Finding a pensive genealogist in "The Witch Elm"

It had to happen. My all-time favorite (living) fiction writer, Tana French, has a genealogist in the cast of characters in her new title, The Witch Elm. His findings are not as friendly as they used to be:

"People are coming to me because their analysis didn't turn out the way they expected . . . . They're unsettled and they're frightened, and what they want from me isn't the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They're afraid that they're not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance. And we both know it might not turn out that way. I'm not the fairy godfather any more; now I'm some dark arbiter, probing through their hidden places to decide their fate. And I'm not nearly as comfortable in that role."

(FYI: The genealogy is Irish, not my forte; but it appears that the author did her homework. Don't pick it up for the genealogy -- it's scattered lightly through the 509 pages -- pick it up for what Stephen King calls its "incandescent" prose. )


Tana French, The Witch Elm (New York: Viking, 2018), 132

History as Quicksilver

From the fictional 98-year-old narrator of a novel:

"Wars  make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternative version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces."

Kate Morton, The House at Riverton (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006)

Lidie Harkness Newton, an appreciation (possibly off topic)

Last week I grabbed a 50-cent used paperback from our local library's perpetual-book-sale rack, just because I had enjoyed something else the author (Jane Smiley) had written. It never occurred to me that this fiction would anything more than a pleasant escape. But sometimes fiction can get us closer to the human side of history than non-fiction can.

Set in the 1850s in Illinois and Kansas and Missouri, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton begins as a coming-of-age story and a bit of a love story -- and then everything changes. Both the heroine-narrator and the reader find themselves suddenly in deep water. Not until I finished it did I realize the Lidie was a bit like Voltaire's Candide in that picaresque tale. But unlike Candide she's a very real person as well as a vehicle for the author.

Smiley's lesson is a good deal more subtle than Voltaire's. In my mind, few issues in all of history, and none in American history, are more clear-cut than the fathomless moral evil that was human slavery and its ongoing aftermath. Smiley sets her story in the middle of a boiling conflict over slavery, and uses Lidie's adventures to show the human faces of an "issue" and compel the reader to pay a different kind of attention. No, she didn't change my mind, and I don't think she meant to. It's more about what you do with your assurance, maybe, or . . .

Actually, maybe we can't even have this conversation until you've read the book too.



Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (New York: Knopf, 1998).


Harold Henderson, "Lidie Harkness Newton, an appreciation," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]