Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power - theory and practice

Portland has, by my standards, an outstanding public library, meaning they have new books but also old books, even in languages other than English.  The process of moving has not been good for what I will call intellectual activity, but I now have a new library to play with, and my reading has become a little more ambitious. 

And this book needs to get back to the library, so here it is.

Long ago, I wrote a little four-post series on Pekka Hämäläinen's original and surprising The Comanche Empire (2009), in which Hämäläinen conceives of Comanche-occupied territory as a state, a nomad empire, allowing him to apply a great deal of illuminating international relations theory to what at first seems to be sparse evidence.  Much becomes clear.  He finds an interpretive framework that makes sense of a lot of puzzles.

In Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019), he does something similar with the history of the Lakota Sioux.  The differences are, I think, as follows:

First, the new book is much more synthetic than The Comanche Empire, based less on Hämäläinen’s own archival work and more on that of other historians.  Having said that, it is clear from the notes – not the bibliography; there is no separate bibliography – that the last twenty years, and perhaps especially the last ten, have been an exciting period in the history and anthropology of the interior of America.  There must have been plenty of times when Hämäläinen had to tear up some part of his own book as new archeological or documentary results were disseminated.  The work on Sioux sources, especially the complex pictographic winter counts, is crucial.

Second, and related, Lakota America is more of a narrative history and less of a social history than The Comanche Empire, with more “characters” and with much of the methodology and theory moved to the background.  More readers will likely find the book accessible.  Perhaps that is intentional.

I remember Larry McMurtry, in the New York Review of Books, complaining that there were so many books about Custer and the battle of the Little Bighorn that even he, a top collector of books about the American West, had stopped bothering with “Custeriana” (although a few years later he wrote his own Custer book).  One little irony here is that Lakota America becomes, in the last third or so, another Little Bighorn book, even if here, from the Lakota point of view, it is the battle of the Greasy Grass, and the opposing, losing, general, Pȟehíŋ HáŋskA (Long Beard), is neither a martyr nor hero.

But it’s an exciting story from many perspectives; what can you do.  The entire history is an exciting story.

Jürgen Osterhammel's enormous global history of the 19th century, read by me, breezily discussed here

Jürgen Osterhammel is a German historian at the University of Konstanz, a specialist in Chinese history and globalization.  His 2009 The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century is a massive synthesis of the state of the field – the fields, history and the social sciences – on every big topic: cities, frontiers, imperial systems, etc.  Those are chapter titles.  The book is 1,500 pages in German.  Princeton published it in 2014, in the heroic translation of Patrick Camiller, in a mere 1,167 pages, not by omitting anything but by making the pages irritatingly large.

The bibliography and notes are of course enormous.  I may not quote from the book, which is written crisply enough but is not exactly written in the prose of Gibbon, but I am tempted to quote the bibliography.  It is, on its own, full of riches.

Osterhammel is an expert on China, and is himself German, and here we see much of the value of this particular massive history: as much attention as Great Britain and the United States get, inevitably, neither nation is the center of the history.  There are always competing centers.  I found this, by itself, informative.  If things are organized a certain way in the United States – and I likely knew that they were – they were organized some other way entirely in Qing China, Meiji Japan, and the Dutch East Indies.

Ironically, Princeton UP has published the book in a series titled “America in the World.”  Osterhammel has said that he barely knew anything about U.S. history before conceiving this book.  I would never have guessed.  His claim may be highly relative.

Osterhammel organizes the book in a German fashion.  My impression is that in the U.S., it is thought to be essential that the argument of a book be put up front, maybe even first.  Here is the surprising claim I am making.  Here is why you should keep reading.  Osterhammel begins with a hundred pages of methodology and definitions.  I am not sure he even has much of an argument, except that many particular claims look different in a global context, and many older global claims fall apart upon comparative inspection.  He just assumes that his book is worth reading.

Actually, this book may not be worth reading, exactly, not as such.  It is perhaps foolishness to read it through, although in fairness to myself I have been chipping away at it since 2014.  Any individual section can be read on its own.  Which sections would I particularly recommend to readers most interested in literature?  “V. Living Standards: Risk and Security in Material Life,” “VI. Cities: European Models and Worldwide Creativity,” and maybe “XVI. Knowledge: Growth, Concentration, Distribution.”  These fill in a massive amount of context around many 19th century novels.  I mean, the discussion of monetary policy, gold and silver standards, is exactly as fascinating in Osterhammel as in anyone else’s account, but thankfully has little to do with any novel anyone ever wrote that is worth reading.

The chapter on “Cities” I find almost baffling.  Every claim has to be tested against every major city, and heck if that is not what he does.  How did he keep track of it all?  How did he research it?  That bibliography.

Anyways, what a book.  Between the Sante and Osterhammel books I have been cramming myself with information.  Will I remember any of it, any at all?  Who knows.

The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars - Daniel Beer fills the gaps

Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (2017) filled a major gap in my understanding of Russian history.  An idea that had been almost entirely abstract, or worse, overwhelmed by accounts of the Soviet Gulag, now seems somewhat less abstract.  Beer’s book is filled with specific stories, specific people, specific punishments – so, then, much less abstract.

Could I not read, instead, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1862) and achieve the same level of concreteness?  No, not exactly.  Chapter 7, “The Penal Fort,” is built around Dostoevsky’s experiences, and book, but is more generally about life in a Siberian prison, different than other kinds of exile, of which Dostoevsky’s was among the more brutal.  You wanted to stay out of a prison, out of the mines, and out of Sakhalin Island, the subject of Anton Chekhov’s 1893 book of investigative journalism.  But there were many kinds of exile, and many kinds of exiles.

The story of The House of the Dead is how the system changes over time, how the kinds of exiles change, and how the different types adapt to their punishment.  The 1825 Decemberists adapt to Siberia, working to move it closer to their own ideals.  The bomb-throwers and Communists of the 1890s and 1900s continue their fight by the same means that got them to Siberia.  Lenin used his three years of exile to write The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899).  “[W]hen he finally left Siberia at the beginning of 1900, he took with him 225 kilogrammes of book” (Ch. 14).  Now that is the way to measure books.

Lenin’s story suggests how incompetent the successive tsars were at punishing their enemies.  The response was generally too much, creating martyrs and public backlash among the more Europeanized Western Russians.  Any improvement in infrastructure or technology – the railroad, for example – only meant that the state could pack more criminals, vagabonds, suspicious characters, revolutionaries, and complete innocents into the Siberian camps, prisons, settlements, and frontiers.

The wildest section is Chapter 9, “General Cuckoo’s Army,” about the “hunchbacks,” the escaped convicts, who, in the vastness of Siberia, numbered in the tens of thousands at any given point.  They were a mix of people desperate to get back to European Russia (where they were forbidden to live), beggars, petty criminals, and murderous psychos.  The peasants who were there as voluntary settlers responded in kind.  At times I felt that I was reading a parody of the settlement of the American West.  I would love to read a book contrasting the settlement of the American West and Siberia.

Maybe that book exists.  I wouldn’t know.  My library only had Beer’s book as an electronic book, so I read it in part as an experiment.  The difficulties of moving around in the book killed any interest in checking sources in the footnotes.  At least some of the book is original archival research by Beer.  Which parts? I don’t know.  It was too tedious to find out.

Beer writes in an efficient but plain style, which sets up a pleasing contrast to his extensive use of more rhetorically interesting quotations from Dostoevsky, Chekhov, George Kennan, and a wide variety of other exiles, Russian and Polish, from across the 19th and early 20th century.  Beer is good with numbers, but there were many places where he would have benefitted by inserting a dang table – number of new exiles per decade, that kind of thing – but I suppose that is forbidden for commercial reasons.  The book would have looked too much like social history, which (don’t tell anybody) it is, a good one.

Francis Parkman's France and England in North America, opinionated

I have finished Francis Parkman’s seven volume France and England in North America (1865-92), the “history of the American forest,” as the author called it.  The history of French Canada, really, from early exploration to English conquest, written by America’s greatest historian, or 19th century historian, at least.  I took about a decade to read it all, maybe 2,800 pages, plus I should add The Oregon Trail (1847, not a history but an exciting travel book) and The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War (1851, a warmup to the big series), which brings the total to 3,500 pages.

I am writing this post not so much because I have anything to say about the books, but rather to apply for my merit badge.  Parkman’s books are not as good as Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), but my feeling of accomplishment was similar.

Parkman’s greatness was at least twofold.  First, with Gibbon as a model, he picked an ambitious subject early on – in college – and then stuck with it, even in the face of severe ill health, and was lucky to live long enough to complete a fifty-year project.  Second, he is not the prose writer that Gibbon was – in this way he resembles almost everyone who has ever written anything – he had the advantage of having not just Gibbon as a model but also Walter Scott.  No one would mistake Parkman for a novelist, but he absorbed Scott’s innovations in narrative history.  He is good with scenes, novelistic detail, characters, that sort of thing.

Third, he set a new evidentiary standard for historians, which is part of why he needed so much time.  Part of that new standard is described, incidentally, in The Oregon Trail, Parkman’s account of a youthful trip to the Rocky Mountains which he took partly for health, partly for fun, but largely so he could meet, interact, and even live with Native Americans.  He was acting as an early anthropologist, studying living native peoples in the hopes of understanding those of earlier centuries.

The Oregon Trail is a terrific adventure, as is La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869).  Anyone who enjoys books about exploration will enjoy these.  At the far end of the series, Montcalm and Wolfe, which covers the entire French and Indian War and is quite exciting – George Washington, the expulsion of the Acadians, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, etc.  The stretch of The Old Regime in Canada (1874), Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877), and A Half Century of Conflict (1892) does not cover such interesting material, although it will all prove to be enormously useful during your vacation in Quebec City.

Parkman’s great weird masterpiece, though, is The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867), a cruel and dark book about the meetings of two cultures alien to each other; they are also both alien to Parkman, the Jesuits much more so than the natives of the Canadian forest.  This book is not quite a narrative history, but it is certainly not fiction, or no more so than Parkman’s sources require.  I have never read anything quite like it.

There, that was some opinionating on Francis Parkman, which I believe meets the requirements of the badge.

What preposterously enormous history should I launch into next?  John Motley’s seven-volume history of the Netherlands (1856-67)?  Could that be as exciting as a history of Canada?  Theodor Mommsen’s three-volume History of Rome (1854-6) is tempting, too.  The most likely answer is that I’ll never read such a thing again, although I would like to re-read Gibbon.  Well, I’d like to re-read Parkman, too, someday, a long time from now.

Grumpy complaining about a book I won't finish

Well here's something unusual for me, so I'm going to stay in my Professional Reader role for another day. I picked up a book at the library, just yesterday, that seems like a dud.  I'm not going to finish it.

The book is historian Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (2008).  MacMillan argues that history is important, and that sometimes history is used for bad purposes.  Historians should write good history, not bad history.  Politicians, and the rest of us, should try to draw the correct lessons from history, not the wrong lessons.

It sounds like I'm just mocking the book, but I'm just imitating its style:

History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do. (6)

History has shaped humans' values, their fears, their aspirations, their loves, and their hatreds. (8)

The last two decades have been troubled and bewildering ones, and, not surprisingly, many people have turned to history to try to understand what is going on. (11)

I do want to mock that last line, inserting a parenthetical comment after "troubled and bewildering ones" - unlike any other decades, right, like the tranquil and perfectly comprehensible decades of, um, you know, let's see?   But that's not my point, which is that these statements, although more or less true, are banal, and the language, simplistic.  It's historiography for seventh graders.

I've only read the preface and one chapter.  That's just not fair.  Hang on while I read some more.  This is a Modern Library Chronicles book, so the chapters are short and the pages tiny.  I won't be long.

All right, Chapter 2 was not much better.  The subject is national apologies for historical misdeeds - should the United States apologixe for slavery, or should Canada apologize interning Ukrainians during World War I?  MacMillan lays out the pros and cons clearly, which is good, and simply, which is not, since I pretty much knew the issues already.  Not the book for me.  Maybe one more chapter.  Sorry, hang on.

Now that was a mistake.  MacMillan uses Chapter 3 to take swings at the history profession.  What is this supposed to be, I ask:

While it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects as the carnivals in the French Revolution, the image of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, the role of the doughnut in the Canadian psyche..., or the hamburger in American life, we ought not to forget the aspect of history that the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as "what really happened." (38)

How condescending - "indeed fun."  Finish up your cute little pretend history and get back to real history.  Who is "forgetting"?  How are carnivals in the French Revolution not part of what really happened?  The next paragraph backs off a bit, mentioning the rise of social and gender history, but this is what she really means:

historians must not abandon political history entirely for sociology or cultural studies.  Like it or not, politics matters to our societies and to our lives. (37)

MacMillan is correct.  Fortunately, there is not the slightest danger of historians, who study a wide variety of subjects, "abandoning" political history.  MacMillan is arguing about the ratio or the hierarchy or something.  I'm missing some subtext.

I'd better stop.  Three chapters is almost a third of the book, which if not fair, is close to fair.  Readers less familiar with these sorts of issues - undergraduate hitory majors, perhaps? - will likely get a lot more out of it than I have.

Now look at this.  I have before me a review of the book by Max Hastings from the March 11, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books.  The book's essays, says Hastings, "break no significant new ground" and "suffer somewhat in coherence and continuity by their obvious derivation from lectures delivered to a student audience."  I see, I see.  Fair enough.  I wish I'd known that.

The same dang thing over and over again

I just started reading Alessandro Manzoni's On the Historical Novel (1850), which includes many of the arguments I and others have made this week, couched in a subtle, ironic rhetoric. I think it's ironic - maybe he means exactly what he says. So far, Manzoni has used his essay to completely demolish the historical novel: "it is the historical novel itself that is completely at fault."* Manzoni is himself the author of one of the best historical novels ever written, The Betrothed (1827), so perhaps I am misreading.

Regardless, it's full of useful ideas. I may return to it soon. A Professional Reader might have thought to look into the subject before writing so much. Ah well.

Anyway, my final complaint or concern or prejudice is more about books that come in series than about historical novels as such. The mystery series is the mode of our age, what people read. On trips to Germany, I have marvelled at the richness of the literary culture, about the attention received by serious books. But what do Germans really read, really, more than anything else? Mysteries that come in series. I'm using "mystery" generically, including thrillers and such - the Owen Parry novel I read claimed to be a "novel of historical suspense."

I know that people still write and read romances and sea stories and knights-in-armor stories. But I do not believe that those genres have the equivalent of the amazing rack of books I recently found in a library, a collection of knitting mysteries, and candle making mysteries, and gardening mysteries. Used book store mysteries. Antiquing mysteries. Pie mysteries. I am for some reason currently using a bookmark that advertises a series of handbag mysteries.**

Everything gets shoveled into mysteries now, including stories about the birth of Italian Futurism and stories about New York City midwives. When I described my pile of six mysteries, I didn't say anything about the plots, not because of concern about spoiling the surprise, but because the plots don't matter, not in any of them. The settings matter, a lot, and the choice of detail, and the voice. But the plot, the actual mystery in the mystery, is always just something pulled off the shelf of time-tested devices.

Because the clever author (and every author I tried was clever enough) knows that we cannot just march from the beginning of the mystery to the end, the story has to be well-larded with incidental material that slows us down, with each episode of the novel giving us 1) one piece of genuine information, 2) several interesting but in the end deceptive pieces of information, and 3) directions to the next episode. There must be writers who can break free of this formula. But if they do so, are they still writing mysteries?

So if I find myself wearied with the repetition found among six different authors, I can guess how I'd feel reading more books by the same author. Steve Hockensmith's cowboy Watson and Holmes are in four novels now. Besides the train, one's on a ranch in Montana, one's in San Francisco, one's in Texas. That's something. But they're really just the same dang thing over and over again, aren't they?

I suspect that's true of more authors than Hockensmith. It's not what I'm looking for in fiction. With some time - a year, years - I'm likely to try one of these authors again, probably Parry or Hockensmith. The memory of the original pleasure will have dimmed, and I will be ready to enjoy the same dang thing. That formula works in one way - I turned every page of every book, faster and faster until I got to the end.

* P. 72 of Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, tr. by Sandra Bermann. University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

** Now if someone were to write or has written a pie sea story, I might just read it. 'Cause the idea is so stupid.

Purpose

On Tuesday, Margaret D, host of the remarkable HistoricalNovels.info site, asked a pertinent question: why even bother with a historical novel? Meaning, the historical aspect should have some sort of point. My pile of five novels do pretty well by that standard. It's the contemporary mystery that turned out to be pointless.

Here's where I say nice things about Victoria Thompson and Murder on St. Mark's Place. I didn't like it that much, but I understood why she chose the story she did. In this novel, so-called "charity girls" are being beaten and killed. "Charity girls" are immigrant girls, factory workers, mostly, who pick up men at dance halls. They're not prostitutes, they insist, because they don't take money, just gifts.

The detective is a New York midwife, now living in a working class area, but actually from an old, wealthy Dutch family. She is independent, tough, a typical literary "strong female character." The world of young women who go dancing every night and go to hotels, or worse, with strange men is completely unknown to her. She's an outsider who can fill the reader in on all of the shocking details. This is how we get out to Coney Island, by the way, to see that Elephant Hotel - that's a place where men take their dates.

I thought this was all pretty interesting. The novel is not merely about violence against women, but also about the social changes of the past one hundred years. Some things have improved enormously for women in this situation - their incomes are dramatically different, for example. But the fear of violence, if not the risk, from men, strangers or otherwise, remains.

So Thompson's then/now comparison has some power, a resonance that the mystery itself, standard genre business, lacked. The novel has plenty of problems, but it has a meaningful purpose.

I'm pretty sure that Michael Pearce's A Dead Man in Trieste has a serious purpose as well. I just didn't understand the argument he was making. Something about the role of the individual in larger events, or the role of the artist in guiding history, or something like that. Avant garde art is a necessary but futile protest against the march toward war? So disappointing, because Trieste is such an interesting city, and it was fun to see the author play with Marinetti and Futurism. But I'm not sure that it amounted to anything more than play.

The Carlo Lucarelli and Owen Parry novel both investigate the compromises necessary for justice. Few ideas are more common in mysteries now, but the question is a big one, and worth pursuing from different perspectives - the unjust world of fascist Italy, the righteous cause of the fight against slavery.

Neither of those novels has an especially original purpose. Steve Hockensmith's On the Wrong Track has no purpose at all, besides good clean fun. Mostly clean - there are a few descriptions of gunshot wounds that are bizarrely gory, well out of character. Some misguided attempt at realism? A trivial book, I'm afraid, but not a disappointment. It is what it is.

And what book isn't, but that won't keep me from complaining about John Banville's The Lemur. I learned one thing from this book, namely that Banville can simplify his style when he wants to. Stylistically, The Lemur is Banville-lite, but still elegant, finely polished. No clichés in the prose. Why then, are the characters and plot nothing but clichés? Gee, that character is just like John Huston in Chinatown, I was thinking, just before John Huston strolls onto the page in a cameo! So Banville knows. Everything is borrowed. Calling it a pastiche or homage (to whom?) would be a kindness. It's a completely hollow novel. Why did he bother?$?$?$

Voice

Of the five historical mysteries I read over my summer vacation, I liked three of them enough to consider reading more in the series.* The little Banville novel is something of an exception, since I've already read all but a few of Banville's books. I'll really lay into Banville tomorrow, so let's set that one aside.

Maybe I'll set Carlo Lucarelli aside, too. The greatest interest there is thematic. Plus, it was so short, you read all three books in the series, and you're not even close to 300 pages. Easy reading.

In two other novels, the great appeal of the writing is the voice of the narrator. Steve Hockensmith is playing with the Sherlock Holmes type of mystery, so the narrator has to be Dr. Watson. But in this case, Watson is a burly cowboy named Big Red. Holmes is his older, smaller, smarter brother, Old Red. Old Red is illiterate, so Big Red has to read him the latest Sherlock Holmes stories. Also, the signs on the bathroom doors. The comedy can be a bit broad. Funny, though.

Watson \ Big Red is folksy and sees the homorous side of things, so the tone is almost always comic. I don't think I ever actually laughed while reading this book, but that's a matter of habit:**

"Someone cleared his throat, and I glance across the aisle to find a fortyish sport in a checked suit giving me the eye in a friendly, amused sort of way. He had a face as flat and pink as a slice of ham, and atop his head was a pompadour of such impressive proportions I wouldn't have been surprised had I spotted the great explore Sigerson attempting to climb it with a team of native guides." (p. 33)

That's pretty good. If its not quite characteristic, that's because of all the dialogue and plot fuss, most of which was all right. The book has many short chapters, which unfortunately often end with irritating false climaxes - this is my main stylistic complaint. They do work, though - I always wanted to keep going.

Hockensmith's narrator has a typical comic voice. Owen Parry created something more original for his Civil War mysteries. Abel Jones, our hero, is Welsh, a veteran of wars in India, a wounded veteran of Bull Run, and a Methodist teetotaler. He is earnest and self-righteous, full of prejudices (against the Irish, the rich, cavalrymen). And he's scared of horses, "great stupid things," "four-legged demons."

The comedy of the book, which in many ways is a quite serious piece of work, comes from the narrator's inability to suppress his judgmental scolding, even while telling the story of a murder investigation, or a battle. Mostly, he's a driven man on a mission, but he continually pauses to zing his superiors, scold his inferiors, and praise his own virtue. An example of the latter: he does not drink, of course, but he'll buy whiskey for other people, in order to get them to spill secrets. But then he tells us that he feels bad about it.

Maybe this isn't meant to be funny, but I think it is, because it works so well. It deepens the character - in some ways he's a very narrow man, while in other ways he's an abyss. It keeps me guessing, at least - just what will he be capable of, this strange fellow.

My only real disappointment with the book is that the answer is: whatever is necessary to fulfill certain plot and genre expectations. But let that bide, as Captain Abel Jones always says when he suspects he's gone a bit too far.

By the way, neither of these narrators, both of whom are supposedly writing their stories, sound remotely like they actually would have, telling their own stories at the time. But, fortunately, I don't care about accuracy.

* In the right situation - trans-Atlantic flight, for example - I'd read more of any of them. I just wouldn't go out of my way for more Victoria Thompson or Michael Pearce.

** The Parry and Hockensmith books are both quite funny, but my only audible laugh came from the Michael Pearce novel, the one set in Trieste. The angry, drunken Irishman, suspected of murder, turns out to be James Joyce, which is funny enough. Wait, I thought, Italo Svevo lived in Trieste, too - I wonder if Pearce can work him in. About two pages later, there he was, under his real name, smoking one of his last cigarettes (see The Confessions of Zeno, Ch. 1). That's where I laughed.

Accuracy

A couple of the historical mystery authors I just read - specifically, Victoria Thompson of gaslight New York and "Owen Parry" of Civil War Washington, D.C. - express, in afterwords, pride in the accuracy of the details in their books, despite the fact that Pride is a mortal sin. They want to be sure to tell us which few, tiny details in their novels diverge from historical fact. Coney Island's Elephant Hotel, for example, was abandoned by 1896, and burned down the same year, but Thompson thinks it's neato and keeps it in business in her book. Otherwise, though, everything is totally accurate, "t"s crossed, "i"s dotted. Uh huh.

Much of what I write this week will be a confession of prejudices, I fear, evidence, perhaps, that I have no business reading these books (although I enjoyed them all, more or less). Still, as to the accuracy of the historical mystery, of any novel: I don't care, I just don't care.

Great writers create worlds that are nearly complete in themselves, lacking nothing but the imagination of the sympathetic reader. They borrow from the actual world around them, but in the end it's most important that the fictional world is true, not that it intersects with the real world in arbitrary or trivial ways. Because, I gotta say, there's plenty about every one of these novels that is untrue, regardless of how particular dates and events mesh. And, at their best, the novels contain other truths that have little to do with their historical accuracy - let's save that for later in the week.

I liked the approach Steve Hockensmith took to his "cowboy detectives on a train" story. In his acknowledgments, he thanks seven railroad buffs and one gun expert. His research is not meticulous - he just asked someone what he needed to do to keep the sticklers happy. The topography of the train is actually incorporated into the plot, but even that doesn't really matter - different order of train cars, slightly different plot. The world he created is small, but has its own sense, and works fine.

Some authors research their subject as part of their creative method. I'm thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald, novels like The Blue Flower or The Gate of Angels, which seem effortless, but are backed by intense archival work, hours digging around in old newspapers and diaries. The key here is that Fitzgerald used what she learned to inhabit her imaginary world, to make the fiction real. Almost all of the information she acquired in the process is omitted from the book.

Among these mysterical histories, only Carlo Lucarelli, writing about World War II Italy, came close to achieving this effect, carefully failing to explain the importance of every political detail or branch of the secret police. Some of the details are even obscure, or confusing. Good. He trusts his reader, or perhaps just assumes that they're Italians who know what he's talking about.

Every other writer from time to time hits the narrative brakes for an information dump. Hockensmith and Parry came off best, I think because of their first person narrators - they have to stay in character. A few passages in the Victoria Thompson and Michael Pearce novels, though, are little more than encyclopedia entries, on the history of Coney Island, or the politics of Herzogovina, or some other bit of curious lore. Thompson actually writes, about her policeman character, "He'd done some research on Coney Island and learned..." (p. 61), and then we get a page of Thompson's notes. When I said Thompson was clumsy, I meant passages like this.

The same problem plagues historical novels of any stripe, not just mysteries. Walter Scott's novels often include detailed notes about the accuracy and sources of his various characters and events. I've read six Scott novels; in saying that I am definitely not including every word in every one of those notes. I remember the notes in Ivanhoe as being especially dull. Better historical novels - The Scarlet Letter, or Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed - excise everything that is merely factual.

But, but, but, given that a novel or novelist may not be capable of creating an original world, historical or otherwise, given that the author is not Nathaniel Hawthorne or Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps accuracy isn't such a bad goal. If a novel's mystery plot is typical for its genre (in every novel I'm considering, it is), the characters brightly colored cardboard, and the themes well-worn if we're lucky, we can at least enjoy some strange and wondrous details extracted from the library by our all too fatigable mystery writer.

Because Victoria Thompson was right - it is neato that there was a hotel on Coney Island shaped like a giant elephant. I had no idea. By all means, use that in a novel. I'm happy to know about it.

All this week: I am mystified by historical mysteries

What I Read on My Summer Vacation. Mysteries, all mysteries, all new authors to me. Maybe you'll see a pattern.

In order of declining preference:

Owen Parry, Faded Coat of Blue (1999), 337 pp. A Civil War mystery by columnist and all-around military expert Ralph Peters. Series: #1 of 6, I think. Narrator: 1st person, with an original voice. Cameos: Abraham Lincoln, General George McClellan, Allan Pinkerton.

Carlo Lucarelli, Carte Blanche (1990), 94 pp. A murder investigation set in 1943 Bologna. The Gestapo lurks everywhere; the Americans are coming. My understanding is that this author is hugely popular in Italy now. Series: #1 of 3. Narrator: 3rd person, plain, all business.

Steve Hockensmith, On the Wrong Track (2007), 290 pp. A comic mystery, with two cowboys on a train between Utah and San Francisco in 1893. One of them wants to be Sherlock Holmes. The series is called Holmes on the Range! Har har. Series: #2 of 4. Narrator: 1st person - Watson narrates, of course, not Holmes. R. T. reviews the first novel in the series over here.

Michael Pearce, A Dead Man in Trieste (2004), 188 pp. A British policeman in 1906 Trieste. Series: #1 of 6, maybe. Narrator: 3rd person, understated, repetitive. Cameos: Franz Lehar, Marinetti - the climax of the novel occurs during the first Futurist Evening. James Joyce! Italo Svevo!

Victoria Thompson, Murder on St. Mark's Place (2000), 277 pp. A midwife solves murders in 1896 New York City. The second-worst novel I've read, for quite a long time.* Series: #2 of 11. Narrator: Third person, sometimes quite clumsy, although fortunately not always. Cameo: New York Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, offstage.

Most of these were recommended by the friendly owner of a mystery book store. I wanted historical mysteries, he delivered. Here's one more book that does not fit the pattern:

John Banville, The Lemur (2008), 134 pp. A typical Banville narrator becomes tangled in, and then somehow solves, a murder. This one is the worst book I've read in a long time. Series: Stand-alone, thankfully. Narrator: It's Banville, and not about the history of science, so it must be first person. Cameo: John Huston.

I included page lengths because every one of them is too long, except possibly the tiny Lucarelli novel.

This is my raw material for the week, as I try to figure out how these books function, what worked well and what didn't, and why anyone bothers writing or reading them.

I don't read too many mysteries, so I'm likely to showcase some first-rate ignorance as the week progresses. My thoughtful readers can help me out.

* Sounds sorta harsh. I'm going to say some nicer things about the book later. And, to the author (http://victoriathompson.homestead.com/), if you stop by, please look around the site. You will see that I am comparing you to Flaubert and Chekhov and the like.

An eight year old recommended this academic history of China

Just a bit on the actual book, first. So feel free to skip ahead to the eight year old if uninterested in the history of classical China.

The book is The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (2007, Harvard University Press) by Mark Edward Lewis, a distinguished Stanford professor. The book is excellent for its purpose, which is to cram one with knowledge. Since I started from little, the Return on Investment has been very high. Just as an example, I can now place Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, buried with his terra cotta warriors, in some real context. He's not just a very old Chinese emperor now. Please, do not test me on this in five years. Or months.

It is not a narrative history, not a book of personalities or dramatic events. Chapters are titled "Kinship," "Rural Society," "Religion." Sounds a little snoozy, looked at that way. But I'm used to, and can even enjoy, this sort of thing, and, look, the eight year old kid liked it fine.

Maybe he was nine, I don't know. I never met him. See this piece at Anecdotal Evidence, in which Patrick Kurp encounters the Mark Edward Lewis book in the hands of a schoolkid who is also a master wizard. Or something. Anyway, I'm not going to be outread by a dang third grader.

I am actually reading this book because of this kid, and Kurp. Since my surprise trip to Japan last summer convinced me that classic Japanese literature was far more accessible than I had thought, I have been trying to read a little bit of Asian literature, mostly old poems. Japanese poetry led to Chinese poetry. Chinese poetry led to a desire to fill in some substantial gaps in my knowledge of Chinese history. And then somehow I remembered Kurp's post, and that eight year old.

The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han is the "first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China." I'll bet that kid is already way ahead of me. But I'm gonna catch up.

Why am I supposed to hate The Scarlet Letter?

I just finished The Scarlet Letter a couple of days ago. I'd never read it before. It turns out to be - what's the technical literary term? - awesome. Chapter XII, "The Minister's Vigil" - holy cow, what a piece of writing. Virtually nothing in Hawthorne's short fiction, almost entirely written before The Scarlet Letter, prepared me for the artistic quality of the best parts of this novel.

The impression I have picked up, here and there, is that this novel is much hated. Is this some lingering reaction to high school forced-feeding? I'm very glad, so so glad, that I was not assigned this book in high school. My understanding of fiction was a little narrow then. A little - to go back to my discussion of Gautier - utilitarian.

I was leafing through a book of snippets of essays on Hawthorne and came across a passage by Mark van Doren that I should have written down, since now I have to paraphrase it. Van Doren granted that The Scarlet Letter had some psychological acuteness and some symbolic resonance, but claimed that it is most valuable for Hawthorne's insightful understanding of Puritanism. Now, this strikes me as completely absurd, almost a crime against the notion of literature. The high school Amateur Reader might have agreed with van Doren, I'm afraid. I would have assumed that we were reading The Scarlet Letter because it complemented our 11th grade American history curriculum. It would help us learn about Puritans.

I might not have thought of it quite that way, but I did see fiction as a sort of sugar-coating to make the pill of useful historical information less bitter. Since I like useless - sorry, useful - historical information pills anyway, the Flintstones shape was not really necessary for me, but I would not have complained. I thought Moby-Dick worked very well as a way to learn about the whaling industry and 19th century sea-faring. And I was right about that, but, a little narrow, huh?

I also knew that there was such a thing as escapist literature, fantasy literature, The Hobbit and The Phantom Tollbooth and whatnot, very enjoyable. What a revelation, some years later, to understand that every novel is a fantasy novel. Different novels intersect with the actual world in different ways, and those intersections are often of great interest. But they're all imaginative creations. Even the parts that aren't made up are made up. And this is all aside from the fact that The Scarlet Letter features a witch, a vampire, and an elf-child.

Henry James, from his little book Hawthorne (1879):

"The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element--of a certain superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged, of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move." (Ch. 5)

I would say that the second sentence is exactly right, while the first is more a matter of artistic judgment. For me, the novel has no more reality than it requires, and superficial symbolism is one of Hawthorne's primary subjects, what the book is actually about.

This is a short week for me, due to some coincidentally Hawthorne-related travel, so I won't spend more than another day on The Scarlet Letter. In the meantime, please, fill me in. What am I missing?

Sheila Heti's Ticknor - Put the pie in the flower bed.

William Hickling Prescott was an important 19th century historian (The Conquest of Peru, The Conquest of Mexico). George Ticknor, a childhood friend, was also a distinguished Bostonian man of letters. Ticknor was also Prescott’s biographer. Contemporary Canadian youngster Sheila Heti has used the lives of Prescott and Ticknor to structure her little slip of a novel, Ticknor (2005). It looks like it might be a historical novel, but Heti is just having her clever postmodern fun. The two most authentic historical scenes in the book are a detailed description of a hospital and a first-rate Christmas scene that are pinched directly from Florence Nightingale and others (see the Author’s Note). It’s that kind of book.

Here’s the line, a good, and typical, one, that tipped me off, on Prescott’s leisurely labors on The Conquest of Mexico:

“And hurry he did not, but rather put it off so that three months were passed in loafing before he was able to sit down at his desk, beginning only a few days’ labor for it was to be another six months before he would again put a word on paper, given the interruption of a voyage to Nigeria on account of his daughter’s ill health and the death of his brother Edward at sea, two things that together prevented him from coming to his labors for another half year.” (p. 46)

Sorry, what’s that? A trip to Nigeria, you don’t say? For his daughter’s health, you don’t say? There might be some fun in separating fact from fiction here, but not much, I think. Forget the history – it’s just a hook on which to hang a novel about jealousy and betrayal.

Self-perceived betrayal. The Prescott of the novel is wealthy, well-married, famous, and important. The Ticknor of the novel is none of these things. So there we have the jealousy. Prescott has known Ticknor since they were children, but has other, better friends and only sometimes invites Ticknor to his parties. There’s the betrayal – in other words, no betrayal at all, just ordinary life, and Ticknor knows it, which embitters him more.* This all seems acutely observed.

Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation has championed this book. He has praised it for its evocative period details, for example of the Prescotts’ kitchen. This is a great testament to the power of the imagination, since the kitchen scene includes almost no concrete details whatsoever (at least of the kitchen - Prescott’s wife’s “wide” posterior “was like a whole other being entirely; a lovely creature stuck to her legs”, p. 32). I have seen other reviewers,** Sarvas, too, praise Ticknor’s voice for its authenticity, which I don’t hear at all. Ticknor’s voice is more like that of the narrator of The Good Soldier or Malone Dies than of Hawthorne or Emerson or Longfellow or Parkman. All to the good, too, since it’s consistent and without jarring archaicisms.

It might sound like I’m knocking Sarvas here, which is not my intent. He actually pointed me toward this book, which is very much worth a look. Sarvas’s own novel (Harry, Revised) just came out. While doing some Ford Madox Ford-style page 90 tests in the bookstore last weekend, I picked up Sarvas’s book, and not only did he easily pass the test, but out of the dozen or so books I tried, he was only topped by Irène Némirovsky.

I strongly recommend Ticknor, all 118 pages of it, to any reader who finds this funny: “She can vouch for my character. I have a pie” (p. 52), and later “I thought you said ten. Put the pie in the flower bed. Leave now.” (p. 54) I do, and there’s more like it.

* And there’s a final shocking revelation, which I won’t go into, since it’s so oblique yet so obvious that I assume it’s a parody.

** This Village Voice review is in a class of its own: "Lately, this reader's been occupied with a dismal question. Do any of the books we adore leave us feeling they really, truly need to exist?" Time, perhaps, to take a break from book reviewing, then?

The Navy of the Republic of Texas

When John Lloyd Stephens and his party arrived in the Yucatan in 1840, the peninsula was not exactly in rebellion, but had declared itself the autonomous Republic of Yucatan. Negotiations with the central Mexican government were ongoing. As a defensive measure, the Republic of Yucatan had entered a military alliance with the Republic of Texas. Texas naval vessels were patrolling the Gulf of Mexico.

It all sounds like something from an alternate history novel. It's a glimpse of a dead end of history, a contingent path that went nowhere. Every American is taught about the Republic of Texas (the Alamo, remember?), but as a prelude to the 1846 Mexican War, and as part of the path to the Civil War. Not for it's own sake (not outside of Texas, at least). But it was, for a short time, an existing entity, a state with ambassadors and treaties and the like. As was the Republic of Yucatan. As were any number of vanished corners of history. It's an odd thing to read about.

One great value of old travel books is their firsthand encounters with these nooks and crannies of the world that were not in the middle of the action. John Kirk Townsend in the Sandwich Islands, Mungo Park on the banks of the Niger, Darwin in Argentina and Chile. Almost no one thinks to read The Voyage of 'The Beagle' for his description of Argentina and the gauchos in the 1830s. But it's there, and it's worth the time, and where else can you read about them?*

* I know, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (1845). Is that a book for non-specialists? We shall see.