Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

What a peculiar book! American Bloomsbury is easy to dislike for all the reasons given in a number of the editorial and customer reviews: the factual errors riddling the book beginning right on page 1 (little Waldo Emerson was 5 when he died, not 9; Emily Dickinson and other "neighbors" were not neighbors to the Concordians; the Emersons were not married in 1838; and on and on and on), the jarring colloquialisms (Emerson as sugar daddy, Thoreau as moocher, Hawthorne as rat), the sweeping and totally unfounded assertions, and the sporadic real-clunker sentences. Such factors as these contribute to making a bad book, but what makes this book peculiar is that the author shows herself capable, on a number of pages, of producing compelling, factual, graceful prose, but just as you are lulled into the story and willing to forgive and forget the clunkers and errors just passed, she pulls you up short with some sensationalistic or speculative doozy that utterly breaks the spell. In the worst cases, these sojourns into fantasy make one angry because they are so clearly untrue -- and purposeless except as means to stoke the potboiler theme of the book: unconsummated lust, cerebral adultery (and maybe more!), jealousy, seething resentment. The best example of this is her depiction of Hawthorne, whose complex moral and intellectual flaws receive no attention at all because Cheever chooses instead to focus one glaring spotlight on him as "a rat with women." She quotes him out of context referring to his wedding as an "execution," says by marrying Sophia he traded "passion for stability," and has him panting after Margaret Fuller to the extent that poor equally misrepresented and maligned Sophia is depicted as almost "gloating" over the horrific death by drowning of Margaret Fuller, her husband, and their baby. Cheever's depiction is a colossal miscarriage of historical justice because in truth we admire Hawthorne the man (as opposed to Hawthorne the author) perhaps most for his gloriously happy and, yes, very passionate marriage and his faithfulness and devotion year after year to Sophia. Cheever's version is ridiculous, especially given that her bibliography is peppered with biographies and other critical works that provide no foundation for her story and in fact, if read, reveal just the opposite. And yet, there are thoughtful pages on Thoreau and dozens of pages that cleave to the truth and show a faithful grasp of events and influences. There are lovely paragraphs describing nature. There are passages that show sensitivity to the new thinking of that time, the rebellious ferment,the originality and energy of this complicated group of convention-busting freethinkers. But each time you begin to float happily along, basking in the rich glow of a glorious American renaissance, you strike an iceberg like the following paragraph: "But the middle of the nineteenth century was a time when sexual energy was pent up in this country, and all these people were high-minded prudes, usually too wrapped up in Goethe to be thinking about the carnal aspects of love. Even Walt Whitman had joined the popular antimasturbation movement. None of them drank. Perhaps the absence of actual physical intercourse, with its groping with the endless skirts of the time, made the affairs of Emerson and Hawthorne with Fuller even more intense than they might have been otherwise. The only thing more powerful than lust is lust denied." This paragraph's problems go beyond its numerous factual errors. But even those factual errors are inexcusable. Emerson loved wine, Nathaniel and Sophia loved their bed, and Nathaniel perhaps drank too much. And that "popular antimasturbation movement?" Who knows. The dozens of books I've read on this period have never mentioned it. So, who actually wrote this book? A split personality? A committee? A bunch of Bennington grad students with occasional oversight by the author? A ghostwriter? A dabbler who spread her keyboard sessions too far apart? It's almost hard to believe it to be the work of one coherent person. But perhaps this is no harder to believe than that the virtual army of "inestimable" and "brilliant" literary lights, musicians, photographers, editors, agents, and educational institutions acknowledged at the back of the book were unable to help Cheever with the countless boo-boos, fibs, hyperbolic fits, and verbal infelicities that fatally mar this book. ----------------------------------------- Postscript: Does the truth matter anymore? I've just read all of the currently posted reviews, which shoot from one end of the spectrum ("fabulous" & "a treasure") to the other ("shoddy" & "shameful"). The positive reviews appear to be written largely by people with little knowledge of the book's subject matter before reading, who were entertained by its content. The negative reviews appear to be written primarily by people knowledgeable about the American Renaissance and upset by the book's many errors, conjectures, and untruths, which, for them, precluded any entertainment value. So I guess potential readers have to ask themselves: Do I place a higher value on entertainment or truth? Our current political situation and the best-seller status of fabricated works like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces would certainly indicate that as a culture we're not very concerned with the truth anymore. My recommendation then boils down to this: if you are a person who loves and values truth, do not buy this book. If you are seeking entertainment and are indifferent as to the truthfulness of what you read, you may enjoy it.