Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

Harvey Jacobs: American Goliath

Satire often has two faces: one is Swiftian–savage–the other is Thur­ beresque–lovable. Among famous contemporary satirists, one might think of the face of, say, Andy Rooney, or, less well-known, the author at hand, novelist Harvey Jacobs. The Swiftian sort of satire is scalding : it wants to burn what it satirizes from off the face of the earth. The Thurber sort, the Andy Rooney sort, couldn’t live without what it makesfunof,sinceitneedsthematerialforitsownhumor,amusement. Harvey Jacobs’s new novel, American Goliath, is an entirely successful satire of the second sort. His novel mines the “true, incredible events” of willful mass delusion suffered by large numbers of the citizens of New York State soon after the close of the Civil War: the “discovery” on a humble farm of a buried giant man, thought to be a petrifiedpersonorastatueofgreatantiquity,onepossessedofmagical powers. American Goliath is a riot of dedicated humbug and slapstick denunciation. All historical fiction (Jacobs’s novel starts in 1868 and ends, more or less, in 1870) is written to be viewed through a scrim of contemporary consciousness, no matter how authentic the costuming might be of the players cavorting on stage. Jacobs is following a traditional , and well-rutted, road; one often traveled, especially since E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975); one frequented by contemporary writers Harvey Jacobs: American Goliath 258 259 as diverse as Jim Crace (Signals of Distress, 1995), and William T. Vollmann (the Seven Dreams series, begun in 1990). One reason why today’s authors are reaching back into the bin of history is the fatigue generated by our current media-drenched contemporary world, where the here-and-now is omnipresent and, subsequently , becomes quickly tired of: it fades on its electronic shelf, yellows around the edges. To find freshness, authors have donned pith helmets and have gone hacking through the thickets of library stacks (and past libel laws’ statutes of limitations), looking for valuable morsels , the more ludicrous, and grotesque, the better. Artifacts, such as the giant stone man of Cardiff, N.Y., are at least long-gone, and their relative deadness gives them vitality as story material. The hackneyed, alas, is now the everyday. As satire has two faces, there are two principal uses made of these historical finds: one is terror, the crime story resuscitated; some lesser knownJack-the-Rippersortofcharacterisexhumed,andhisorherterrible deeds are put on display, hence the great success of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1995), for instance. Then there is the comic turn. Harvey Jacobs’s fresh morsel “the CardiffGiant,”is,toquotehowtheLibraryofCongressdelicatelycatalogues it, a “Forgery of antiquities,” belonging to “New York (State) –History–19th century.” But not just any historical oddity will automaticallyturnintocaptivatingandusefulfiction :itdoesneedtospeak to our time. And here Jacobs has the late twentieth century, not the nineteenth, right smack in his crosshairs. The Tabloidization of History Whatisourpresentmediaagebutahoaxofgiants?ThroughoutAmerican Goliath the contemporary parallels offer themselves up all-too- 260 rapidly:ourrecentandcurrentpresidents,Nixon,Ford,Reagan,Bush, andClinton(nottoslightthemerelyvicepresidential,Agnew,Quayle, and Gore), a crew all simultaneously alive and kicking until just a few short years ago. And the media’s much improved (since the 19th century ) ability to make mountains out of molehills (as the Cardiff giant was made out of a slab of Iowa granite), so that the words “news” and “hoax” take on complementary meaning, rather than their once, more sober, definitions. Are O.J., Princess Di, etc., more news than hoax, or more hoax than news? So, Jacobs has both his curio, and his modern subject, and he runs with it. Jacobs is very much in tune with his times, since his career has made him something of a multi-media personality himself. He is a novelist(Beautiful Soup(1993),The Juror(1980),Summer on a Mountain of Spices (1975)) and short-story-writer (The Egg of the Glak (1969)), but even more pertinently, he is a television writer and dramatist, one whoworkedfor ABC forfifteenyearsasdirector ofindustryaffairsand satellite communication. American Goliath is indeed a novel, a literary event, but it is one that is shot through with larger media awareness and consciousness. And Jacobs has his own informative website–www.americango liath.com–as well. As Jacobs makes the block of granite that becomes Goliath aware of the outside world, so too is the novel itself aware of the multimedia world it has been launched into. Rushing to the Past Another benefit Jacobs gets from rushing to the past is that he can bring to the page...