Of all the good historical fiction I've read this year, John Ehle's The Land Breakers is the best. It's a gripping, comprehensive saga of the early Anglo settlement of an Appalachian valley in present-day North Carolina. It reads like Little House on the Prairie, only for an adult audience. Ehle doesn't spare complicated details like slavery, sexual tension, and colonization. He also doesn't moralize: the colonists' behavior ranges from inspiring to deplorable. Somehow, the narrative effectively drifts around, shifting close third-person perspectives, to encompass a large group of people while also giving us one sympathetic protagonist: the remarkable Mooney Wright. Highest recommendations for this tremendous novel.
One of the most popular books in the decade I grew up in was John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I hadn't read it until last month. It's a true-crime story set in Savannah, Georgia. Like its spooky title, the text is redolent of the Southern Gothic genre: full of gentility, ghosts, and decay. While undeniably entertaining, this book pushes through the limits of "nonfiction." In the afterward, Berendt freely admits to changing the order of events, and (some of) his long-winded characters attest that his account is (more or less) true. This is clear throughout the text--a lot of the dialogue is crafted exposition that no real person would ever actually say. Despite that, the book is flowery and decadent, colorful and depraved. I quickly read the story, interested in its outcomes, but it felt a bit empty, and manipulative, on the whole.
The Pueblo Revolt by David Roberts, on the other hand, feels very real. Here we have a fascinating writer (Jon Krakauer's old professor and mentor) doing his damndest to make sense of a historical aberration. In 1680, the Puebloans of New Mexico coordinated a single-day revolt that drove all Spanish colonists out of their land. For the next twelve years, they lived free from European occupation. This type of indigenous power had never--and would never again--been exercised in North America. Despite its notoriety, historical records are notoriously sparse about the details of this event. Roberts travels throughout the region--examining pueblo ruins and trying to ingratiate himself with remaining tribes--only to encounter silence. For understandable reasons, modern Native Americans are tight-lipped about sharing their oral tradition with outsiders. Somewhere, there is a rich, complex narrative about the Pueblo Revolt, but Roberts was never able to actually attain it. I sympathize. I picked up the book at a visitor center about 20 miles south of Taos, on a recent trip to New Mexico. An Anglo outsider, I am deeply moved by the landscape and history of the Land of Enchantment. But due to its persistent violence and exploitation (the descriptions of the Spanish are harrowing), I have not inherited a right to those stories.
