From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The author of the Vietnam classic
Meditation in Green (1983) here channels Liberty Fish, a fictional member of a real, still-prominent upstate New York family, for a gruesome Civil War picaresque à la
Candide. Roxana Maury, the daughter of Carolinian slaveholders, turns against the "peculiar institution," disowns her parents, Asa and Ida and marries northerner Thatcher Fish, who shares her abolitionism. Their son Liberty is born in 1844, and his liberal education is enhanced by his parents, and the oddball metaphysicians and charlatans with whom they surround themselves. When war breaks out, Liberty joins up, participates in a series of horrific battles, deserts and travels South to his mother's ancestral home, Redemption Hall. There, he finds his grandfather, Asa, practicing ghastly homicidal experiments with his slaves. As Union forces approach, Asa abandons his invalid wife and more or less kidnaps Liberty, and the two ship aboard a blockade runner, bound for Nassau. Liberty functions more as Gump than protagonist, and ultimately learns Candide-like lessons through similarly unlikely adventures. Roxana's background and the (unconnected) doings of a curious Uncle Potter in Kansas occupy a large portion of the story; the grotesque piles on top of the macabre in depicting slavery; highly humorous banter flows throughout. This book, rich in an appropriately fatuous, overblown period style, is the morbidly comic counterpoint to Doctorow's
The March.
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*Starred Review* Wright's tale of the growth and travels of Liberty Fish (a "moniker to choke a tyrant on"), son of passionate upstate New York abolitionists but drawn to his slaveholding extended family, is an unusually captivating modernist novel set during the Civil War. As a child, Liberty sees ghosts; as an adolescent, he escapes his military unit, eventually to end up aboard a pirate ship. Throughout, Wright portrays a strangely level young man, always idealistic and occasionally sharp-tongued amidst brutal, absurd circumstances. Like Wright's
Going Native (1994),
this book is, at its heart, a road novel in which encountered characters--like the one-eyed Euclid or the bizarre English captain Wallace--frequently overshadow the main ones. One senses, however, that Wright has more to say in this novel than in his previous ones. Although it's tempting to label the story Faulknerian for its setting and precise, if playful, prose, Liberty's resemblance to Huck Finn is too strong to ignore. Highly recommended.
Brendan DriscollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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