THE AUBURN CONFERENCE

An 1883 writers’ conference raises questions still roiling 21st-century America.

Frederick Olmstead Matthews, a junior lecturer at the moss-grown Auburn Collegiate Institute in upstate New York, has tried to get more contemporary American books into the tired literature curriculum, but he “could as well have suggested installing a porcupine as the Institute’s president.” Matthews manages to convince the provost who bankrolls the institute that “a public conversation about the future of America” among Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass will enhance the prestige of the institute, the town, and—not so incidentally—the social-climbing provost. By the time the conference begins, Matthews has reluctantly added a former Confederate general and a bestselling female author to the roster, which prompts a local journalist to invite suffragists and supporters of the Lost Cause to attend in the hopes that they will stir up trouble so the journalist’s lurid coverage can get him into the pages of a big-city newspaper. He hardly needed to bother: Hilarious scenes of the conference’s early sessions show Whitman showboating and Twain giving his standard after-dinner speech while Douglass and Melville valiantly try to raise real questions about the darker aspects of American life and Stowe rolls her eyes over the idiocy of the entire gathering. Stoked by racist comments from the former Confederate and Douglass’ angry protests, the final discussion ends in a full-scale riot. Along the way, Piazza lets the bestselling female novelist make some cogent points about the value of domestic fiction and shows Douglass to be weary of his public role as the representative of his race. The intriguing mix of humor and underlying seriousness makes this an engaging change of pace for an author better known for his writings on music and New Orleans. An overall lack of focus, however, is signaled by occasional appearances to no evident purpose of an unnamed conference attendee clearly identifiable as Emily Dickinson.

Readable and entertaining, though the scattering of provocative ideas never quite coheres into a satisfying whole.