A novel based on the family of John Wilkes Booth explores the passions and disagreements inside one family — and the country.
"Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler; G.P. Putnam's Sons (480 pages, $28)
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Karen Joy Fowler, best known for her very different novels "The Jane Austen Book Club" and "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," goes in yet another direction with "Booth," and it's reasonable to wonder why. If a heinous act hadn't been committed by one member of their family, the Booths would have been properly relegated to the history of American theater, where father Junius and sons June, Edwin and, yes, John Wilkes, each made their distinctive marks.
John's of course we know, and though his assassination of Abraham Lincoln comes to define the lives Fowler limns, he is the least of the Booths in this book — by design, as Fowler tells us in her author's note. "How to write the book without centering John Wilkes" was, she says, "something I grappled with on nearly every page."
What we have, then, is an interesting historical novel about a family in 19th-century America, whose story begins in theatrical celebrity and ends in notoriety, broken by the Civil War and the irreconcilable convictions it exposed and the bloody passions they unleashed. The war itself is adumbrated mostly as it affects the Booths — for instance, when the Manhattan draft riots of 1863 spill into their neighborhood (and they have to hide a wounded Union soldier and his Black attendant) or John rushes off with the hastily assembled Richmond Grays to confront an imaginary force of abolitionists marching to the rescue of the jailed John Brown.
Most of the story, however, concerns the various Booths' acting careers, often seen from the point of view of the older daughter Rosalie, of whom little — other than her spinsterhood and crooked back — is actually known, and the younger, feistier Asia. But the Booth sisters "share a conviction, held by their mother and Father, too, when he was alive, that the important people in the family are the boys."
Junius, with his fame and insane, drunken antics, sets the pattern, infusing the household with Shakespeare and leaving his sons to grasp for their share of glory in his wake, and their mother to grapple with the humiliating arrival of the wife and son he'd abandoned in London.
Fowler's portrayal of the theater business, high and low, is fascinating in its particulars — of staging, costuming, touring, vying for, triumphing in and failing at certain roles, among troupes of players in Baltimore and amid Wild West culture in California, before chilly audiences in London and in the fervent embrace of fans in New York.
Edwin's career, first in his father's daunting shadow and then as the rising star defining Hamlet for a generation, unfolds a bit beyond the view of the Booth women whose roles are supporting and domestic; while the horror of slavery lurks largely on the periphery. But everything that happens, however thoroughly engaging the Booths and the reader, is shot through with our awareness of what's coming, which makes for an odd sort of suspense — a suspense complicated by the sense that this play never really ended, and that we have yet to contend with this darkness at the heart of the American drama.
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Ellen Akins is a writer, editor and teacher in Wisconsin. ellenakins.com
