The Amalgamation Polka - Hardcover

Wright, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067945117X ISBN 13: 9780679451174

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a bright star in the literary sky,” Stephen Wright now extends his astonishing accomplishment with a Civil War novel unlike any other.

Born in 1844 in bucolic upstate New York, Liberty Fish is the son of fervent abolitionists as well as the grandson of Carolina slaveholders even more dedicated to their cause. Thus follows a childhood limned with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways in the house, his Uncle Potter’s free-soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents—a conflict that ultimately costs her her life and compels Liberty, in hopes of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.

Rich in characters both heartbreaking and bloodcurdling, comic and horrific, The Amalgamation Polka is shot through with politics and dreams, and it captures great swaths of the American experience, from village to metropolis to plantation, from the Erie Canal to the Bahamas, from Bloody Kansas to the fulfillment of the killing fields. Yet for all the brutality and tragedy, this novel is exuberant in the telling and its wide compassion, brimming with the language, manners, hopes, and fears of its time—all of this so transformed by Stephen Wright’s imaginative compass that places and events previously familiar are rendered new and strange, terrifying and stirring. Instantly revelatory, constantly mesmerizing, this is the work of a major writer at the top of his form.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Wright was educated at the U.S. Army Intelligence School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught at Princeton University, Brown University, and, most recently, The New School. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

The Civil War, that most American of cataclysms, held an almost mystical fascination for writers even before Grant and Lee reached their gentlemen's agreement at Appomattox. To judge from such recent entries as The Known World, Cold Mountain and The March, there is still no more effective way to signal that you have something weighty to say about this country than to locate your narrative in Civil War-era America.

Stephen Wright, the acclaimed author of Meditations in Green, has chosen to do exactly that in his new novel, The Amalgamation Polka. Essentially a coming-of-age story, the book follows the portentously named Liberty Fish, a kind of abolitionist Candide, from his boyhood as the child of Underground Railroad activists in upstate New York, through an extremely bloody tour of duty as a Union soldier in Georgia and the Carolinas and eventually to a Caribbean island, with all sorts of adventures, both expected and improbable, along the way.

Liberty's mother was born and raised on a grand old cotton-and-bullwhip plantation near Charleston, S.C., and his childhood has been marked as much by his mother's silences regarding her past as by his father's high-toned rants against the evils of slavery. When the tides of war deposit Liberty near the old family estate, he decides to drop out of the army and pay his long-lost grandparents a visit. At this point the novel, which has so far been relatively carefree, tilts abruptly into full-fledged Grand Guignol. What Liberty discovers at "Redemption Hall" is a caricature of plantation life, both more violent and more preposterous than he -- or, for that matter, the reader -- could have expected. Liberty's grandmother, a hate-worn, ghostlike invalid, slashes her cook's palm open with a carving knife for undercooking the turnips; his grandfather keeps his own half-breed daughters locked up for breeding purposes, with himself -- and, in due time, his grandson -- as the sire. Life on the ole plantation, it turns out, was not so much a tragedy (or even a Margaret Mitchell-style melodrama) as a mean-spirited bedroom farce.

Wright is nothing if not ambitious, and the energy with which he throws himself into this world -- which bears only a passing resemblance to 19th-century America -- is a wonder to behold. The novel overflows with charlatans, whores, preachers, soldiers-of-fortune, madmen and even a handful of pirates, all of them declaiming, at the tops of their lungs, in language that often borders on free verse. The prose is unapologetically purple. Consider this exchange, in which Liberty first meets his slave-buggering grandfather:

" 'Are you Asa Maury?'

" 'What's in a name?' He regarded his visitor with detached bemusement. . . .

" 'Have I actually traveled these hundreds of miles, risking injury, imprisonment or worse, to engage in a mere verbal joust?'

" 'Supposing I were the gentleman you take me for, what would you want of me?'

" 'I thought, unwisely perhaps, that simple courtesy required this visit, just as simple human curiosity and the unsparing needs of the soul to comprehend its own origins demanded it. I expected, after absorbing a lifetime of tales about the prodigious man, to meet finally face-to-face the legend himself, my maternal grandfather. And frankly, sir, I presumed the reception would be somewhat more enthusiastic than that provided.' "

It's standard practice, of course, for the novelist, even in completely naturalistic fiction, to allow characters a higher level of articulateness than they might plausibly possess; sometimes it's even necessary. Wright's characters, however, sound less like hyper-articulate abolitionists and yeomen than like stand-up comedians parodying the Royal House of Windsor. Here's another example, in which Liberty, still a boy in his teens, explains to a 12-year-old slave girl named Tempie that she's been set free:

" 'Tell me, how long have you been locked up like this?'

" 'Since before the war come.'

" 'Well, Tempie, I'm here to inform you that the house of bondage is thoroughly ablaze from cellar to ridgepole. The old haunted manse is coming down at last.' He caught her glancing anxiously upward, scanning the ceiling for tendrils of flame. 'No, no,' he tried to explain, 'not this house. The one I'm referring to is more of a verbal representation really, a sort of mental picture made up of words which aren't real but which stand for something that is real, in this case the entire institution of slavery which, of course, is not exactly a house either.' "

The term for art that trades in extremes of taste and plausibility is "camp." When Wright is sitting firmly in the saddle, The Amalgamation Polka reads like a cross between John Barth and John Waters, and is often entertaining; when he's not, it resembles a Victorian morality play by the over-excitable cult porn director Russ Meyers. My guess is that Wright himself, if asked to account for his excesses, would probably admit to them with pride. To quote a phrase attributed to P. T. Barnum, whose "Hall of Wonders" turns up in the novel: "Let them call me unreasonable if they must, but never, ever, let them call me boring."

Reviewed by John Wray
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Is it a curse or a blessing that the work of idiosyncratically original writers prompts the most divisive reviews? There's no preordained slot for Steven Wright (Going Native; Meditations in Green), so his fictions have to be read with an open mind and, perhaps, a predisposition for his "dark, hallucinatory world" (New York Times). The main point of dissension centers on whether Wright has balanced the strains of parody and the grotesque carefully enough. Critics also disagree about whether the author's verbal prowess, sometimes so powerful, overwhelms the story. In the end, with some critics' accolades set against others' criticisms, most critics are impressed enough by the author's accomplishment to warrant it a success.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Starred Review. The author of the Vietnam classic Meditation in Green (1983) here channels Liberty Fish, a fictional member of a real, still-prominent upstate New York family, for a gruesome Civil War picaresque à la Candide. Roxana Maury, the daughter of Carolinian slaveholders, turns against the "peculiar institution," disowns her parents, Asa and Ida and marries northerner Thatcher Fish, who shares her abolitionism. Their son Liberty is born in 1844, and his liberal education is enhanced by his parents, and the oddball metaphysicians and charlatans with whom they surround themselves. When war breaks out, Liberty joins up, participates in a series of horrific battles, deserts and travels South to his mother's ancestral home, Redemption Hall. There, he finds his grandfather, Asa, practicing ghastly homicidal experiments with his slaves. As Union forces approach, Asa abandons his invalid wife and more or less kidnaps Liberty, and the two ship aboard a blockade runner, bound for Nassau. Liberty functions more as Gump than protagonist, and ultimately learns Candide-like lessons through similarly unlikely adventures. Roxana's background and the (unconnected) doings of a curious Uncle Potter in Kansas occupy a large portion of the story; the grotesque piles on top of the macabre in depicting slavery; highly humorous banter flows throughout. This book, rich in an appropriately fatuous, overblown period style, is the morbidly comic counterpoint to Doctorow's The March.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Wright's tale of the growth and travels of Liberty Fish (a "moniker to choke a tyrant on"), son of passionate upstate New York abolitionists but drawn to his slaveholding extended family, is an unusually captivating modernist novel set during the Civil War. As a child, Liberty sees ghosts; as an adolescent, he escapes his military unit, eventually to end up aboard a pirate ship. Throughout, Wright portrays a strangely level young man, always idealistic and occasionally sharp-tongued amidst brutal, absurd circumstances. Like Wright's Going Native (1994),this book is, at its heart, a road novel in which encountered characters--like the one-eyed Euclid or the bizarre English captain Wallace--frequently overshadow the main ones. One senses, however, that Wright has more to say in this novel than in his previous ones. Although it's tempting to label the story Faulknerian for its setting and precise, if playful, prose, Liberty's resemblance to Huck Finn is too strong to ignore. Highly recommended. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The bearded ladies were dancing in the mud. Outsized country feet that just wouldn’t keep still, strutting and reeling all along that slippery stretch of flooded road. Yellow paste clung to the hems of their gowns, flecked sunburnt arms and whiskery cheeks, collected in thick earthen coins upon the lacy ruffles of their modest chests like a hero’s worth of medals artlessly arranged. A cold rain fell and continued to fall over the lost hills, the yet smoking fields, the rude, misshapen trees where light—vague and uncertain—struggled to furnish the day with the grainy quality of a fogged daguerreotype. And at the center of this dripping stillness these loud animated women without origin or explanation, refugees from a traveling circus perhaps, abandoned out of forgetfulness or deceit or simple spite, the improvised conclusion to some sorry affair of outrage and betrayal, and as they danced, they sang and reveled in the rain, porcelain pitchers of ripe applejack passing freely from hand to unwashed hand, the echo of their song sounding harshly across that desolate country:

Soupy, soupy, soupy, without any bean

Porky, porky, porky, without any lean

Coffee, coffee, coffee, without any cream

On a rise back of the road stood a tall white frame house with long white curtains flung twisted and sodden from the open windows. A solitary blackbird perched atop the brick chimney, its beaded prismatic head jerking mechanically about. Several emaciated hogs rooted with audible vigor among the stumps of broken furniture, the puddles of bright clothing littering the trampled yard. From out the shadowed doorway flew an enameled jewelry box, bouncing once, twice, and off into the weeds. Followed quickly by an English plate, a soiled pair of ripped pantaloons, a clanging case clock, an oval looking glass that vanished upon an upended table leg in a burst of twinkling confetti—the house methodically emptying itself out. A pregnant sow shifted its spotted flanks, then resumed gnawing at the gilded frame of a painting in the grand style of Washington and Cornwallis at Yorktown. A bearded lady appeared at the door bearing before her a magnificent rosewood chair, the ruby red brocade of its seat and arms mounting up in lurid flame. The hurled chair landed upright in the mud where it continued to burn, to reduce itself to skeletal blackness, to pure idea. The bearded lady watched, haloed in the fires now leaping madly behind her. Curds of gray smoke were crowding out from under the cedar shakes. The house began to make a great whooshing sound. Flakes of wet ash blew down out of an opal sky.

The figure was already running when the bearded ladies glimpsed it, rushing slantwise down the clay slope as if materialized in mid-stride out of some adjacent realm of unendurable horror and perpetual flight.

“It’s a nigger!” cried one of the ladies.

She was young and barefoot and clothed in woolen rags. The clear terror in her touched even them standing there astounded for once in their ruined fashions and waterlogged boots. They watched agape this sudden apparition go bounding up the road like a wild hare and as the size of her steadily diminished in the misting distance an unaccountable rage grew large among them. Without word or gesture they moved off as one in raucous pursuit. It was a remarkable sight. Splashing and howling, jostling for position like whipped racing ponies, all bobbing beards and bonnets, stumbling on petticoats, sliding belly down into the mire, they presented a spectacle of hermaphroditic frenzy such as few could imagine. In a moment they were strung out wheezing in the muck. All but one. Audacious in a poke bonnet and bombazine dress, she rapidly outdistanced the rest, she hounded her quarry, she ran like a mother possessed, in a fit of chastisement, hard on the heels of an impudent daughter. Over the near hill and down, up the far hill and gone.

When at last the others found them, they were fallen and half-buried in the melting loam of an eroded embankment, their partially clad bodies so slathered with mud as to be almost unrecognizable, ill-formed creatures who had failed some evolutionary test. The bearded lady was settled in between the girl’s thin bare shanks and well into her work, the bonnet wadded fiercely into the girl’s bleed- ing mouth, a crude brand of the letter D gleaming on the lady’s exposed cheek. The girl’s eyes were closed. She might have been unconscious. The stragglers stood about in an uneasy huddle, turning to study now and again the dreary emptiness of the road, the earth, the sky, waiting like patient cattle in the rain, the tattered remnants of contemporary finery hiked to their armpits, buttons undone on the filthy breeches beneath, waiting politely in turn, their pink manhood carelessly exposed. Someone belched; another laughed. Soon the last of the pale light would draw off into the pine hills, shielding from hostile eyes the occupations of these costumed shapes in a starless obscurity, in the cloaked freedom of the night.

There was a gorilla in the White House and a long-tailed mulatto presiding over the Senate chamber and the dreams of the Republic were dark and troubling.

He was born in the fall of the time at the end of time. The signs were plain for all with an eye to read: the noonday passage the previous spring of a great comet—“the marvel of the age!”—the swift echelons of croaking blackbirds flocking north for the winter, the collapse of the revival tent up in Rochester where, miraculously, not a single soul was harmed. Cows walked backward through the meadows; well water turned overnight into vinegar. Surely the advent of eternity was at hand. The vine was about to be reaped.

At dusk on the evening of October 22, 1844 (the date deter- mined by the divine computations of an ex-sheriff and self-taught biblical scholar), the ascension-robed faithful gathered anxiously in churches and meetinghouses, along rooftops, the branches of trees and out upon high desolate hillsides—the nearer to glory—hymns and prayers keeping them through the final chill hours of that long last day until, instead of the Bridegroom, there appeared in the eastern sky the tentative kindling of just another dawn, proof that, for now, time would have no end, the body no release, and outside Delphi, New York, the disappointed crowd, waistcoat watches ticking steadfastly on, descended the knoll out of Briarwood Cemetery past the leafless, unscorched elms, the cold, unharrowed graves and into the welcoming arms of no company of saints but a taunting, unredeemed mob from town brandishing brickbats and stones.

So the trials of America were not to be so speedily concluded. Hours more must be drowned in sin, the sun darkened to a seal of pitch, before God would deliver this errant nation from the wickedness of history.

Nine days later Liberty Fish was born.

His mother, Roxana, did not expect to survive the occasion, the birthing chair having served all too often as a makeshift gallows for women of the family, carrying off Grammy Bibb, several faceless cousins, a favorite aunt with dimples deep enough for planting and her eldest sister, Aurore, the blonde darling of Stono County, who stoically kneaded at her bedclothes for three frightful days before producing a male nonesuch that Father hastily wrapped in red flannel and buried in an unmarked hole behind the smokehouse on the morning she died, crying out at the end in a mystic guttural tongue none understood or recognized. Passage to that Good Land seemed to be neither fair nor fleet. The moment Roxana realized she was growing a baby she understood immediately what she must do: prepare herself like a warrior on the eve of battle. She had read The Iliad in the original Greek at the age of sixteen; she knew what was required.

The annunciatory instant, as clear to her now as present vision, occurred as she stood defiantly in the pulpit of the Pleasance Street Methodist Church in Utica, struggling to lift her modest voice above the clanging, the braying, the whistling, the clapping of the protest- ing horde outside. She had just finished reciting the Declaration of Independence—amazing the ardor those few simple words could still arouse almost seventy years later—when a boyish, moon-faced man in a rusty black coat climbed atop a pew and, shouting above the clamor of fists drumming angrily upon the walls, inquired of Roxana whether he could approach and feel her chin for evidence of a beard. A dozen men rose in outraged objection, and as Roxana waited patiently for the commotion to subside—a small, still figure at the eye of her nation’s storm—she felt an unmistakable flutter of ghostly deli-cacy, a kind of spiritual hiccough, pass hastily through her frame, and at once she knew: a skull had begun to swell between her hips.

“Nonsense,” declared her sister-in-law, Aroline. “No one’s departing this household just yet, as long as I have any say in the matter.”

“But I want this child,” Roxana said in her soft drawl that always struck Aroline’s northern ears as the sound a cloud might make if it could talk.

“And so you shall, my dear, and many more besides.”

The thought depleted Roxana. Did she truly want even this one? She fell into a prolonged and uncharacteristic period of distraction. Days came and went, but she was no longer a passenger. The most trivial tasks eluded her. The careless placement of a spoon or cup on the kitchen table, a particular patch of sunstruck wallpaper, acquired a mesmeric fascination. She could lose herself for hours (and go she knew not where) in the view from her bedroom window, the barren hills lying motionless in the bleak February light like a corpse spraw...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067945117X
• ISBN 13: 9780679451174
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304