Life, Liberty, and the Pursuits of History

Dykstra continuedfrom previous page ---------------thing which was not and the thing which was. Human society, not simply Mathews, becomes the novel's compositecomiccharacter. Butthe specialgraceofthe novel arises from something more: its desperate grip on the idea ofethics in the guise of its release. Swift's silly tale skewers competing ideals of politics and of society; Mathews similarly refuses us the protective bubble of escapist fantasy. He askedme, whomade the ship, andhow it was possible that the Houyhnhnms of my country would leave it to the management of brutes?.... I went on by assuring him, that the ship was made by creatures like myself. The agon of the novel unfolds in two parts. The first centers on that need to decide whether Mathews's life in CIA should be "classified" as truth or fiction. Then the conflict begins to evolve into something else. Call it the clash between our willingness to recognize the fragility of social constructions and our need to deny it. Or, to witness acts of destruction and to ignore them. Or, to choose one ofthe following roles to play in games ofshameful consequence: the simpleton, the knave, or thejester. Agon: Beauty ofHuman Making, meet Disaster of Human Unmaking. I said farther, that if good fortune ever restored me to my nat ive country, to relate my travels hither, as I resolved to do, everybody would believe that I said the thing which was not, that I invented the story out of my own head.... In My Life in CIA, Mathews—no cold and elegant Houyhnhnm, probably to his regret—says the thing which was not as a means of highlighting die thing which was. Which is to say: that the novel is a fabulous take on that schlocky image, the tears of the clown. The salty fluids secreted by the lacrimal glands of a composite comic characterwho might be a simpleton, a knave, or a jester. There they are, ostentatiously pathetic, sparkling with the not-at-all-esoteric intelligence of what went down in '73. Kristin Dykstra's books oftranslation and criticism include Violet Island and Other Poems, Time's Arrest, and The Winter Garden Photograph (forthcoming). Shecoedits Mandorla: NewWriting fromtheAmericas / Nueva escritura de las Americas. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuits of History Tom LeClair The Amalgamation Polka Stephen Wright Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 331 pages; cloth, $24.95 When pomo elders DeLiIIo and Pynchon identified their favorite sons with several blurbs, it was even-steven—Stephen Wright and Steve Erickson, respectively. Now, after three often violently experimental novels aboutcontemporary violence, DeLillo's Wright has done a Mason andDixon (1997), a sometimes sweetly told historical romance, in this case about a peripatetic idealist named Liberty who fights in the Civil War and wanders into other grotesqueries of the American past. Amalgamation Polka should have been published in 2005, the year of the historical novel, when four of five National Book Award finalists were set in earlier times. The most substantially researched and formally adventurous were William T. Vollmann's Europe Central (the winner) and Christopher Sorrentino's Trance. Amalgamation Polka is a cross between the second tier—Rene Steinke's imaginative biography of a social radical in Holy Skirts and E. L. Doctorow's war-is-hell and slavery-was-hell stories in The March. Like Steinke, Wright lavishes considerable detail on the childhood ofhis precocious outsider, the son ofupstate New York abolitionist lecturers and conductors on the Underground Railroad. In this leisurely bildungsroman, the small-town Liberty Fish has speculative talks with an old free black man named Euclid; hears tales ofplantation life fromhis mother, who grew up in South Carolina; gets introduced to the vulgar realities of life on the Erie Canal by his father; and, after inhaling laughing gas, loses his virginity during a trip to New York City with his libertine uncle Potter. In 1861, at age sixteen (and at the midpoint of the book), Liberty enlists with the Union. He sees his childhood friend killed in battle, participates in Sherman's march, has his skull creased by a bullet, deserts the blues in Georgia, and makes his way to his grandparents' estate, "Redemption Hall." There Liberty finds his grandfather engaged in crazed...