A postmodern portrait of President Lincoln

Mr. Lincoln's Wars: A Novel in
Tltirteen Stories
by Adam Braver
2003, William Morrow
Hardcover, $23.95

In the 1980s and 1990s the relatively stable edifice of History was shaken by the seismic shock waves or such new methodologies as New 1 listory, Psychohistory, and Postmodernism. Generally, these philosophies tended to stress cultural diversity and class-consciousness, upsetting many comfortable assumptions about the basic stories of Western Civilization. Columbus, for example, was no longer revered as the discoverer of the New World but was recast as the villain who introduced venereal disease to 1 lispaniola. Many of the towering giants, such as Shakespeare, Washington, Jefferson, and F.D.R., were showcased with all their warts and sometimes dismissed as "dead white men. These iconolastic readings-- or misreadings-- even blurred the distinction between academic history and creative writing, as shown by Gore Vidal's Lincoln and Richard Slotkin's Abe. As the new millennium approached, fresh voices were being heard, and interesting approaches were being tried, sometimes with brilliant results, as in the Lincoln scholarship of Doug Wilson and Michael Burlingame.

The work of contemporary short-story writer Adam Braver fits nicely into this overview of recent historical approaches because he writes (for the most part) with a careful eye on Lincoln scholarship, beginning each story with a Lincoln quotation, while simultaneously breaking many of the rules of traditional story-telling. For starters, it is hard to pin down the precise genre of his daring and fascinating first book, Mr. Lincoln's Wars: A Novel in Thirteen Stories (William Morrow, 2003). The thirteen chapters are radically uneven in length, ranging from a lew pages devoted to the poignant final story "A Rainy Night in Springfield, Illinois-- 1849" to nearly a hundred pages for the novella-like tale, "The Necropsy," in which Braver shifts back and forth like a film director between the stoiy of John Wilkes Booth, the autopsy of Lincoln, including the painfully dramatic scene when surgeons chisel and saw into the slain president's skull, and the cameo appearances of Orville Browning, before and after the assassination. Mr. Lincoln's Wars, thus, is neither traditional history nor traditional narrative. It is a kind of tragic Civil W4ir opera, with a few famous characters singing their arias (Stanton, Browning, Booth, Abe, and Maty), all somehow addressing the crushing sadness of Willie Lincoln's death, which runs like a leitmotif through all the scenes. Braver opens the book with "No More Time for Tears," a scene occurring in the spring of 1865, three years after the death of beloved Willie, a length of time that underscores the lingering aftermath of his death. Mary still refuses to eat, bitterly curses the president, and resorts to racist invective. "You gonna go kiss some nigger babies now?" The grief and pain behind her outbursts are shared by Lincoln, who can t sleep and is given to long, rambling discussions with the various low-life and ordinary characters who populate the book. There is a great deal of talking in this book as Lincoln interacts with soldiers, mental patients, undertakers, politicians, and the Washington citizenry. One of those everyday people is Seth Jackson, narrator of "The Undertaker's Assistant," who recounts a strange conversation he once had with Abe about Willie's death. Seth Jackson prepared both bodies for their final rest. Using a razor, he slit the pant's legs down the back and draped them over the front of the legs to show his respect and maintain some sense of decorum. He was in awe of the sacred bodies, touching them as little as possible.

In "The Ward," Lincoln has another long conversation on the subject of Willie's death. This time the exchange occurs in Central Park in New York City with a mental patient named Albert, who has received a letter from Lincoln informing him of his son's death in action. Lincoln decides to accept responsibility for all the deaths in the war, and he understands Willie's death is part of his atonement. One of the strangest exchanges takes the form of a letter written by the abused wife of a dead soldier. As an act of spiteful revenge, she seduces the young soldier who arrives on her doorstep to relay the news of her husband's death. Her letter is atypically graphic for this period, but she seeks Lincoln's approval and understanding anyhow ("A Letter to President Lincoln from a Good Girl").

Pushing the envelope of acceptability is one of Braver's stylistic traits, part of his postmodern legacy. In like manner, the story "On to the Next Field," briefly but powerfully dramatizes Lincoln holding the hand of an unfortunate boy whose leg was being sawed off by an overworked surgeon. "The Willie Grief," one of the best tales, allows Braver to continue his focus

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Even the most casual reader will be jarred by Braver's postmodern ear for the language of the streets. The author transcribes a great deal of profanity in the book, none of it inappropriate, and all of it contributing to the gritty and sad spectacle that the last weeks of the war presented to everyone. "Sonabitch' seemed to be the all-purpose expletive, frequently on the lips of soldiers and statesmen alike. Perhaps the most colorful narrator in the book, Crybaby Jack in "Crybaby Jack's Theory," is a fifteen-year-old groom who helps to clean and curry the presidential stable of horses. The job has a certain status, after all, because it brings his closer to presidential power. Jack observes sardonically that "picking three-month-old shit out of the ass of a horse was considered patriotism." But it is Crybaby Jack who correctly predicts the plot to assassinate the president.

Some readers of this important book will note Braver's occasional historical lapses-- his depiction of Lincoln as a consumer of alcohol and morphine, for example. Everyone, however, who enters this grim and rainy Washington of 1865 will believe and empathize with Lincoln when he remarks to Browning, "This is me on my way to dying."

Dan Guillory

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