Ye Olden Days
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (2022)
In her end notes, Karen Joy Fowler explains why she centers John Wilkes Booth’s story from the perspectives of his family. Killers should be denied attention; this is the modern way. The Booths are a colorful bunch of eccentrics, she didn’t lack for material, and the book is an engaging read.
Her portrayal of the male Booths holds our interest, but it’s the women Fowler elevates. Junius Booth, the father, is larger than life, a renowned actor and polygamist. His son, Edwin, toured with his father as a nanny, ensuring Papa made it to curtain call without getting too sloshed, then became an acclaimed actor in his own right, a celebrity of his age. Chapters with Lincoln ground us historically, yet these chapters do not sing. Where Fowler excels is in writing about domestic life, revealing wonderfully descriptive details and the small, ordinary observations of nature and home. I felt most engaged when the story expresses the oldest daughter, Rosalie’s point of view, or that of the youngest daughter, Asia, who is lively and seems quite modern.
According to Fowler, the Booths sympathized with the enslaved, excepting for John Wilkes, of course; yet they contributed little to the war effort. John Wilkes’s story is the focus at the end, but Fowler doesn’t connect all dots — which, in a work of fiction, she might have attempted. Readers feel distant from certain events. The most dramatic action, the assassination plot, is pieced together by others; Fowler denies John Wilkes a soapbox. With historical fiction, we don’t read for plotting — we know how it ends. We read for dots to be connected, for a fresh perspective. This was a remarkable age, and a remarkable, idiosyncratic family, and Fowler portrays both, highlighting their vivid contradictions. *** 1/2
2. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganess (1989)
A bestseller, and I see why, but I’d have preferred this to be two separate books; clocking in at over 800 pages, it easily could have been.
Descriptions of how people in the South experienced the Civil War and its aftermath are riveting. The widow is a lively narrator, but she wasn’t born until after the War, so she tells us what she has learned after the fact. Sections of this book feel vital and vivid and wonderful. I was less interested in hearing about the Widow’s childhood friendships, her life as a mother during the thirties, and her observations about living in the nursing home. But her mother-in-law’s complicated relationships with the enslaved people on her plantation? Wow. The rainy-day games where they would drape sheets over furniture to create tunnels — this felt real, the stuff handed down from family lore over generations. The reader — and notably, the author, too — understands that while the mother-in-law believes herself to be a “good” mistress, the people forced to cater to her whims do not. In this telling, the enslaved people aren’t whipped or egregiously abused — but they are controlled, and the depiction powerfully turns “Lost Cause” mythology on its head [I loved my slaves and they were happy, we were like family]. As Gurganess was writing in the eighties, his foresight in rebutting Lost Causeisms is all the more prescient. *** 1/2