A meaty, enjoyable drama about the personalities clashing over the building of the Erie Canal.
A historical romance focuses on the construction of the Erie Canal.
In this attractively designed reissue of Casey’s 1988 novel, A Land Beyond the River, the action opens in 1810, when the United States is already straining its boundaries and yearning to stretch out west. One avatar of that dream is New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton, who wishes to orchestrate the building of a great waterway extending west of the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The author vividly conveys the somewhat grubby passion that motivates Clinton, a combination of vision and avarice that he’s well aware can only come to fruition with the cooperation of a grand alignment of social, political, and financial powers throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond. He has ideas along these lines, too, but he also faces a major obstacle, and it’s not the impenetrable wilderness between him and his destination. It’s the young and ferociously ambitious future president and Tammany Hall operator Martin Van Buren, who wants to scupper the project for his own reasons. In Clinton’s search for allies, he seeks to enlist two key figures: the wealthy, influential widow Eleanora Van Rensselaer and the wily, rough-hewn ship captain Daniel Hedges. As the story gains momentum, the growing challenges of planning and erecting the Erie Canal are joined with the looming threat of a renewed war with Britain. The tale follows its tight central cast of characters through the War of 1812, with the tensions of the narrative coming to a head.
The main frictions of Casey’s story derive not from the work of engineering or the cultural expansion of the plot but from the more personal facets. Eleanora has a scandal buried in her past linked to her deceased husband, and Clinton’s clashes with all the political characters in his path feature bristling personalities. Aaron Burr, for instance, is “far too slippery,” and Clinton angrily refers to Van Buren as “the bastard son of an innkeeper.” These personal elements electrify the narrative. They make the story so compulsively readable that they entirely vindicate the author’s decision to give the book an attractive cover and reissue it for a new readership. Casey has a remarkable ability to bring alive the daily life of the Hudson Valley at the beginning of the 19th century and to invest all these well-known historical figures, like Burr and Van Buren, with flawed, three-dimensional qualities. In fact, the novel’s only noticeable flaw is the imbalance between the two narrative emphases: Alongside the richly textured historical figures, Daniel and particularly Eleanora often seem thinly contrived and stereotypical. The author’s skill at dramatizing the Byzantine politics behind financing and constructing the Erie Canal is so pronounced that most readers may find themselves wishing he’d stuck to that and left the romantic plot on the drawing-room floor. And curiously, despite what seems like the narrative’s best efforts, the standout character is easily Van Buren—probably a first for American fiction.
A meaty, enjoyable drama about the personalities clashing over the building of the Erie Canal.Pub Date: March 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73436-662-4
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Diamonds Big as Radishes LLC
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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