The Amalgamation Polka

Wright squeezes nearly every feature of the nineteenth-century novel into this fat sausage of a book. Narrator Michael Emerson would be commended if he had merely gotten through it all without stumbling, but his flawless, controlled delivery becomes the thread for this rambunctious tale of a boy growing up with abolitionist parents and slave-owning grandparents. A pirate in upstate New York? This story has one. North and South, politics and war vie together in this story, and Wright's allusive and heavily alliterative style may not be every listener's cup of tea. But once Emerson's steady delivery carries one through the early chapters, Wright's recreation of the moral controversy over slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War is compelling. D.A.W. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 21, 2005
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
.