Some thoughts on the Whiskey Rebels by the great Paul Cymrot!
The Whiskey Rebels
David Liss
Where does a novel cross the line from Fiction to Historical Fiction? A novel must be set somewhere and sometime, after all. But Historical Fiction exists on its own shelf somewhere near romance, and I wonder why that is.
The Whiskey Rebels takes place in and around Philadelphia in the 1790s. Two narrative threads intertwine. One is told by a former Revolutionary soldier and spy who was disgraced at the end of the war and is now a drunk, though an amusing and apparently rakish one. The other is told by a woman who moves to the western frontier with her husband, finds a way to subsist there, only to have everything come crashing down around her and setting her upon a mission of revenge.
From one perspective, it’s a novel about The Whiskey Tax. The soldier’s narrative (his name is Ethan Saunders) shows the tax from the perspective of patriots who are concerned about growing Federal power, and the ripple effect of cheap money in the shady business of speculation in Hamilton’s new economy. The woman’s narrative (her name is Joan Maycott) shows the injustice of the tax itself. It shows the long arm of the Federal government reaching where it has no business to reach, and how corruption and distant law-makers threaten to disintegrate the newly formed country.
Nothing wrong with that. Many a novel are set in a time of crisis. Gone with the Wind. Slaughterhouse Five. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
There are romances and intrigues. Ethan begins the story a drunk and a debtor. We learn of his fall from grace, his noble sacrifices, his unflagging love of country and of a woman who thinks the worst of him because of a misunderstanding. We learn that though he owns a slave, he has freed him. That he has not told him of his freedom is meant to be somehow endearing, and practically is. His story staggers along heading nowhere in particular until he bottoms out by being rescued by his slave from an ignoble beating for adultery… and then the story comes to him in the form of a Jewish assassin and spy who works for Hamilton at the Treasury Department.
Joan’s story begins with her as a precocious Austen-esque heroine. She marries, struggles, and sets about writing an Important novel. Her husband trades war bonds for land near Pittsburgh and off they go. Indian killing, frontier guides, and corrupt territorial government ensue. All goes well until, in a surprising chapter, she is nearly raped and her husband and unborn child are murdered. End of Act One (200 pages). Beginning of Revenge Narrative (300 pages).
It’s at this point, jumping back and forth between the two narratives, that one realizes that they are running at different speeds. Ethan’s story takes place over the course of a few days or weeks, while Joan’s has spanned years. They’re converging, and when the two finally end up together in the same room, there’s a nice averting of the eyes. That is to say, the characters, despite several hundred pages of build up, are neither in sync nor entirely interested in each other.
Ethan spends most of the book trying to figure out what’s going on. He is drawn into a large and complicated plan without knowing who’s plan it is. Joan, on the other hand, is meant to have formulated the plan and be running things, including manipulating Ethan, from behind the scenes. This is where the first of the serious problems arises. The plan, it turns out, is the overthrow of the Bank of the United States by artificially devaluing 4% certificates but buying up all the available 6% certificates while at the same time restricting the free trade of bank scrip and confusing the speculators in Philadelphia and New York by spreading rumors about the certain failure of the bonds being issued by a different bank. All this by manipulating the finances of William Duer and his network of associates and by blackmailing Hamilton over a mistress.
Exactly.
To this end, we meet the investors and the speculators and their families and the taverns where the scrip is traded. We visit the Treasury Department and meet Hamilton himself, catch sight of Jefferson across the room at a crowded party, and spend a breathless 3 minutes with Washington himself. There are successes along the way. It is actually thrilling to stumble into Jefferson’s presence. And Washington lives up to the hype too. Neither advances the plot one iota, but those actors will receive the award nominations.
Which brings us to the problem with Historical Fiction. When the story changes from the imaginary individuals living in an historical moment to an historical moment being created by these imaginary individuals, there’s trouble.
It’s possible that speculators did come perilously close to ruining the new economy in the 1790s. And it’s true that the whiskey tax caused people to take up arms against the government. And it’s impossible to prove that a distiller’s wife didn’t come back east and mastermind the whole thing. She goes on to goad Burr into challenging Hamilton to the duel, no less. It strains credulity. And what’s more, we wouldn’t want it to be the case.
If, in a book of 500 pages, an author manages to resurrect George Washington for one short, believable scene, he or she has done something fine. If an author has created a world that Jefferson himself might inhabit, if only peripherally, that’s a real achievement. The short selling of government bonds is hardly necessary to give it authenticity.
An honorable but fallen war hero, Elizabeth Bennett’s American cousin, a noble slave, a Jewish assassin, and a homosexual Irish frontiersman are a motley crew to push this heavy plot along. Like General Knox dragging the cannons from Ft. Ticonderoga down to Boston through mud and over ice, the characters carry us and the plot from the start to the finish. It’s only that the finish, once we get there, turns out to have been so wedded to reality that if we’d thought at all about it along the way, we’d have realized that we already knew what was going to happen. So the end is not really the end; it’s just the resplicing of the fiction to the ‘history.’ And as soon as we’re back into the history, our minds scrub all the fiction away.
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