Electric City

August 18, 2014
In her structurally flawed multigenerational tale, Rosner (Blue Nude) explores the history of "Electric City," the New York town along the Mohawk River where Thomas Edison chose to relocate Edison Machine Works (later General Electric), his research and manufacturing enterprise "that would light up the world." The bulk of the novel alternates between two eras of the company town. The first begins in 1919 and focuses on Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a physically deformed mathematician known as the "Wizard of Electric City." Steinmetz is conducting cutting-edge research on manmade lightning generators while developing a spiritually rewarding friendship with a Native American named Joseph Longboat. The narrative then switches to the latter half of the 1960s when the company embarks on series of layoffs that harbinger Electric City's decline. We meet Sophie Levine, a high school student whose Dutch-Jewish father works for the famous company begins a romance with Henry Van Curler, the privileged son of a storied Electric City family. Sophie is also intrigued by Martin Longboat, the rebellious grandson of Joseph Longboat who is interested in Steinmetz's life and works. The novel fails to achieve a balance between the earnest but stale teenage love story and the portrait of Steinmetz, which is informative but often dramatically inert. Throughout, the writing is flooded with countless electrical metaphors, which generate thematic unity if not a particularly galvanizing tale.

August 15, 2014
Rosner (Blue Nude, 2006, etc.) draws on the immigrant experience of Charles Porteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady, as the background to a coming-of-age novel.The novel starts off in 1919 exploring Steinmetz's work at "The Company" in Electric City (think General Electric in Schenectady) and the great scientist's friendship with Joseph Longboat, a Mohawk. Later, the story takes up the lives of Sophie Levine, Henry Van Curler, and Martin Longboat, Joseph's grandson. Sophie's parents escaped from Holland, their families consumed by the Holocaust. Henry, surviving scion of the region's first settlers, copes with disconnected parents grieving the accidental death of an older son. Martin, like his grandfather, is a gentle soul attuned to nature. In 1965, the three are approaching the end of their high school years. An unlikely romance begins between Sophie and Henry. That love doesn't shut out Martin, but he "had no idea what to offer when a girl aimed her heart away from him." Later, as the three lark about ice skating, Henry falls through the ice and drowns. Sophie and Martin each suffer differently. "Losses were the exact size of sorrows left unspoken." With deft descriptions, Rosner sketches the bustling city, on land long cherished by aboriginal culture, which grew and flourished as whites invaded and industrialized. The narrative is woven through with symbolic allusions; for instance, the characters' personal losses are mirrored by the physical decline of the once-vibrant city after bottom line-obsessed managers begin sending jobs overseas-"Electric City was being disconnected, unplugged from its own socket." Rosner's best work, however, is developing the characters of the three young people-Henry, tentative, suppressed, dead before he had a chance to flourish; Sophie, gutted by Henry's death, turning every energy to the study of medicine; and Martin, haunted by the oppression of his people and choosing Canada over the Vietnam draft. Rosner offers a gentle meditation on love and loss: "Rivers, oceans, the passing of molecules back and forth, darkness into brilliance and then gone."

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September 1, 2014
Just as the convergence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers allowed Electric City to exist, so, too, do Henry Van Curler, Martin Longboat, and Sophie Levine form the nexus of the past, present, and future of this once-mighty corporate town. The scion of the area's original Dutch settlers, a descendantof the Native American assistant to one of the founders of the town's electric company, and the daughter of immigrants who fled the Holocaust, the teens develop a tentative, improbable, yet enduring friendship in the mid-1960s as the town and its globally influential power company fall on hard times. Weaving the historical narrative of real-life manufacturing wizard Charles Steinmetz with the personal dramas facing Henry, Martin, and Sophie as they confront economic devastation, the Vietnam War, and the impact both have on their private desires and ambitions, Rosner's (Blue Nude, 2006) richly imagined historical novel vividly conveys an abiding sense of time and place. A deeplyevocative paean to the wonders of science, the perils of technology, and the sacrifices of people in thrall to their power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)