Bookplanet: this Civil War extravaganza sounds like an interesting novel

The Union Unhinged: Review of 'The Amalgamation Polka,' by Stephen Wright -- by LAURA MILLER

History is a comfy subject for fiction. We already know what happened, and we usually know what to think about it: how foolish it was to underestimate Hitler, to board the Titanic, to march off to defend Jerusalem from the heathens. This makes historical fiction a safe, even conservative, genre, attractive to writers who aren't looking to go out on a limb. But it's an odd choice for Stephen Wright, an extravagantly talented novelist who excels at depicting the delirium that hits once you've scrambled so far off the limb you're suspended in midair, legs whirring, like a character in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

Furthermore, "The Amalgamation Polka," Wright's fourth novel, is set during the Civil War, a subject already mummified by History Channel documentaries and multivolume Time-Life series. This seems overly staid territory for a guy who so far has written about a strung-out soldier convinced the Vietnam War is really a battle against the vegetable kingdom ("Meditations in Green"), a disintegrating family of U.F.O. cultists ("M31") and . . . actually, it's hard to say just what "Going Native," Wright's iridescent, nihilistic third novel, is about, but it's clearly drunk on the blood of the golden age of 1980's horror films.

"The Amalgamation Polka" has more ballast than "Going Native" — it puts a little faith in love and decency, for example — but it's no sober museum piece. Instead, it offers something rare in historical novels and also available in Wright's other books, the vertiginous sensation of a tilt forward into the unknown. This, after all, is what history feels like to the people who live through it, the ones with no idea what will happen next and an uncertain grasp on who the good guys will turn out to be. It feels like the world as you know it, dissolving and re-forming into an unimaginable and unnavigable new configuration. It feels like now.

The novel's hero, Liberty Fish, is himself an amalgamation, the son of a Northern father and a mother, Roxana, whose fervent abolitionism has exiled her from her family's South Carolina plantation. Liberty is raised in upstate New York, where his parents run a station on the Underground Railroad. He enlists in the Union Army when the war breaks out and eventually makes his way to his mother's childhood home with the vague intention of confronting the people who have caused her so much pain.

You might guess — especially as Liberty follows the Stono River to the old manse where his demented grandfather attempts to achieve, by a variety of horrid experiments, "the transformation of black into white" — that "The Amalgamation Polka" is patterned after Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is a better bet. Most of the people Liberty meets (and not just in the South) are what the Cheshire Cat would call "mad," from a shaggy hermit who lives in a well-appointed hole in the ground and claims former citizenship in the legendary pirate republic of Libertalia to the Georgia farmer who secedes from the Confederacy by reclaiming his little plot of land in the name of the Union. Most of the novel's white characters are preoccupied with freedom and racial difference, as if reconciling the two ideas were a complicated equation and the peculiar arithmetic of solving it has knocked them off their hinges. (The black characters, very sensibly, try to stay out of their way. When Roxana informs the family cook that the truth will set her free, the woman replies, "Only things that could set anyone free are money and death.")

Like "Alice," Wright's novel is episodic, and like the travel narratives of Mark Twain, it bristles with unruly, captivating minor characters. There's a long passage in the first half describing a trip Liberty and his father take to Rochester by canal boat. Their host, Captain Whelkington, regales the passengers with tales of "the rovers and the roughs who haunted the waterway like unappeased spirits, the soaplocks and the runagate apprentices, the gyppos and the swingkettles, the road men and the redemptioners." The mule driver, "a lean, leathery twist of a man known as Genesee Red," is famed for "his ability to sleep while not only standing upright but even walking forward." The cook is "a large, testy woman with a wide, mustachioed face who claimed to be the captain's wife yet insisted on being addressed as Mrs. Callahan." And that's just the crew.

Having read it twice, I'm still not sure how this interlude pertains to the novel's larger themes. Perhaps it's included purely for the untrammeled delight it offers to anyone lucky enough to read it. A shrewd, hilarious and melancholy slice of early-19th-century life, it ends with nightfall on the canal and Liberty transfixed by "the great, glimmering waterway where ranged in near faultless symmetry the tenderly glowing lamps of the preceding boats dwindled off into the western distance, a floating panorama matched by the approaching headlights of the boats behind, emerging in unnumbered stateliness, one after another, from the darkness aft to move surely on into the obliterating darkness ahead."

The perpetual danger in Wright's novels is that the book's forward momentum will be swamped by the trippy fecundity of his prose. He always has time for a detour. Before, say, the former slave living in the Fishes' root cellar can show Liberty his scars, Wright must pause to describe the man's style of shucking peas, "the pods splitting neatly open beneath his broad thumbs like emerald wallets, the peas tumbling into the bucket as noisily as balls of shot." Tantalized with too many such images, a reader can become as disoriented and distractible as someone on hallucinogens. But in "The Amalgamation Polka," Wright gets the balance just right, and the rich, droll style he uses here — both tribute to and parody of 19th-century diction — becomes, like the canal water conveying Captain Whelkington's boat, a means of travel as well as an interesting stew in its own right.

Lacing this endlessly beguiling series of diversions together is an idea about American utopianism, its tendency to slide into nightmare and vice versa. "The Amalgamation Polka" takes its title from an antebellum cartoon depicting a ball at which white abolitionists dance with black partners, everyone fashionably got up in frock coats and sausage curls. When first drawn, the image was meant as a grotesque rebuke; today it seems admirable, as does Roxana standing in a Methodist church to recite the Declaration of Independence, an outrage that causes a man to leap up and demand to feel her chin for a beard. Today's divinely ordained social order is tomorrow's injustice; it's sometimes just a matter of context. The Cheshire Cat deemed himself mad only because he didn't behave like a dog.

"Is it the climate," a British character asks of Liberty's countrymen, "some quickening agent in the air, sends you all mooning helplessly through the woods, scavenging for God in every tree, paradise behind every rock?" There's something absurd about conceiving of a nation in terms of a morality so prone to drastic reversals and inversions. For Wright, America, past and present, is Wonderland, a place of marvels and horrors from which not even the fortunate escape with their heads.

(Laura Miller is a frequent contributor to the NY Times Book Review.)