THE POWER LINE

A rugged woodsman from the Adirondacks is drawn into the dangerous world of bootlegging in Shaw’s debut novel set in the 1920s.

François Germaine grows up in Lake Aurora in New York state’s Adirondack Mountains, a densely forested area with which he has an intimate familiarity. He abandons engineering school at nearby Clarkson University in Potsdam in 1914, despite having real talent in that area; instead, he joins the U.S. Army, establishing himself as a war hero as he fights in Mexico and France. However, he returns to his hometown a sullen, quick-tempered man who’s inclined to drink to terrible excess. He finds work with an electric company constructing power lines throughout the region and soon stumbles into an opportunity to become a bootlegger, partnering with his best friend, Alonzo “Lonnie” Monroe, to transport illicit booze smuggled in from Canada during the Prohibition years for Legs Diamond, a relatively minor New York City gangster. However, the lucrative side gig turns increasingly dangerous as the pair go from being couriers to “bootlegger’s henchmen.” When someone murders a member of a rival New York outfit, the notoriously brutal gangster Dutch Schultz blames Diamond, and a gang war erupts that threatens to bury François and Lonnie. Throughout, Shaw depicts the two friends as aging relics in a vanishing world, and he poignantly describes their connection to their home: “They learned the ground by hearing it described over and over, even while in the womb, so when they got to a place for the first time, invited along to help and do chores at age ten or twelve, they already knew where they were and how it related to the whole.”

The novel is split into two parts; in the first, Lonnie tells the tale of his misadventures with François to local amateur historian Abel St. Martin, and the second delves into the private journal of Rosalyn Orloff,  a brilliant woman who studied with philosopher William James while at Radcliffe College and was friends with Gertrude Stein. Rosalyn also crosses paths with François, and her account of him serves as a kind of ballast to Lonnie’s, as his credibility is suspect: “He’s always trafficked in howlers, lies and tall tales, hackneyed old homilies about the side-hill winder, the snow snake, the hide-behind,” according to St. Martin.Shaw’s poetic, elegiac style is affectingly melancholic and the story deftly raises provocative questions about the extent to which one can see clearly into a “still-murky past.” François is a memorably well-drawn character—hardened by a violent life but still achingly vulnerable. And Lonnie, in his 80s when he relates his story, is a moving embodiment of heartbreak. In a way, though, the Adirondacks itself are the true center of the novel, and François and Lonnie preemptively mourn its death even as they contribute to it: “The big woods are gone,” Lonnie says at one point, adding, “I’m gonna be dead myself soon enough, and I want them dams making power before I go.”

A haunting story told with quiet, emotional power.