JANUARY, 2004. This Month's Book Review: Shooting the Sun. A Novel by Max Byrd. Hardcover: 320 pages Bantam ; December 30, 2003. List, $23.95. ISBN: 0553802089
In September 2001, only a few days after the historic events of 9/11, Max Byrd, one of America's best known historical novelists, came to San Francisco State University's College of Humanities to speak about history and the "historical novel." Byrd was, at the time, writing Shooting the Sun, which has just appeared today, December 30, 2003. Before printing the edited transcript of Dr. Byrd's lecture on the historical novel, I will begin with this brief review.
Full disclosure: I admit to being a Max Byrd fan. In JEFFERSON, GRANT and JACKSON, Byrd made me see, feel and love, Nineteenth Century America better than any living novelist has done. Byrd is a Harvard PhD, a former Yale and U.C.Davis Professor: one knows the books are researched and real. He was just back from hiking the Santa Fe Trail when he spoke that day.
Byrd's new historical novel is a departure from his his last, GRANT. SHOOTING
THE SUN is pure pleasure, a great adventure. And (this is new for Byrd) it is
often comic. Gwyneth Paltrow or Renee Zellweger should grab at this rare chance
to play a Kate Hepburn comedy role-- a modern young scientist amusingly stuck
in a pre-modern world.
SHOOTING THE SUN fills in the years between JACKSON and GRANT, so that Byrd's
ambitious wall fresco now paints America from the 1770s to the 1870s.SHOOTING
THE SUN has added covered wagon invasion of the West, the Plains Indians, and
the "New Woman." To do so, Byrd has left the (largely male) political
world, and used an inspired (and frequently comic) plot device: One of the first
modern women scientists, educated in France and England where such a person
was newly possible, is dispatched to America to prove that the first computer
works. It has predicted a full eclipse in a certain spot, and she must document
that with the other latest hi-tech invention, the camera.
But when this poor lady, Selena Cott, lands in Tom and Huck's America, she
finds that a modern woman scientist is a greater novelty than an elephant; and
the spot where she has to photograph this full eclipse, has only been seen by
four white men in forty years, though there will be plenty of astonished Apaches
and Kiowa to welcome her. (I myself am astonished that the Kirkus Review is
all about computer inventor Babbage, who speaks approximately thirty sentences
in the book, all back in England. He is merely a MacGuffin, as Hitchcock used
to say, to plunge a bewildered "lady scientist" into Darkest America.)
Selena Cott's first hint that she "ain't in Europe anymore" comes in Washington, a hamlet of thirty thousand souls and as many foraging pigs, where President Van Buren personally wishes Selena luck at the Open House the public expects him to host at the White House every Thursday. No invitation required. No bodyguards. Freeloaders sometimes try to borrow money from him.
And that is the built-up part of 1840's America. Byrd's luckless heroine soon
discovers she's been ordered to sail in a covered wagon off the edge of the
known Earth. This great, and often hilarious concept (Selena Cott reminded me
of Katherine Hepburn in the African Queen) gives Byrd a chance to "do"
this other Dark Continent, the vast, silent America of 1840, using everything
he learned writing JEFFERSON, GRANT and JACKSON.
Professor Byrd's erudition produces, as in those earlier books, scenes one instantly knows are the way America must have been, but which one never saw dramatized this way before.Gathering poppies on the prairie at night, Selena turns back and sees that "in the camp itself candles had turned the covered wagons into Japanese lanterns." Of course it must have looked like that. A mule, stung to death by rattlers, "galloped forward in a slathering frenzy, halted abruptly and stood trembling on three legs, then crumpled sideways and fell with a bone-hollow thud and died." On his own trek up the Trail, Byrd must have noted down this Kansas lightning storm:
"Black thunderclouds rose like warships over the western horizon.... Rain started to fall in bursts of icy spray, driven like scuds along the top of the bending grass. For a moment the air smelled of electricity and had a taste of brass, then the two black clouds were rent by the loudest explosion of lighting Selena had ever witnessed."
Classic craftmanship: in only two sentences, Byrd manages to convey the rain through all five senses-- sight, sound, touch ("icy spray"), smell, and even taste. As in John Updike's novels, Byrd's real topic in SHOOTING THE SUN is the reconstruction and transmission of an experience-- the American Far West. The virginal, rational Selena seems to discover her own senses as she enters this sensual terrain.
Byrd's 1840 America is simultaneously primitive yet still recognizably our
country-- already filled with appealing, greedy optimists certain that their
new hi-tech computer or camera is the Next Big Thing, and willing to risk their
lives to prove it. (Or an employee's life.) Even the wagonmaster is a "spiritual"
devotee of a cure-all Vegetarian diet he got from the best-sellers of one Dr.
Graham, whose followers live on a "thin orange biscuit" called a "Graham's
Cracker." (Not only "New Age" religion and bestselling diet books
already-- but even successful "merchandising" tie-ins!) The ingenious,
mass-produced Conestoga "covered wagon" is very plainly the American
transportation industry's first attempt at What Americans Really Want-- and
it's an SUV, with ingenious beverage holders, built-in snack bars and all. Reading
Byrd's America is like spotting the clear outlines of one's face in a photo
of one's great-grandmother.
Byrd faced up to slavery in JEFFERSON, the Indian tragedy in JACKSON, the Civil
War's bloodiest battles in GRANT, and he seems to feel he's earned the right
to do one sunny, optimistic, wonderful book about why the whole world wanted
to come here anyway. Until now the frescos in his growing chapel had only been
of tragedies, battles, heroes, villains. It's right to use one wall to paint
Babbitt's grandparents lumbering across the continent eating Graham's Crackers,
taking photos, and looking to make a buck; and a smart woman's role in it all.
Sometimes the Indians simply come up to the caravans, stand in circles around
these people and stare. Any sane person would.
Quibbles: the author could have planted a clue about a violent and effective plot twist at the end. I can't say more, or it'll be a plot spoiler. Suffice to say, don't trust anyone. Second: the book's too short. Byrd's first books were Chandler-esque thrillers, and he plays a fast game from habit. As E.M. Forster said, when writing a novel, a scene often "takes off," to the author's surprise. Those wagons, glowing from inside like Japanese lanterns, were a place I was reluctant to leave, when the thriller started its rollercoaster ride at the end. There are plenty of thrillers but in the 1840 wagon train journey Byrd achieved a kind of lyric time travel. "And then, in a matter of moments it seemed.... the whole field was covered with men, horses, wagons streaming toward them, and the red sun was lifting itself over the shingled roofs and dark treetops of Independence....A small brass band, more drums than brass, marched back and forth among the wagons, playing "Turkey in the Straw" over and over.... Selena's bench pitched left, then right, and before she could do more than grip the handrail and glance around, they were passing thourgh a knot of cheering boys and through a double gate and out of Missouri and onto the Santa Fe Trail."
This was a book I hated to see end, and I hope Paltrow beats out Zellweger and gets to ride "out of Missouri and onto the Santa Fe Trail."
For Max Byrd's lecture on History and the Historical Novel, please go to L in the San Francisco State Humanities Press Index and look under "Leonard." I will link directly to it when we have the staff. Thanks for understanding.
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