Eugene Garber's The Historian

[Richard Romeo]

smacks somewhat oddly of V. and M&D

In elegant prose, Garber ( Metaphysical Tales ) weaves elaborate, arcane 
allegories about this country's metamorphosis from young republic to 
plutocracy, on Americans' worship of power and Mammon, and on the 
suppression of women in American society. The two main characters are ``the 
historian,'' a Boston professor, muckraker and reformer modeled on Henry 
Adams, and his cousin Simms, a self-proclaimed frontiersman. Their 
adventures, solo and in tandem, extend from the Connecticut River Valley in 
1807 to a Great Plains train robbery in 1912, with stops in New Mexico, 
Pittsburgh and New York City. The historian seeks the embodiment of Clio, 
muse of history, in various magnetic women; one of them, a dancer whose 
philosophy echoes that of Isadora Duncan, teaches him to rediscover ``inner 
stillness.'' The cousins encounter other assertive women--an anarchist 
seductress, a landscape painter, a pioneer, a psychic, a schoolteacher--all 
figures meant to underscore the unrealized potential of American women and 
their unjustified exclusion from historical annals. The work is more 
successful as theory than as narrative, however. Some of the sections are 
ponderous or silly, though others are effective as parable. Yet Garber's 
laudable intent--to strip mythology from accepted historical 
accounts--surmounts his work's inadequacies. TriQuarterly awarded the book 
its William Goyen Prize.

Rich



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