The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright

So. This book opens with a scene, never explained, of bearded "ladies" dancing in a field and singing. It progresses to a burning house and on to more really visceral and terrifying stuff. And not in a way that has the author being calculatedly avant-garde, like, "oooh, I'm going to open up my Civil War era novel with crossdressers."

That's the most impressive part of the novel. It doesn't. explain. anything. It's written as though we have just lived through the Civil War and are very familiar with the events. It's stunning and refreshing and treats the reader like (s)he has a brain. Along with this, the book is structured into episodes. They're not chapters, really. And it has a plot arc, but the story isn't primarily concerned with plot. In other words, here we have a historical novel about the son of two abolitionists who joins the union army, but actually it's none of those things. Not at the core. And that's why it's the best book that I've read in a while. One that wasn't just entertaining, but was engrossing.




Unlike The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, another book set in a war but not directly about a war, a book that I read the whole way through, and wanted to read the whole way through, despite the fact that I couldn't stop wondering why the characters were talking like characters in a novel, and despite the fact that it was a creepy love story between a 33 year old man (I thought he was, like 45, through most of it, though) and a 17 year old girl.

However, I have read a novel involving incest (The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy), and I believed it and enjoyed it. Which says more about the quality of the writing than my interests, really!

What Ms. Hazzard does have going for her is a great cover design for her book. It's better than Stephen Wrights. Sorry, Chip Kidd.