Subtitle: The Politics of the Enlightenment and the American Founding
Darren Staloff, Ph.D., a historian at the University of Florida, considers three prominent Founding Fathers in Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson. He takes up each with reference to their role in the founding of the United States, and with reference to each other. Using their own writings and extensive quotes from contemporary and later sources, he paints an extensive and even-handed portrait of each. Steeped in the thought and politics of the time, these in-depth sketches immerse the reader in the personality and the grand achievement of each. They will round out your understanding of each in grand if unblinking style.
In grossly broad strokes, mainstream Enlightenment thought rejected any appeal to the supernatural or divine revelation. This trend brought into common thought a disenchantment with the idea that the world was run by force of some supreme being, and contemplated instead, the natural forces which one could observe and test.
Continuing broadly, Hamilton used a superior mind and indefatigable energy to push through his vision of a strong central authority, with a central bank, a very active commercial market, and government investment in infrastructure. In his view these would together generate wealth and plenty for the new nation. This was at a time when the new country was overwhelmingly agrarian in nature, both in output and civic vision. Obviously his program ultimately carried the day.
Adams was a brilliant, sometimes prickly, always vain but honest statesman and politician, whose vision for the new Constitution was enacted in its entirety. I believe that any sharing of this credit, by any other contemporary thinker or Founding Father is illusory, and simple myth-building. Plain wrong.
Jefferson’s gift for lofty language created a grand American myth; his phrasing has inspired foreign revolutionary zealots and American schoolchildren alike. His presidency failed, however: the Embargo Act plunged the new nation into its first deep depression, and produced none of the desired results of projecting nascent American power internationally. In addition, his questionable parochiality about the slavery question, and his hare-brained scheme for solving it did nothing to prevent or forestall the bloody sectional conflict to come. In fact, it helped assure that the conflict would come.
As a history of the period, and three of its principal and most influential actors, this book is thorough and balanced — excellent.
Widely admired author Emma Donoghue manages to capture some version of fin desiècle zeitgeist while also spinning a suspenseful action narrative in The Paris Express. She sets her scene in an actual 1895 out-of-control express train that crashes into the Montparnasse station, and assembles within it a cast of historical figures, (some of whom were actually passengers on the wreck). This clever device gathers together key figures who represent the coming train wreck that is the 20th Century. It’s a bravura performance; I recommend it for its intelligence, its respect for its readers, and not least for its breathless pacing.
A national railway express leaves Granville on the Normandy coast bound for Paris, and its passengers include a handful of deputies, or representatives, of the Orne Department of France. The author also calls “all aboard” to scientists, prominent engineers and captains of industry, and literary and artistic lights of the period, and a very angry young anarchist with a bomb. Donoghue names and clearly identifies these souls in the novel. The author mounts an elaborate, nail-biting race against death, in a highly diverting, and very well-organized novel.
And the interaction of these disparate characters, along with the threat to everyone’s life, along with the speed of the action, all make for a very rewarding, heart-quickening experience. This mélange represents for me the headlong speed and power of wrenching change the world will suffer as the 19th Century swings along into the 20th. For on this train is a French automotive pioneer and industrialist Émile Lavassor; Irish dramatist John Millington Synge; Max Jacob, the French poet and painter; Henry Tanner, the African-American painter; and Marcelle Lapicque, a neurophysiologist who lived until 1960. This is not an exhaustive list, but it illustrates the grand scope of Donoghue’s story, in that it brings all these characters into play. The momentum, the dreadnaught, irresistible forces in play, would wreck any static edifice in its way, be it Montparnasse station, or any settled, backward-looking lassitude. I was quite out of breath at the end of this book.
The author shows a steely discipline as she yolks her wildly divergent elements into a cohesive, yet breakneck, story. It’s very well done.
Distinguished author Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin, Thirteen Ways of Looking, among many others) takes up the story of an enigmatic seeker of sense and connection in our fractured modern world. In describing his hero, Conway, he achieves such subtle effects that I felt the need to go back and reread his early descriptions: a man with a focus on something so distant as to remove him from his current surroundings; his calmness and non-committal approach and way of speaking; an unwillingness to display or discuss his inner self. This introduction indicates we’re unmistakably in the hands of an accomplished master of fiction.
Conway directs the repair of undersea cables which house the fiber optic filaments which form the infrastructure of the internet. We view his story from the first-person narrative of Fennell, a journalist with a debilitating, haunting history. He’s left the scourge of alcoholism behind as he boards Conway’s ship (at p. 29 of the hardcover edition): “I, too, have known those sorts of days when I have put on the Prufrock smile when really all I had was the remnants of a wrecked life. ¶ But I am getting ahead of myself. I was still, at the time, eager to dwell on the story of a repair.”
McCann goes to some trouble to equate the internal workings of this ocean-going vessel with the organic internal functions of humans: after introducing the ship’s engine room crew (p. 75): “They moved among the propulsion engines, the water pipes, the boilers, the generator, the filters, the fuel strainers. There was something human about it too: the mysterious workings of the viscera, the liver, the kidneys, the heart.” And two pages later, he looks at a cross section of cable, surprised that they run parallel in perfect concentric circles — no twisting. “At the inner core, protected by several layers, lay the glass tubes. The conduits of the light. The xylem and phloem.” Thus the cable parallels the internal conduits of plants which carry water and nutrients back and forth.
With a faint Ishmael-and-Ahab echo we sail along the west coast of Africa, hunting a break in an undersea cable. Conway worries about Fennell, who is a freelance journalist, and keeps him at a distance. He views him as an interloper who worrisomely seeks to publicize — what? Conway’s own history features heart-rending ruptures, and a murky past he wishes to keep hidden. At length Conway, with a singular personal approach, vandalizes a cable beneath the Mediterranean, near Alexandria. It turns out that there are dummy devices — decoys, or dress rehearsals, maybe, anchored to submerged cables all around Europe and the Middle East. We are left in the dark about these mysterious sunken packs; did Conway install them, as seems quite likely?
In his Epilogue, McCann encapsulates one feature of modern times with beautiful, blunt brevity (p. 218): “Nobody could quite understand why the plot would be so intricately counterfeit, and why someone would go to the great difficulty of diving all that way just to hide something that was likely never to be seen. It triggered speculation across the internet: everyone with an opinion, of course, the obscene certainty of our days.”
These personal and multinational energies drive Twist’s narrative. McCann brings us along with a style that propels, but reveals nothing that would soften or dull the drama inherent. Even as Conway seeks an elusive undersea rupture to repair, he and the great love of his life have rent themselves asunder, and neither we nor Fennell can really tell the depth of Conway’s loss or loneliness.
There are plain lessons here, and it doesn’t take a deep reader to find them: the internet provides the infrastructure that assures “the obscene certainty of our days”; there is not a square inch of the planet that doesn’t bear the imprint of humankind’s traditional effluent industries; there’s no telling what another person thinks, or suffers, or desires. In sober reality, Fennell realizes an ultimate, concluding truth: “Mine has been a lifetime of dropped connections.”
It’s a sombre book, built around a high-stakes adventure story; it reflects sombre realities, but I would never dream of discouraging you to pick it up, dear reader. It’s done in a terse, muscular style, with McCann’s assured artistry. It will encourage your mature reflections, and impress you with the author’s awesome powers. McCann is by acclamation one of the front rank of novelists writing in English today.
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