THE GENERAL AND JULIA

A renowned leader lays bare his heart.

In 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, dying of throat cancer—he had smoked 25 cigars a day—sequestered himself in the Adirondacks to write his memoirs, a book, he hoped, that would serve as a legacy to history and a source of financial security for his wife and children: “He cannot let them go impoverished into their long days.” His friend Samuel Clemens—sly, big-hearted, and loyal— has secured him a generous advance, certain that Grant will “admit the reader into his own mind.” In a graceful, moving narrative, Clinch recounts the pathos of Grant’s last days, as the Civil War general and former president, weakened by pain, inhabits his past: marriage to the wise, loving Julia; the grim reality of a bloody war; entanglement in a devastating Ponzi scheme. In chapters that move back and forth in time, Clinch portrays a man both stalwart and tender, who “as son, brother, student, soldier, husband, father, grandfather, general, and president...accepted all burdens as personal acts of service.” He conveys Grant’s gravity, “an unmistakable and overwhelming power,” and his complexity. As general, he bore the burden of uniting the country, nothing more; slavery seems to him “a puzzle at best and an error in management at worst.” His wife’s family, after all, owned slaves. When Robert E. Lee surrenders, Grant imposes no penalties on the Confederacy. Some see that decision as naive; as a young Black man remarks, Grant seems to be a man of faith and forgiveness: faith “‘in the possibility of man’s improving, given opportunity and encouragement. I ask you: Who else could have led an army to such a victory and come away with the admiration of both sides?’” He has come away with Clinch’s admiration, as well, and, no doubt, by the end of this affecting novel, the reader’s.

An empathetic portrait of a towering figure.