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A couple of years back, Jane Smiley made a ripple with an article she wrote in Harper's arguing that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn isn't such a great book. The book about slavery we should have been reading all along, she claimed, is Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's tempest from the 1850s, dismissed now as sentimental, patronizing mush. Nonetheless, her new novel about slavery and abolitionism, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, looks a whole lot closer to Mark Twain than to Stowe--at least on the surface. Lidie Newton, a tomboyish newlywed from Illinois who packs off to the Kansas Territory with her abolitionist husband, is, if not quite an outcast on the level of Huck, certainly not one of the genteel Christian soldiers of Stowe's universe. She's a fair shot, can't claim much familiarity with scripture, and she don't ride sidesaddle. Lidie masquerades for a time in britches and boots, and she likes the freedom she finds. The 1850s were the most vicious, contentious peacetime decade in American history, and "Bleeding Kansas" was its violent crucible. After the government opened the former Indian territory up to white folks in 1854, settlers poured in from both North and South, and Kansas became home for a few years to two competing legislatures, roving marauders and righteous pilgrims, all fighting to tip the balance of the nation for or against slavery. "Kansas is different," Lidie says after her tour of duty there has ended. "Whatever builds up here in the east, in Kansas folks let it out." Smiley, via Lidie, takes us from lonely prairie cabins to frontier boomtowns clattering with guns to Missouri plantations made lazy with slave labor. She wears her research lightly, clearly delighting in forgotten slang and mislaid customs. But winking quotations from Miss Catherine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy are often undercut by sudden, heart-sinking visitations of death and blank-eyed cruelty. This tragicomic line is the same one that Twain liked to walk, but in Smiley's hands the comedy doesn't reach his all-consuming satire. Her laughs are by no means palliative--as any reader of The Age of Grief or A Thousand Acres knows. Hard consequence and unshakeable sorrow are well-contained, rarely carrying the self-devouring scorn that made Twain show his heroes, Huck and Tom, tormenting the slave they claimed to want to free. For a novel about slavery, The All-True Adventures tells us relatively little about the complexities of race; Lidie's companionship with a black woman is prone to naive misunderstanding but shows few of the blind spots that made enemies of slavery such as Twain and Stowe write books that are often, to our late 20th-century eyes, racist. To understand those complexities--and try to answer the question: Why didn't abolition solve the problem of racism?--we might turn to Twain, Stowe, or to two of the best historical novels of slavery: Ishmael Reed 's uproarious Flight to Canada and Toni Morrison 's wrenching Beloved. --Tom Nissley |
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