Gob's Grief: A Novel [Paperback]

Unlike many a novelist, Chris Adrian isn't intimidated by history. Indeed, he treats historical events as raw material, to be reshaped and reconfigured through the processes of the imagination. It's an endeavor that would please Walt Whitman, one of the central characters in this challenging debut, Gob's Grief. Nor is the good gray poet the only "real" character--both Abraham Lincoln and radical feminist Victoria Woodhull put in appearances, giving an extra twist of verisimilitude to Adrian's rendering of America circa 1863, where the Civil War rages and the dead proliferate like weeds.

Gob's Grief opens with the story of Tomo, the fictional son of Woodhull. At age 11, he dreams of escaping Homer, Ohio, to join the fighting. Unable to convince his twin brother, Gob, to accompany him, Tomo finally sets out alone and is promptly killed by a bullet through the skull. His twin never recovers from this loss. In thrall to his grief, Gob grows up to become a doctor, dedicating himself to healing the war's wounded. And by night, he toils away at a more unlikely corrective: a time machine that will eradicate death and bring back all the lost soldiers. His sidekick in this project is none other than Whitman, who shares his desire to resurrect those millions of departed souls: "Their marvelous passion would go out from them in waves, transforming time, history, and destiny, unmurdering Lincoln, unfighting the war, unkilling all the six hundred thousand."

Gob's Grief is an ambitious and occasionally convoluted story, which remains true to the stubborn mysticism of thinkers like Whitman and Woodhull. Cutting back and forth between characters and historical moments, Adrian never pretends to retrospective detachment. Indeed, his novel will appeal to fans of John Dos Passos or E.L. Doctorow--writers who borrow from history but repay their debt in the form of fictional insight. --Ellen Williams --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Blending history and fiction in the tradition of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, this skillfully imagined first novel follows Walt Whitman as the poet unwittingly aids the son of early radical feminist Victoria Woodhull in constructing a machine to bring back the Civil War dead; indeed, to abolish death altogether. While he is mourning a young soldier who dies in his care, Walt is directed by a message from the dead man to befriend Victoria's son, Dr. George Washington Woodhull, better known as Gob, on a stagecoach in 1868. In 1863, Gob's twin brother, Tomo, ran away to war and was killed. Wracked by guilt at having let his brother go off alone, Gob strikes a bargain with "a mad hedge wizard" known as the Urfeist, who agrees to teach Gob to "defeat death." Will Fie, who has also lost a brother, is compelled by restless spirits to join Gob's cause; wild boy Pickie Beecher, the first product of Gob's labors, calls the machine his brother; Gob's love, Maci Trufant, receives scribbled pleas from her own dead brother, who has seized control of her left hand. The story is repeated from each new character's vantage--gentle, disbelieving Walt is the most sympathetically crafted narrator--and though this allows for an admirably meticulous plot, it hampers the pacing and distances the reader from the difficult, unusual characters. Much like Gob's creation, the novel is a collection of fabulous parts in need of a heart to power them, yet impressing as a flight of fancy. (Jan. 16)from which this novel stemmed, was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1998.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Adrian's novel was reborn from a story that first appeared in The New Yorker in 1997, just as in the novel itself an 11-year-old bugler, Tomo, killed during the battle of Chickamauga, is reborn from a machine designed by his grief-stricken twin brother, Gob, in the years following the Civil War. It is difficult to categorize this fantastical tale of the obsession, longing, and madness that comes with war and its aftermath. Gob and Tomo are the fictional sons of a real woman, 19th-century suffragette Victoria Woodhull, who is fairly rendered. Yet for all the accuracy, this is anything but a historical novel. As indicated earlier, its basic premise involves the construction of a machine to bring back the Civil War dead. The blurring of the lines between reality and madness is made most abundantly clear in the story of Maci Trufant, Gob's love, who also lost a brother to the war. Her left hand becomes a vehicle through which he speaks, while her right hand continues to write speeches for Woodhull. Highly imaginative, this is a "large," complex, thought-provoking work sure to arouse much discussion. Most public libraries will want at least one copy, as will academic libraries collecting new and/or experimental fiction.
-DDavid W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

English poet and critic Alvarez, who is best known for The Savage God (1972)--which combines a study of suicide and Sylvia Plath with an account of his own attempt to take his life--now has written another, far different memoir, attempting to explain where it all went right in his life. He begins with his childhood as the sickly son of deeply unhappy parents. Alvarez courted danger as a way of overcoming his infirmities and found in the "deadly ballet" of the Battle of Britain--Messerschmitts and Spifires dancing and dueling across the London sky--an image of beauty and risk that would never leave him. And, yet, poetry and the literary life were his first loves as an adult, and he describes the excitement of his early successes at Oxford and as poetry critic at the Observer ("a fresh young tadpole in the puddle of poetry"). Profiles of his mentors, including V. S. Pritchett and R. P. Blackmur, as well as descriptions of his encounters with Auden, Berryman, Lowell, Hughes, and Plath are acutely perceptive and full of rich anecdote. Those Spitfires still dancing in his mind's eye, however, Alvarez abandoned the literary life to indulge his "fascination with how other people function." Soon he was writing about poker players, rock climbers, and North Sea oil drillers, seeing for himself "the world of action, where people take real risks with their bodies or machinery or money." And escaping his father's fate, a man "who had spent his life in a business he didn't care for and had never been anywhere." The best memoirs always go beyond anecdote to give us the shape of a life. Free-falling between art and action, between despair and exhilaration, Alvarez struggled to find a shape for his conflicted life, and we share his surprise and his joy that it all went right. A remarkable book about a remarkable life. Adrian's very adept first novel has its provenance in a short story called "Every Night for a Thousand Years," which the author published in 1997 and which now serves as a chapter in this novel. Adrian blends two fictional techniques, in a mesmerizing combination, by taking the kind of authentic Civil War-era historical fiction made popular by Charles Frazier's 1997 prizewinning Cold Mountain and wedding it to the provocative, reality-bending tendencies found in magic realism. Victoria Woodhull was a famous American feminist and suffragette in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Adrian invents a son for her, nicknamed Gob, who becomes a physician after the end of the awful war between the Union and the Confederacy. His main interest lies in building a machine that will bring his young brother, Tomo, who was killed in the fighting, back to life. Gob is a friend of the famous poet Walt Whitman and also becomes friends with a young man who worked as a photographer's apprentice during the war. Also populating Gob's world are spiritual beings, for Mrs. Woodhull's entourage is sensitive to paying attention to what the spiritual world has to say. As one character says, "By May of 1862, it seemed . . . that madness had become the national pastime." Displaying both talent and knowledge, Adrian captures the very tenor of that national madness in the pages of this completely compelling novel. Reviews will be positive, as will word of mouth, so expect demand. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

“Impressive…. So much more ambitious and profound than most contemporary American fiction.” –The Washington Post

“A masterpiece of retrospective mythology…. Adrian hasn’t just reimagined or reenacted this time of national crisis; he’s managed to relive it through his characters.”–Walter Kirn, GQ

“Remarkable…. Utterly different. A work unlike any that has come before it.”–The Economist

“Unlike many first time novelists, Adrian takes great risks here. He brings to life scores of historical figures, from Walt Whitman to Abe Lincoln, with a startling ease and grace. More remarkable, however, is his ability to inspire sympathy for–even faith in–Gob’s mission.” –Time Out New York

“Remarkable . . . utterly different. A work unlike any that has come before it.” –The Economist

In the summer of 1863, Gob and Tomo Woodhull, eleven-year-old twin sons of Victoria Woodhull, agree to together forsake their home and family in Licking County, Ohio, for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their departure for the war, Gob suffers a change of heart, and Tomo is forced to leave his brother behind. Tomo falls in as a bugler with the Ninth Ohio Volunteers and briefly revels in camp life; but when he is shot clean through the eye in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later come to fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo–indeed, all the Civil War dead–back to life.
Epic in scope yet emotionally intimate, Gob’s Grief creates a world both fantastic and familiar and populates it with characters who breath on the page, capturing the spirit of a fevered nation populated with lost brothers and lost souls.

“Impressive…. So much more ambitious and profound than most contemporary American fiction.” –The Washington Post

“A masterpiece of retrospective mythology…. Adrian hasn’t just reimagined or reenacted this time of national crisis; he’s managed to relive it through his characters.”–Walter Kirn, GQ

“Remarkable…. Utterly different. A work unlike any that has come before it.”–The Economist

“Unlike many first time novelists, Adrian takes great risks here. He brings to life scores of historical figures, from Walt Whitman to Abe Lincoln, with a startling ease and grace. More remarkable, however, is his ability to inspire sympathy for–even faith in–Gob’s mission.” –Time Out New York

“Remarkable . . . utterly different. A work unlike any that has come before it.” –The Economist

Chris Adrian’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Story and in Best American Short Stories. Currently a medical student, he lives in San Francisco.

1

Walt dreamed his brother's death at Fredericksburg. General Burnside, appearing as an angel at the foot of his bed, announced the tragedy: "The army regrets to inform you that your brother, George Washington Whitman, was shot in the head by a lewd fellow from Charleston." The general alit on the bedpost and drew his dark wings close about him, as if to console himself. Moonlight limned his strange whiskers and his hair. His voice shook as he went on. "Such a beautiful boy. I held him in my arms while his life bled out. See? His blood made this spot." He pointed at his breast, where a dark stain in the shape of a bird lay on the blue wool. "I am so very sorry," the General said, choking and weeping. Tears fell in streams from his eyes, ran over the bed and out the window, where they joined the Rappahannock, which had somehow come north to flow through Brooklyn, bearing the bodies of all the late battle's dead.

In the morning Walt read the wounded list in the Tribune. There it was: "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore." He knew from George's letters that there was nobody named Whitmore in the company. He walked through snow to his mother's house. "I'll go and find him," he told her.

Washington, Walt quickly discovered, had become a city of hospitals. He looked in half of them before a cadaverous-looking clerk told him he'd be better off looking at Falmouth, where most of the Fredericksburg wounded still lay in field hospitals. He got himself on a government boat that ran down to the landing at Aquia Creek, and went by railroad to the neighborhood of Falmouth, seeking Ferrero's Brigade and the Fifty-first New York, George's regiment. Walt stood outside a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, somebody's splendid residence converted to a hospital, afraid to go in and find his mangled brother. He took a walk around the building, gathering his courage, and found a pile of amputated limbs, arms and legs of varying lengths, all black and blue and rotten in the chill. A thin layer of snow covered some of them. He circled the heap, thinking he must recognize his brother's hand if he saw it. He closed his eyes and considered the amputation; his brother screaming when he woke from the ether, his brother's future contracting to something bitter and small.

But George had only gotten a hole in his cheek. A piece of shell pierced his wispy beard and chipped a tooth. He had spit blood and hot metal into his hand, put the shrapnel in his pocket, and later showed it to his worried brother, who burst into tears and clutched him in a bear hug when they were reunited in Captain Francis's tent, where George sat with his feet propped on a trunk and a cigar stuck in his bandaged face.

"You shouldn't fret," said George. "I couldn't be any healthier than I am. And I've been promoted. Now you may call me Captain Whitman." But Walt could not help fretting, even now that he knew his brother was alive and well. A great, fretting buzz had started up in his head, inspired by the pile of limbs, and the smell of blood in the air, and by ruined Fredericksburg, all broken chimneys and crumbling walls across the river. Walt stayed in George's tent and, watching him sleep, felt a deep thrilling worry. He wandered around the camp, and as he passed by a fire in an enclosure of evergreen branches piled head high against the wind, he met a soldier. They sat down together by the fire, and the soldier told Walt hideous stories about the death of friends. "He put his head in my lap and whispered goodbye to his mama," the soldier said. "And then he turned his eyes away from me and he was dead." Walt put his face in the evergreen wall, smearing his beard with fresh sap, and thought how it smelled like Christmas.

Ten days later, Walt still couldn't leave. He stood by and watched as George moved out with the healthy troops on Christmas Day, then idled in the deserted campground, watching the interminable caravans of army wagons passing and passing into the distance. Near at hand, some stragglers crossed his line of sight--a large young man leading a mule that pulled a wagon, on top of which perched a fat man cursing in French. When all were gone, and the campground empty, Walt went up to the brick mansion and made himself useful, changing dressings, fetching for the nurses, and just sitting with the wounded boys, with the same excited worry on him as when he watched George sleep. Back in Brooklyn a deep and sinister melancholy had settled over him. For the past six months Walt had wandered the streets with a terrible feeling in him--Hell under his skull bones, death under his breast bones, and a feeling that he would like most of all to lie down under the river and sleep forever. But in the hospital that melancholy was gone, scared off, perhaps, by all the shocking misery around him, and it had been replaced by a different sort of sadness, one that was vital, not still; a feeling that did not diminish his soul, but thrilled it.

When Walt finally left Falmouth, it was to watch over a cargo of wounded as they traveled through the early-morning darkness back to Aquia Creek, where they would be loaded on a steamer bound for Washington. With every jolt and shake of the train, a chorus of horrible groans wafted through the cars. Walt thought it would drive him insane. What saved him was the singing of a boy with a leg wound. The boy's name was Hank Smith. He'd come all the way from divided Missouri, and said he had a gaggle of cousins fighting under General Beauregard. He sang "Oh, Susannah" over and over again, and no one told him to be quiet.

All the worst cases went to a hospital called Armory Square, because it was closest to the boat landing at the foot of Sixth Street. Walt accompanied them, and kept up the service he'd begun at Falmouth--visiting, talking, reading, fetching, and helping.

And he went to other hospitals. There were certainly enough of them to keep him busy. Their names were published in the papers like a list of churches--Finley, Campbell, Carver, Harewood, Mount Pleasant, Judiciary. And then there were the public buildings, also stuffed with wounded. Even the Patent Office held them; boys on cots set up on the marble floor of the Model Room. He brought horehound candy to an eighteen-year-old from Iowa, who lay with a missing arm and a sore throat in front of the glass case which held Ben Franklin's printing press. Two boys from Brooklyn had cots in front of General Washington's camp equipment. Walt read to them from Brooklyn papers his mother sent down, every now and then looking up at the General's tents rolled neatly around their posts, his folded chairs and mess kit, his sword and cane, his washstand, his surveyor's compass, and a few feet down in a special case all to itself, the Declaration of Independence. Other wounded boys lay in front of pieces of the Atlantic Cable, beside ingenious toys, in sight of rattraps, next to the razor of Captain Cook.

Walt could not visit every place all in a day, though he tried at first. Eventually, he picked a few and stuck with those. But mostly he was at Armory Square, where Hank Smith was.

"I had my daddy's pistol with me," said Hank Smith, sprawling in his slender iron-framed bed. "That's why I got my leg still." It wasn't the first time Walt had been told how Hank had saved his own leg from the "chopping butchers" in the field hospital, but he didn't mind hearing the story again. It was spring. The leg was still bad, though not as bad as it had been. At least that was the impression that Hank gave. He never complained about his wound. He'd come down with typhoid, too, a gift from the hospital. "I want my pistol back," he said.

"I'll see what I can do." Walt always said that, but they both knew no one was going to give Hank back the pistol with which he'd threatened to blow out the brains of the surgeon who tried to take his leg. They had left him alone, then, and later another doctor had said there wasn't any need to amputate.

"Meanwhile, here's an orange," said Walt. He pulled the fruit out of his coat pocket and peeled it. Soldiers' heads began to turn in their beds as the smell drifted over the ward. Some asked if he had any for them.

" 'Course he does," said Hank. In fact, Walt had a coatful of them. He had bought them at Center Market, then walked through the misty, wet morning, over the brackish canal and across the filthy Mall. The lowing of cattle drifted towards him from the unfinished monument to General Washington as he walked along, wanting an orange for himself but afraid to eat one lest he be short when he got to the hospital. He had money for oranges, sweets, books, tobacco, and other good things from sponsors in Brooklyn and New York and elsewhere. And he had a little money for himself from a job, three hours a day as a copyist in the paymaster's office--he'd given up, for the present, on seeking a fancier appointment, put away in a drawer the letters of introduction to powerful personages from Mr. Emerson. From his desk in the paymaster's office, he had a spectacular view of Georgetown and the river, and the stones that were said to mark the watery graves of three Indian sisters. The sisters had cursed the spot: anyone who tried to cross there must drown. Walt would sit and stare at the rocks, imagining himself shedding his shirt and shoes by the riverside, trying to swim across. He imagined drowning, too, the great weight of water pressing down on him. (When he was a child, he'd nearly drowned in the sea.) Inevitably, his reverie was broken by the clump-clump of one-legged soldiers on their crutches, coming up the stairs to the office located, perversely, on the fourth floor.

After he'd distributed the oranges, Walt wrote letters on behalf of various boys until his hand ached. Dear Sister, he wrote for Hank, I have been brave but wicked. Pray for me.

Armory Square was under the command of a brilliant drunk named Canning Woodh...