LIGHTBORNE: A Novel, the best stories are in History

LIGHTBORNE: A Novel
HESSE PHILLIPS
Pegasus Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling reimagining of the last days of one of the most famed Elizabethan playwrights—Christopher Marlowe—and of a love that flourishes within the margins.

Christopher playwright, poet, lover. In the plague-stricken streets of Elizabethan England, Kit flirts with danger, leaving a trail of enemies and old flames in his wake. His plays are a roaring success; he seems destined for greatness. But in the spring of 1593, the queen's eyes are everywhere and the air is laced with paranoia.

Marlowe receives an unwelcome visit from his one-time mentor, Richard Baines, a man who knows all of Marlowe’s secrets and is hell-bent on his destruction. When Marlowe is arrested on charges of treason, heresy, and sodomy—all of which are punishable by death—he is released on bail with the help of Sir Thomas Walsingham.

Kit presumes Walsingham to be his friend; in fact, the spymaster has hired an assassin to take care of Kit, fearing that his own sins may come to light. Now, with the queen's spies and the vengeful Baines closing in on the playwright, Marlowe's last friend in the world is Ingram Frizer, a total stranger who is obsessed with Kit's plays, and who will, within ten days' time, first become Marlowe's lover—and then his killer.

Richly atmospheric, emotionally devastating, and heartrendingly imagined, Lightborne is a masterful reimagining of the last days of one of England's most famous literary figures.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I doubt too many unabashedly gay men throughout history are as well-known to modern audiences as Marlowe. He is one of the few in History whose sexuality does not get the "oh, no of course he was just as straight as string" treatment from the "eww-ick" homophobes. Goodness knows they've tried, but it never gets past the "no he isn't because I said no he isn't" level of argument.

No, he was, and he said so too loudly for History to get their anxious denials to be believed.

The delight of this novel, however, is the unnerving time it chooses to bring to life, that terrible last bit of existence after Marlowe left prison for the last time knowing he was not going to be allowed to live much longer for fear of what he knew becoming public knowledge. It was not an unreasonable fear, Marlowe was not a reticent man. It was possible to provoke him into indiscreet speech; he knew embarrassing truths; therefore....

It's never, ever been safe to know things about powerful people that can't be said in public. I suspect that Marlowe, poor lamb, besides being a startlingly bad judge of character was also just as addicted to risk as he was to tobacco. In the story we're told here, by a scholar of Marlowe, his life, and the times, Ingram Frizer is not with Marlowe by mere happenstance but in the role of minder while the decision of what to do about him and the risks he poses to the great and the good is determined. What actually occurs follows the official version established at law...but the unspoken and unspeakable parts are revealed.

I would give this wonderfully textured, nuanced work more stars were it not for something I'm sorry to say is a failing of mine in reading about my bygone ancestral queers: I want writers to choose a side, I want to know what they think, in every case but this one. I'm not saying Marlowe was straight, or gay, or any other modern label because I really believe you can't impute an identity to someone whose worldview quite simply didn't contain it. The torturer should as plausibly think of himself as a serial killer and a sadist if Marlowe was taking the identity "queer." "Sodomite" meant someone who performed acts of sodomy, not someone's fundamental identity. It's no small point to me.

The author, in the epilogue, presents really fun-to-read ideas about Marlowe from days gone by, from the "no he isn't because I said no he isn't" brigade, and from those like me who say identities aren't fungible. He's got sound reasoning for his viewpoint. If Marlowe was alive today he'd very likely be in a leather club somewhere making some platoon of horny men very happy. But he isn't.

For me that's a problem buying into this character. YMMV, and I seriously hope it will. Oh, and Frizer? A real man. I would not be one bit surprised if the role he plays in this story is not precisely the role he played in Deptford.

THE LINDBERGH NANNY, historical fiction about a case we still talk about 90 years on & HESTER, speculation about Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER

HESTER
LAURIE LICO ALBANESE
St. Martin's Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid reimagining of the woman who inspired Hester Prynne, the tragic heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and a journey into the enduring legacy of New England's witchcraft trials.

Who is the real Hester Prynne?

Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts have forced them to flee Edinburgh for a fresh start in the New World. But only days after they've arrived in Salem, Edward abruptly joins a departing ship as a medic—leaving Isobel penniless and alone in a strange country, forced to make her way by any means possible.

When she meets a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, the two are instantly drawn to each other: he is a man haunted by his ancestors, who sent innocent women to the gallows—while she is an unusually gifted needleworker, troubled by her own strange talents. As the weeks pass and Edward's safe return grows increasingly unlikely, Nathaniel and Isobel grow closer and closer. Together, they are a muse and a dark storyteller; the enchanter and the enchanted. But which is which?

In this sensuous and hypnotizing tale, a young immigrant woman grapples with our country's complicated past, and learns that America's ideas of freedom and liberty often fall short of their promise. Interwoven with Isobel and Nathaniel's story is a vivid interrogation of who gets to be a "real" American in the first half of the 19th century, a depiction of the early days of the Underground Railroad in New England, and atmospheric interstitials that capture the long history of "unusual" women being accused of witchcraft. Meticulously researched yet evocatively imagined, Laurie Lico Albanese's Hester is a timeless tale of art, ambition, and desire that examines the roots of female creative power and the men who try to shut it down.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book about passion elicits passionate responses. Thus The Scarlet Letter from its date of publication to the present. What Author Albanese did was meld a fact of Hawthorne's life...all his novels save this one sprang from known biographical incidents..and said, "...except...? Hmmm" and ran with it.

Thus we have this novel, which I stress so loudly because I've seen a lot of responses to the book that take exception to the author's assumption that Hawthorne was always a writer working from his own biography. I fail to understand this. It's a novel, and novels are fiction. The way they get their lives is someone thinking, "hey, what if..." and running with it. "Oh it's unsourced in anything from the time" well now, our little firebug Hawthorne might've hidden many a secret forever in his purgings, mightn't he? What he didn't want us to know, we do not know. ...that sounds weird but I don't know how to fix it.

Anyway, considering the story on its own merits...I like it okay. I don't love it.

Too much, too much, I thought as Isobel synesthesia came to the fore, then as we whizzed back into the seventeenth century again.... It's just another thing to mark her out as weird, this strange sensory disorder. Her life was eventful and her loves bone-rattlingly deep wasn't enough? When I read novels I want to think about how the life unfolding before me is moving, not how it's making me move between emotional registers. That's when I begin to feel a bit like a footstool, moved here, plopped there, and all in service of someone else's visions and needs.

Yes yes, I know, that is what novelists do. But the ones whose work I treasure do it with less grunting and heaving.

Setting the novel in Salem, and with Hawthorne...well, the parallels to his probable state of guilt and discomfort over the history even then looked on as brutal and his treatment of Isobel aren't challenging to form are they. I wasn't particularly enamoured with the author's take on Hawthorne, finding him a dreary sort of navel-gazing git. I'm not all the way sure that he could've been as quivery as a blancmange and still written the work he did. I could, of course, be wrong. After all, I suspect that Melville's obvious tendresse for Hawthorne was not entirely unreciprocated and I am *loudly*assured* this is unthinkable.

Back to Hester. I wish it was less hectic. I would've enjoyed a more uncluttered interior for the novel to present itself to me; one colored less hectically and decorated less thoroughly with lovely bibelots and literary objet d'art. But the read as it was, distractingly stuffed into a space a bit too small for it, was a deeply interesting and quite soundly reasoned story. The passive little Hawthorne falling for the intensely alive Isobel? Yes, I see it. The quivering awakening of the young people to bodily pleasure? It is ever thus, and so always involving to me. The resolution of the matters that, quite inevitably, come from the aforementioned awakening? Fortuitous! And, as the epilogue-y thing at the end makes Ever. So. Clear, it all came good.

Please don't tie bows and smack 'em on the butts of my stories. I'd like some room to put my own thoughts into the story's likely continuation.

These are the things that kept me from warbling my fool lungs out about this read. Others will, I do not doubt, feel differently. I expect so, in fact, and hope I'll be seeing the author's gorgeous cover art in many a gift pile this Yule.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE LINDBERGH NANNY
MARIAH FREDERICKS
Minotaur Books
$27.99 hardcover, available 15 November 2022

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mariah Fredericks's The Lindbergh Nanny is powerful, propulsive novel about America’s most notorious kidnapping through the eyes of the woman who found herself at the heart of this deadly crime.

When the most famous toddler in America, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., is kidnapped from his family home in New Jersey in 1932, the case makes international headlines. Already celebrated for his flight across the Atlantic, his father, Charles, Sr., is the country’s golden boy, with his wealthy, lovely wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, by his side. But there’s someone else in their household—Betty Gow, a formerly obscure young woman, now known around the world by another name: the Lindbergh Nanny.

A Scottish immigrant deciphering the rules of her new homeland and its East Coast elite, Betty finds Colonel Lindbergh eccentric and often odd, Mrs. Lindbergh kind yet nervous, and Charlie simply a darling. Far from home and bruised from a love affair gone horribly wrong, Betty finds comfort in caring for the child, and warms to the attentions of handsome sailor Henrik, sometimes known as Red. Then, Charlie disappears.

Suddenly a suspect in the eyes of both the media and the public, Betty must find the truth about what really happened that night, in order to clear her own name—and to find justice for the child she loves.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A lot of ink is still spilled about this dreadful criminal act, ninety years on; it has everything we love in a public spectacle: a pretty woman, a handsome hero, a quiet young girl with big dreams. That these won't survive contact with the ever-increasing celebrity culture that mass media, only recently including newsreels and radio broadcasts, with its invasive tentacles shoving into each and every cranny of the principals' lives, thoughts, actions before, during, and after the events described, is the darkest tinge of tragedy.

As part of this non-fiction novel coming this November, Author Fredericks presents her research in epitome..."this is true, this bit's been changed but is mostly true"...which to my mind is the proper way to handle a researched work of fiction that is based on fact. I do not care for the research-paper lists of sources, citations, and so forth, that some authors provide so as to spike the many, many guns aimed at creators in internet culture. "Appropriation! Inaccuracies and falsehoods!" ::eyeroll:: It's called FICTION, people, CTFD.

My personal axe now ground to my own satisfaction, let me tell you what I enjoyed most about the read:

It's not clear where I'll be living. I'm part of the Lindbergh household, but they have no house of their own yet, which is why they're living with her parents. They've not even been married two years and seem to have spent most of that time in the air.

That's Betty's voice from the beginning of chapter three. She's direct. She's concise. She does not shilly-shally, not ever and not once. I like that in a person, I appreciate that in a character, and I am glad to say that Betty was (despite the media circus that she endured without much in the way of role models to guide her) a delightful companion in her own life as well. (The author speaks of her meeting with A. Scott Berg when he was writing his Lindbergh biography, what transpired during that meeting, and this informed her awareness of how she wants Betty's voice to sound. She nailed it.)

This being a factual story, and the author giving no hint that she intended to pull a fast one at the end, I was deeply pleased to feel invested in the unfolding tale. It's really easy, with a story not exactly underreported, and about which there is quite an extensive trove of writing already. (Ye gawds some of what's been said...!) No, the ending hasn't changed; yes, the guilty party's guilt is evident; but there are so many cockroaches scuttling for cover in any person's existence if an arc-lamp like the one aimed at the Lindberghs is trained on it that there's room for a lot of juicy speculation.

How can you not be impressed when someone takes ninety-year-old facts and makes a solid, well-made story out of them?

But...I hear the Gotcha! Gang clearing their throats...this is a four-star review and you're describing a five-star experience. Well, no thing made by human hands is perfect, is it. I rankle mightily at the author's choice to ascribe a certain suspect's furtive, secretive, and frankly unpleasant suspiciousness as down to that suspect's gayness. Yes indeed, the suspect's actual sexuality was not ever even hinted to be "deviant" in the parlance of the day. In the endnotes, the author says she made this deliberate choice to give the character a "need for privacy that would be instantly understandable to the modern reader."

Uh-huh.

That star-losing choice aside...Yes, I'm impressed. Yes, I'd say go pre-order one. I'm so glad I was able to read it as a DRC because the wait for the library's inevitable copy will be long. Get on it soon.

THE KING'S EVIL, mid-career offering from CanLit leading light David Helwig

THE KING'S EVIL
DAVID HELWIG
Beaufort Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
from $4.99 hardcover, available from various sellers

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Dross stands on the precipice of sanity. One of his last lucid thoughts is that he knows he's going to tumble, shortly, into the abyss of madness. He is drugged by his past, haunted by his mother's madness, addicted to the memories of the woman who rejected him and later died in a hospital cancer ward. He does not know where she is buried.

Trapped in his personal history, Dross packs up his unwieldy body, takes a leave of absence from his work, and moves into his vacationing cousin's house in Niagara. Alone, mesmerized by log fires, Dross doubts if anything can keep him from insanity's beckoning flames.

There is an intruder, however, a knocking on his consciousness, a woman, a stranger with information about his cousin's house. She tells Dross she is a historical researcher and that the house had been razed in 1823 and was rebuilt on the original eighteenth century foundation. He explores the ancient basement one sleepless night. Through a hole in the wall Dross spies another room, deeper than the basement. Hidden there he finds an old book in a locked box, and in the book a secret. The owner was King Charles I who, according to history, was beheaded, but according to the cryptograms and notations in the margin, escaped his recorded fate and lived under another identity on the same foundation where Dross now stands. This is what Dross needs: One small thread of external thought to weave into a web large enough to catch him from his fall. The house in which he cannot sleep, the house in which he consumes too much brandy and too little food, has a history longer and more involved than his own.

Bolstered by a new obsession, Dross sets out to prove history wrong, and in this pursuit he, like Charles I, avoids his own fate.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THOSE LIBRARIES, FOLKS, THEY NEED US...BUT WE NEED THEM MORE.

My Review: I like Wikipedia's "Recent Deaths" obituary aggregation feature. I learned of David Helwig's existence from it. Being a CanLit fancying Murrikun, I sallied forth to the ALIScat site and, after discovering there were several Helwig titles available, eenie-meenied Coming Through: Three Novellas. See my review for details of my appreciation for Author Helwig's writing. The title of this work amused me. The conceit of Charles I not losing his head on 30 January 1649 (370 years ago this week) appealed to me. This slim book appeared among the eight holds I needed to pick up at my local library a few days ago, before they were due to be returned to their originating branches. Faithless to common sense's proddings, I jumped it up the queue. I came home to eagerly begin reading the story at once.

I'm a hopalong reader, not ordinarily reading books...even short ones...in one go. A chapter here, a subheading there, is my habit. It's a means of lowering my Pearl-Rule rate from over half of all library books I pick up. This book, however, grabbed me and kept me reading, with interruptions for canoodling with my Young Gentleman Caller when he showed up to surprise me; I then was implored to make us some food in order to prevent his young body from wasting away. At least that's how he presented the situation to me, poor hungry lamb. Despite some dire flap copy (see above), which usually bodes ill for how I receive the book, I dove deep into the story before my starveling was all the way out my door (carrying a hunk of my homemade banana bread as insurance against recurrent malnourishment).

It's a great pity to me that there are only remnant hardcover copies of The King's Evil still available. Bunim & Bannigan, Helwig's Canadian publishers, don't appear to have the rights to this title as they don't list it for sale. But I'm realistic enough to sense that most people with any interest in the quiet pleasures of a bereaved-but-bereft unhusband's descent from grief into madness will most likely do as I did. The library is, in some places anyway, still the best resource for unusual and out-of-the-way older books.

Dross, as our hero is unsubtly named, is a CBC radio producer passing quickly through middle age. The CBC is a public broadcaster, as is the USA's NPR. Dross discovers his age and his long-term employment work against him for the first time. Unlike earlier eras, in the 1980s "market forces" began to be heeded in those previously secure, almost tenure-tracked, halls. He is peddling an idea for a series of shows on the oh-so-exciting world of art forgery, its detection, and the punishments meted out to the forgers.

Each artist has a signature that comes before his (sic) signature. ... An expert graphologist can always find a slight failure in any forged signature, for the handwriting is the exponential product of all the tiny differences of hand, arm, eye, brain.

Dross's equally middle-aged wife has recently jilted him for a hot young stud; at least that's what Dross thinks he is. (We never see him, or her for that matter, in any concrete setting. We have only Dross's narrative, therefore only his perception, of all other people he interacts with.) Her purpose in removing herself and her clothes, nothing else, from her marriage is that she is dying of cancer. She wishes to do so without her unloved husband hanging on her. Dross as rejected man as well as narrator is out of control from page one. We move vertiginously among the first, second, and third persons. We aren't ever on secure narrative footing—then again Dross isn't, either.

As Dross grapples with the heavy, slippery, unbalancing load that is his survivor's grief, his always vivid dream life spirals ever more widely. We're not given any more respite from the horrifying imagery of those dreams than he is. Down and down we go, landing briefly at some painful moment recalled surrealistically; imagination untrammeled by logic, and its effects on his mental health, bring us (reluctantly on my part) along as he delves deeply into the emotional and cultural roots of faking culturally significant objects for personal gain:

Forgery takes place, I've decided, at that mysterious point of intersection between fact and desire. Does it matter if the brush of El Greco touched a supposed El Greco once or a dozen times or a thousand? ... And yet something hangs on the difference between what is and what is not. Otherwise we would be at sea among impressions. Fact is the one defense against solipsism.

Author Helwig gives us this wonderful aperçu from the unsteady, trembling lips of a man unmoored from any reliable handle on reality. Its truth is both brighter and heavier than it would be coming from a more tightly wrapped individual than the disintegrating Dross, fearful for his job, worried about his mistily perceived loss of perspective on life, the universe, and everything.

While he's noodling over the idea for his forgery series...art forgery presented on the radio, that least visual of media...he's realistic enough to know what his hard-driving American-marketing-trained new boss is likely to think about the topic:

"You get a good hard-rock station and stick the speaker in your ear, and it goes straight to the little arteries in your balls. ... Sound that really hits people. Puts them back against the wall."

This is spoken to Dross over a lunch that's the moment when he is pushed out of his comfortable perch among the almost-tenured, ostensibly to grieve and find his emotional balance. He knows that his boss, who is always referred to as "Rand Nordstrom," his full name, wants the Old Guard civil servants like Dross to make way for more men like himself. This moment was so infuriatingly real to me; I remember 1984 as the rotten core of the Reagan Administration, a time of upheaval in the newly deregulated media markets. The Rand Nordstroms of that place and time ended up gifting us with Fox News and reality TV. Gone were the days of Edward R. Murrow making Harvest of Shame with CBS's full support, Woodward and Bernstein affecting in a positive way the course of the Watergate hearings with newspaper owner Katharine Graham's full support. Entertain, don't educate; obfuscate, don't elucidate. People are plumb tuckered out and don't need nothin' makin' 'em think! Advertisers want happy happy, joy joy.

We did not arrive at a world where Trump could get into the White House quickly, or by accident, and Dross's experiences in the 1980s media world illuminate a corner of that process.

Sorry, back to the book. Dross's mental health crisis assumes ever-larger proportions as he leaves the big city of Toronto to recuperate in Niagara, a Canadian version of Colonial Williamsburg. His cousin and her husband, successful entrepreneurs, are visiting the South of France and their Niagara house needs looking after for the winter. Being in a place where he never spent time with his no-longer wife has the curious effect on Dross of allowing his suppurating psychic abandonment wounds to erupt into a full-on break from reality. In his imaginings, or just possibly in his physical reality, Dross goes through a transformative series of events that bring to him objects, real solid objects, that carry clues shedding light on an historical mystery.

The Execution of Charles I has long been mooted to be a sham, with an impostor taking the King's place on the scaffold. There were sufficient oddities in the lead-up to the event, after the King's trial and conviction, that enabled this conspiracy theory to persist for over 350 years. And now Dross has obtained...in Niagara, Ontario, in 1984...undiscovered concrete evidence which could easily be interpreted as supporting the King's survival!

An actual, physical copy of a Royalist apologia called the Eikon Basilike or "Portrait of the King" circulated soon after Charles's execution. Dross, holding an ancient annotated copy of the text, reads the words purportedly written by the executed monarch:

Freedom, Moderation and impartialitie are sure the best tempers of reforming Councels, and endeavours; what is acted by Faction, cannot but offend more than it pleaseth.
And in the eighteenth-century (is it?) hand is written beside this and along the bottom of the page.
Hard words. He would take from Man what no man has ever agreed to give, and can never, without being less than Man.

Dross resonates to those words, finding in them a link to his personal predicament. His dreams take on a new and darker tinge as he absorbs the truth and wisdom and possibility he feels resident in his bizarre, concrete discovery.

In his ever-increasing excitement at uncovering more and more slight-but-real links in a chain of evidence that could lead to an American afterlife of sorts for the King, Dross begins a long physical and psychic journey to Virginia, then to London, and ultimately to Chester, rustling long-untouched papers and communing with long-forgotten scholars, nearly dead aristocrats, and his own fractured and betrayed emotions as King Charles replaces art forgers in his rabid obsessive drive to gain personal and historical perspective:

It was necessary to invent history in order to invent the future. The sense of necessity in Cromwell and Lenin (and even in Jefferson) springs from an obsession with time, change, an obsession with cause and effect that starts to make the effect seem like the cause of its own cause. The future is the cause of the past, and we play antiquarian games to reassure ourselves that the past is past and different so that we can believe that the future will be different too.

His arrival in Lord Firebrace's stately home is followed by some of the book's strangest, most disturbing dreams, narrated as always by a slightly breathless Dross. All through the novel he always seems to me just on the edge of an embarrassingly public as well as humiliatingly small erection. Dross, rejected by his wife as she faces her end of life, is what he always has been: a fat, weak kid. He narrates his horrifying, hard-to-read nightmare of youthful bullying by the sporty boys. It's amazing how graphic Author Helwig makes those bit players's language. It has an outsized impact on the reader because it's found nowhere else. Author Helwig couples this crudeness with the most refined cruelty aimed at breaking Dross utterly. He's aware now, as adult Dross, that had he been homosexual he could've understood why the boys beat him, reviled him, made him their bitch.

Do I need to say how much NO that brings up for me? We're talking about events that occurred in the 1950s, which is the only reason I didn't stop reading and Just Say No a la Nancy Reagan. I still found it extremely distasteful for Author Helwig to trot this ancient homophobia-makes-sense argument out. What saved the day, for me at least, was the equivocal nature of his invocation of homosexuals as weak, fat, effeminate...Dross is describing himself, using the prejudices of the day to hate himself, making his self-loathing into a rock on which he builds his identity:

I hesitate to have a bath in case the huge narcissist's mirror across from the tub catch my eye and force me to see my flabby body and scream at its inadequacies.

We shouldn't need to be beautiful.

He's a homely lardass; his wife, who in one of his flights of fancy (or possibly one of his memories) says of Dross that she never loved him; he finds no protest, no aggrieved denial of this horrible rejection. In fact he accepts that Nora (a name we see applied to his wife exactly once in the text) couldn't have loved him, no other woman ever has. His mother was simply damaged goods...several memories of her erratic, borderline schizophrenic, behaviors as he was growing up rang awful memory bells in my head...his beautiful cousin simply didn't bother to know who Dross is...his wife simply couldn't be bothered not to let him "have access to her body," never seeming to care about Dross's attentions.

And then one must bring to mind the fact that the entire book is, more or less, a perfect récit, that French form of simple tale told with a knowing, complicit smile, the narrator and the novelist and the reader all twined about each other's ankles and stumbling from event to event, lurching into dark, cobwebby corners...what a lot of incestuous fantasizing goes on here! what a lot of toxic-masculinity tropism gets deployed to damage the "weaker" characters!...while unfolding an emotional beach umbrella in the shower stall of fat, weak Dross's grief for himself.

He never once grieves for the dead wife. He is hurt by her rejection of him. He is wounded by her taking a studly young lover with a bigger member, a harder body; in the same vein he's hurt by boss Rand Nordstrom's go-getting rejection of the safe, stuffy, dull listener-unfriendly programming that the 1980s CBC no longer has room for, therefor no room for Dross. He's hurt in retrospect by his cousin the Niagara homeowner's past indifference to him, her present so far above his collapsing life that she wings away to France to escape the harsh winter cold her charity allows Dross to use her home as his (unsuccessful) escape from inward-growing ice. Dross exists to be rejected. He cannot fathom his good fortune, his slight-but-real discoveries of clues to an historical event of huge importance. As he gets closer and closer to his search's object...so close he knows where it is but not what to look for...

The ending of the novel doesn't weave the threads together in a neat, orderly pattern. The ending resembles threads from multiple skeins of yarn in just slightly clashing colors wound around each other in a strangely satisfying rope. Soft yarn, rough yarn, thinner and thicker and worn-out threads, wind about each other and vanish into the heart of the rope, emerging briefly at intervals determined by a sundial not a mechanical clock. Dross, dead wife and absent cousin and inaccessible mother carried on his shoulders, reaches across time and slings his malformed and misshapen rope at King Charles I. He catches a prong of the royal crown, drags at it with a feeble victory cry smothered under the women he carries but from whom he never receives any attention.

But Dross has forgotten: The world's first executed, not assassinated or murdered, monarch lost his crown-bearing head.

The human mind exists in chaos and is in love with meaning, so historians go back again and again to try to turn the multitudinous resistant facts into a story.

I never forgot or forgave the casual homophobia or misogyny, the reduction of women to objects of incestuous desire; but Dross's extraordinarily average life is worthy of this tale's beauties. With them come the author's craft failings and imaginative limitations. Imperfect. Ungainly even. But so was Frankenstein, teller, tale, and monster.

Seek this story out and your hoard of facts will be increased.

THE WHISKEY REBELS, excellent historical thriller about how far back anti-gummint fervor goes in the US

THE WHISKEY REBELS
DAVID LISS
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: David Liss’s bestselling historical thrillers, including A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, have been called remarkable and rousing: the perfect combination of scrupulous research and breathless excitement. Now Liss delivers his best novel yet in an entirely new setting–America in the years after the Revolution, an unstable nation where desperate schemers vie for wealth, power, and a chance to shape a country’s destiny.

Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington’s most valued spies, now lives in disgrace, haunting the taverns of Philadelphia. An accusation of treason has long since cost him his reputation and his beloved fiancée, Cynthia Pearson, but at his most desperate moment he is recruited for an unlikely task–finding Cynthia’s missing husband. To help her, Saunders must serve his old enemy, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who is engaged in a bitter power struggle with political rival Thomas Jefferson over the fragile young nation’s first real financial institution: the Bank of the United States.

Meanwhile, Joan Maycott is a young woman married to another Revolutionary War veteran. With the new states unable to support their ex-soldiers, the Maycotts make a desperate gamble: trade the chance of future payment for the hope of a better life on the western Pennsylvania frontier. There, amid hardship and deprivation, they find unlikely friendship and a chance for prosperity with a new method of distilling whiskey. But on an isolated frontier, whiskey is more than a drink; it is currency and power, and the Maycotts’ success attracts the brutal attention of men in Hamilton’s orbit, men who threaten to destroy all Joan holds dear.

As their causes intertwine, Joan and Saunders–both patriots in their own way–find themselves on opposing sides of a daring scheme that will forever change their lives and their new country. The Whiskey Rebels is a superb rendering of a perilous age and a nation nearly torn apart–and David Liss’s most powerful novel yet.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Liss in true Liss form! I adored A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption and enjoyed greatly The Coffee Trader. Mr. Liss is a writer with several gifts, and seemingly displays them to their best advantage in works of historical fiction. (I was no fan of The Ethical Assassin since it felt undeveloped and unfinished to me. And don't get me started on The Devil's Company and its icky anti-bisexual silliness that added nothing to the plot.)

Most unusually, Mr. Liss can take any business conflict and make it into a story. He tells us the story of the business panic that in part led to the Whiskey Rebellion in this novel (I grossly oversimplify the twists and turns, but that’s the penalty of wanting to keep this under 5000 words!) from the points of view held by two victims of honor. Ethan Saunders and Joan Maycott have wildly diverging aims in this novel; their conflict is completely believable; they are characters representing very real conflicts in American society at that time, and they do so without feeling like invented mouthpieces for a particular cause or view. This is Mr. Liss’s extraordinary gift to historical fiction, that his characters breathe enough life to seem as though their actions are inevitable outgrowths of their described and/or demonstrated interests. This talent above all others should win Mr. Liss a place on the bestseller lists, since he competes against authors of creative facility and character-building imbecility (eg, James Patterson, John Grisham) for male readership.

Another of the gifts Mr. Liss brings to the table is his deftness of plotting. It takes a writer of skill to make a complex issue like a bank failure (and how timely is that choice of plot point!) into something exciting to the reader and highly personal to the characters. I was riveted to the descriptions of one character’s machinations to achieve a particular result to the failure of the Million Bank and the reasons for that character’s venomous hatreds and callously indifferent behaviors was both cause and effect in the spiraling, stomach-churning race that forms the last thrilling 40 pages of this novel.

Really highly recommended for anyone looking to find a fine writer with a gift for storytelling coupled to a sense of timing that cannot be beat.