted this portrait of Lincoln in 1859, a lithograph made from it figured in presidential campaign literature in 1860 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Thomas Hicks painted a portrait of Lincoln in 1859. This lithograph made from it figured in presidential campaign literature in 1860 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Narrating this tale is Micajah (Cage) Weatherby, a Springfield poet and businessman, the author’s brilliant creation, a man who befriends Lincoln during the Black Hawk War of 1832. As a convinced abolitionist, freer with his passions, less concerned with how things look than how they feel, he’s a perfect foil for Lincoln, who’s always looking over his shoulder to see what the electorate thinks and binds his heart to be ruled by law. It’s not that Lincoln the politico lacks any sense of right and wrong; on the contrary, he’s got a very highly developed one. However, it’s always subservient to his belief in order and justice, which is where he thinks honor lies, and honor means everything to him.

It’s no small task to write Lincoln’s character, but Harrigan does marvelously well, I think, partly by contrast to the young lawyer’s friends, all young men on the make:

Most . . . were smoother than Lincoln, not as raw, not as striking in appearance, not as obviously self-invented. During the [Black Hawk] war, when everyone had been clothed in rags and shriven by scant rations, he had not seemed so remarkable. Now that he was more or less respectably dressed, something in his appearance betrayed him. He looked like a man who did not quite fit in, whom nature had made too tall and loose-jointed, with an unpleasant squeaky voice and some taint of deep, lingering poverty. He seemed to Cage like a man who desperately wanted to be better than the world would ever possibly let him be. But in Lincoln’s case that hunger did not seem underlaid with anger, as with other men it might, but with a strange seeping kindness.

But to describe A Friend of Lincoln as a character study, even of such a momentous nature, does the book injustice. Harrigan has re-created the period and its tensions, whether over slavery, who gets what government contract, or who’s murdered whom. Everyone must take sides, which causes both personal and political animosities. Harrigan offers court cases, romances, near riots, a duel, and, most vividly, Lincoln’s stormy courtship of Mary Todd. Cage helps his friend through terrible bouts of depression and saves his life on at least two occasions, for which, one may argue, he was poorly repaid.

I dislike prologues and retrospective first chapters. I understand why Harrigan begins his story in 1865; he wants to show how the Lincolns, chiefly Mary, have thrust Cage out of their lives when once he was intimate friend to both. But that chapter is entirely unnecessary, and the “set-the-record-straight” talk is a timeworn device for telling a story. This one needs no excuses.

More seriously, I think, is Harrigan’s apparent ax to grind. He seems determined to accent the less attractive parts of Lincoln’s character, and though I like that as an antidote to the legend, I think the author may have gotten too caught up in his cause. What’s more, he often tells you what he wants you to think, perhaps as with the passage quoted above, when he’s more than capable of showing it. And from time to time, these statements confused me, because I’d come to a different conclusion entirely.

Nevertheless, I like this novel a great deal. As Lincoln himself might have said, it reminds me of a story; this one’s from the museum. When one of the president’s enemies accused him of being two-faced, he replied, “If I had another face, why would I show you this one?”

Stephen Harrigan has indeed shown us another face of Lincoln.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Life Not Lived In: High Rider

17 Monday Aug 2015

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Review: High Rider, by Bill Gallaher
Touchwood, 2015. 263 pp. $16

In 1867, John Ware, a young black man of strong character and dignity, realizes that he has no future in his native South Carolina. His new freedom will mean nothing, so long as any white man with a gun or length of rope may use them on him with impunity. Since Ware has always loved horses and can tame even the most ornery mule, he dreams of being a cowboy. So he sets off for Texas, on foot. It’s a thousand miles across the Deep South, and should the Klan find him, he won’t get there–not to mention that he can’t be sure anyone will hire him. Of course, someone does, and Ware eventually becomes famous as a rancher–in Canada.

John Ware, his wife, Mildred, and two of their children, 1890s (Courtesy blackpast.org).

John Ware, his wife, Mildred, and two of their children, 1890s (Courtesy blackpast.org).

Unfortunately, Gallaher lets this excellent premise–and character background–get away from him. The scenes of slavery speak loudly of cruelty, viciousness, and the struggle to maintain dignity when one is powerless. However, the tendentious commentary, which reminds me of voiceovers in language Ware would never use, undercuts the effect. For example: “Therefore, it was time to go, to leave behind this land of cruel deeds committed by heartless, single-minded people.”

The reader can tell right away who’s good and who’s not. The people who welcome Ware do so with open arms, with nary a conflict thereafter. Those who’d just as soon spit on him lose no time doing so. As a result, there’s little tension, and whatever happens feels utterly predictable, if not ordained. The only character in this novel, black or white, who has the least shade of gray to him is a disabled Confederate veteran who rows him across a river solely because he needs the toll money.

As for the setting, Gallaher describes interiors meticulously, giving you a snapshot of everyday objects. But he rushes through the outdoor scenery, which leaves me wanting a sense of place, particularly the magnificent Alberta landscape that moves Ware to put down roots in Canada.

What a shame, for High Rider could have been so much better. Comparing it to Paradise Sky (July 13), whose hero resembles Ware, underlines the point. I don’t mean that High Rider could or should have been picaresque and funny like Paradise Sky, only that the latter book explored its protagonist’s inner life and emotional transitions. By contrast, we’re informed that Ware longs to settle down and marry, and that he feels ashamed, a little, to visit prostitutes. But I don’t see him wrestling with that shame, or with what settling down means, maybe trying to imagine what it would feel or look like, how he views that next to what his parents had, and so forth. We’re also told his resentment of bigotry–not exactly news, there–or how tired he is of having to prove himself over and over and over before his white colleagues will accept him. Again, however, Gallaher never takes that anywhere, as if these observations were enough and bear repetition. It’s as if Ware never inhabits his skin, even though his skin has determined his life path.

The only quirk Ware has is a passion for breaking horses, at which he excels beyond compare. (The scene I liked the most was the prologue, in which he goes to fantastic lengths to tame a particularly unruly one.) Reading this, I wondered at the metaphor here, of a former slave asserting his mastery over an animal, who’d then be his servant–one lovingly treated, like a friend, but still. I wish Ware had pondered that parallel, or other aspects of his fascinating life. Too bad he doesn’t, and that High Rider never really gets off the ground.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

When Fiction Outdoes History: The Moor’s Account

20 Monday Jul 2015

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Review: The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami
Pantheon, 2014. 324 pp. $27

It’s a commonplace that the victors write the history. The disastrous Narváez expedition to what the Spanish called La Florida, from which only four men returned after an eight-year odyssey, earned celebrity in the early sixteenth century as a heroic mission to civilize the New World savages. But Lalami’s retelling gives Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, a Moorish slave who accompanies the mission, the voice he never had. The official record mentions him in a phrase, but only by his Spanish name, Estebanico. Here, he has plenty to say, even if he has to swallow most of it in Spanish company, and what a penetrating, profound, and empathic narrator he is. As he remarks of his upbringing, “Silence taught me to observe. Silence made me invisible to those who speak.” That skill both serves him well and saves his life on more than one occasion.

In the early 1520s, Mustafa, once a successful merchant in Azuremma, Morocco, sells himself into slavery to provide money for his mother, brothers, and sister. The hard times have followed European conquest, but, as with everything else in Lalami’s astute vision, there’s always more to say. At one level, how Mustafa comes to his fateful decision, and what happens after his master resells him in 1527 to a captain participating in the Narváez expedition, makes a page-turning adventure of great pathos. But in the process, Lalami also shows what slavery, greed, and colonialism look like, and how much farther they reach than it at first appears.

Panfilo de Narvaez (Courtesy Wikemedia Commons).

Panfilo de Narvaez (Courtesy Wikemedia Commons).

Exhibit A is of course the Spanish conquerors, especially Narváez, a selfish, proud, pig-headed leader who makes terrible decisions that he then tries to spin. (Politics doesn’t change, even if the politicians do.) However, his captains are little better, and their collective fixation on gold brings about catastrophe, for themselves and the native peoples unlucky enough to live in their path. Among the possessions the Spanish steal, Estebanico notices, are place names, as if their identity has somehow changed at Spanish whim, as accurate and pithy a description of colonialism as there is. And as he notes, his masters have stolen his identity as well, which makes him determined to cling to his real self, at least in his own head, where they can’t touch him.

But in a brilliant stroke, Lalami turns the tables: His real self has committed the same sins as the Spanish, if on a smaller scale. He recognizes, for example, that greed caused his own downfall as a merchant, that he sold others into slavery for quick profit, and that his ancestors conquered Azuremma and colonized it. Further, he comes to understand that his efforts to stay alive and return home–the dream that keeps him going–may bring unseen consequences to others. Late in the novel, he laments, “Would I ever be able to stir a finger without bringing harm to somebody?”

It’s this voice of conscience, delivered firmly but without breast-beating, that makes The Moor’s Account so penetrating. Not only does trying to do the right thing–or even figuring out what the right thing is–up the tension, the humility that Mustafa strives for forces me to consider my own life more carefully.

I often lamented the wicked turns my life had taken, but I rarely considered how much I had to be thankful for, how I had survived so long where so many others had perished, how I had seen wonders that no other Zamori [native of Azuremma] had. Had even Ibn Battuta [a famed traveler and chronicler] witnessed the things, both terrible and wondrous, that I had seen?

Read The Moor’s Account. Maybe you too will be moved to reflect.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.