ABE
A NOVEL OF THE YOUNG LINCOLN
By Richard Slotkin
478 pp. New York:
Henry Holt. $27.50
By
KEVIN BAKER
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel
"Dreamland."
Sometimes
an author comes up with an idea so simple, yet so brilliant and
unprecedented in its simplicity, that it seems like a little bit
of genius. Such is the case with Richard Slotkin and Abe, a novel
about the first 23 years in the life of Abraham Lincoln.
This
not promising terrain for any novelist. No other American president’s
life has been so thoroughly worked over. What’s more, it
was a life that was so astounding, so much larger than life, that
Lincoln has become our secular folk-saint. Just what is left to
embroider?
The
genius behind Abe is Slotkin’s decision to focus on one of
the early, almost mythological events of Lincoln’s early
life—that is, his trip down the Mississippi on a flatboat,
during which he was widely exposed to slavery for the first time.
A raw, barefoot boy, learning about life—and race—on
a raft on the Mississippi. Ring any bells?
Slotkin,
a professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University, and the
author of several prominent works of frontier history and two
previous novels, makes the association between Lincoln and Huck
Finn quite consciously—and successfully. This is due in no
small part to the fact that he is a bold, creative, and often
brilliant writer. Just as he manages to weave Huck into Abe, Prof.
Slotkin works the young Lincoln’s words, thoughts, dialect
and society seamlessly into his objective descriptions. At its
best, this is a technique that reaches nearly Faulknerian heights.
Take, for instance, his opening description of the toddler Lincoln
waiting for his mother to read to him: "Her long fingers,
big-knuckled with flattened tips like tongues, moved on the face
of the page, and the spots and whirls and flashes, black on white,
flowed out of them (very soon now) black spots and squibbets,
and just as it always, always happened the flow of spots made
her voice come: the telling voice, reading voice, the voice he
loved more than anything: the voice only for him, in the dark,
licked all over with orange tongues, flowing…"
It
helps, too, that Slotkin is adept at conveying the hardship and
precariousness of life on the American frontier. The sheer variety
of experiences Lincoln had and the things he had to know, even
as a young man—how to plough, clear a field of trees, hunt,
fight, build a fence, build a boat, and navigate a river—seem
particularly amazing in an election season full of lifelong politicians,
retired athletes, and famous sons. Slotkin is even better at depicting
the awesomeness of the American landscape, the "black wall
of trees" that greet young Abe’s family as his ne’er-do-well
father leads them ever farther west. Again and again, Slotkin
uses this natural world to captivate the reader, whether it be
in the massacre of an enormous, rather terrifying pigeon-roost,
or in his many, marvelous descriptions of navigating on the treacherous,
ever-shifting Mississippi.
Like
so many parts of Lincoln’s early life, there has been much
written about the two different trips he took down the river but
little that is really known for sure. Slotkin has combined them
into one trip, with two partners—and a slave named Sephus
whom young Abe rescues from the river and who may be more or less
than what he seems. Along the way to New Orleans there is time
for both lessons and adventures, and if it isn’t quite as
good a yarn as Huck’s story, well then, what is? There are
encounters with the Frances Wright and her utopian community that
go on a little too long and for too little purpose, and it’s
perhaps too much to have Abe encounter both Junius Booth, father
of his eventual assassin, and Judge Joseph Davis, older brother
of Jefferson.
Yet even they make the larger point that Lincoln’s America,
for all its vast geographical dimensions, was still a relatively
small country—a fact that would magnify the tragedy of the
Civil War. And if Slotkin’s Lincoln is perhaps too often
the one to pull out everybody’s bacon, well, consider what
a prodigious force of nature the actual Lincoln must have been—the
railsplitter, with his immense physical strength; growing up in
log cabins (or worse), learning to read and write on a shovel
in the light from the fireplace. Our ultimate autodidact, able
to make himself from nothing into a lawyer, a legislator—a
president.
Slotkin’s
Abe begins as a folding in—of Abe into Huck, of our stone
Lincoln into the natural environment he sprung from. It ends as
a separating out, as Lincoln separates himself from his domineering
father; separates out what it is he wants from life from what
he doesn’t, what he will accept or reject from all the many
codes he encounters—the Bible, the official law (which countenances
slavery, among other things), the code of survival in his frontier
society. Abe is an immensely rich, satisfying coming-of-age story,
an engrossing tale that leaves one wishing Prof. Slotkin would
go on, right to the end of this uniquely American myth.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
