Illuminating Our Sense Of History

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The New York Sun

Just why is historical fiction so annoying? Besides the horror of antique dialect, there is a deeper misgiving, a sense that the novelist has cheated. Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa defines fiction thus: “It is life as it wasn’t, life as the men and women of a certain age wanted to live it and didn’t and thus had to invent.” But a historical novel does the opposite: It gives in to life as it was.


In his many novels, E.L. Doctorow has defied the boring course of historical fiction by recombining the characters of a given period according to his own vision. But in “The March” (Random House, 366 pages,$25.95),he has given us something unusually straight – the story of General Sherman’s march to the sea, told from multiple viewpoints.


Mr. Doctorow’s chief effect is the dramatization of the conflict as we already understand it. On his first page the perfect image comes galloping up:



Letitia Pettibone of McDonough, her elderly face drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming, this dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove to be.


The ramshackle, run-on clause that contains a complicit reference to the Atlanta social season as well as the indulgently Shakespearean phrase “some hag of doom” is precisely what you want from Civil War fiction – the old South admired and then annihilated. Historical sweep allows the novelist to neglect personal agency in favor of prophetic grandeur.


“But supposing we are more a nonhuman form of life,” says a field surgeon to a lady. “Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. … It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.”


In Mr. Doctorow’s treatment Sherman is not in charge. Like Grant, the general succeeded because he discounted the loss of his own soldiers’ lives; here he believes that “in war a fate is altogether incidental.” Sherman does not take personal responsibility for events, but conjures up a reverence for complexity: “There are too many missiles in the air for it to be your fate to be killed by one of them.” Only the novelist has control.


In his previous novels Mr. Doctorow meddled with history, stirring up vortices that threw the likes of Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman together. In “The March” the war does Mr. Doctorow’s work for him, but he still gets what he wants: the portentous language of destiny.


“Though this march is done and well accomplished,” Sherman says, “I think of it now, God help me, with longing – not for its blood and death but for the bestowal of meaning to the very ground trod upon, how it made every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral consequence.”


For Sherman, as for Mr. Doctorow, the moral dimension and the historical are the same. Though “The March” is often moving and palpably startling in the reading, it feels light upon completion, because it has not made much intervention against history. It illuminates our sense of history at the expense of character.


***


Myla Goldberg’s novels are happily intent upon private lives, though her latest, “Wickett’s Remedy” (Viking, 326 pages, $24.95), is heavily indebted to historical whimsy. The remedy in question is a brand of mail-order medicine – snake oil, that cutely ironic symbol of American cunning and innocence.


Ms. Goldberg, whose “Bee Season” was a critically acclaimed best seller, pads her narrative with excerpts from period newspapers and glosses the margins of her novel with commentary from a heavenly chorus. When the recipe for Wickett’s Remedy comes to Lydia Wickett in a dream of her deceased grandmother, we read in the margin that “Maureen Kilkenny takes no credit for the recipe, but she would like to think she engineered her appearance in her American granddaughter’s dream. Our whisperings are most often heard in life’s interstices: in dreams, in sickness, and in the moments preceding sleep or waking.”


These extraordinary commentaries serve Ms. Goldberg’s taste for complexity. “Bee Season” concerned Kabbalism, and the commentaries of “Wickett’s Remedy” continue her celebration of a layered past, where richness is a function of successive narrative uncoverings.


Her pedantic ghosts afford a definite bookish pleasure, and as so often with historical fiction, the richness of Ms. Goldberg’s history is a value born of long hours of library research.


blytal@nysun.com


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