Frederick Busch
The Night Inspector
* * (of five)
No Union soldier was more feared than sharpshooter William Bartholomew. He moved like a ghost amidst the fields, swamps, woods, and boondocks that were the unheralded battlefields of the Civil War. Like a dark avenging angel, Bartholomew dispensed death and raw justice just when the victims thought they were beyond harm. One day, however, Bartholomew’s weapon exploded in his face, leaving him horrendously disfigured. Now, armed against the social horrors around him, Bartholomew prowls the deep shadows of New York City’s hellish Five Points, his papier-mâché mask the only thing that prevents passersby from fleeing as if encountering a literal ghost. Think the Elephant Man packing a Colt.
This is the setup for Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector, originally published in 1999 and a finalist the next year for the National Book Award. Because I teach post-Civil War history, several people told me I should read this book. I never quite got around to it and forgot all about it until Busch died in 2006, and more people told me I should read it. After finally plucking it from my shelf and reading it, I wish I had let it languish there.
Give the book high marks for accuracy. Early in the book Bartholomew chances upon a stomach-turning scene of children massacred by Confederates that foreshadows another event five years hence. His is no generals-and-glory view of the Civil War, rather a portrait of senseless destruction, inhumanity, and the psychological distancing necessary to survive the conflict. Even more gruesome than the war was the Five Points, an inferno in which life, sex, and death were cheap. His descriptions of the smells, squalor, coarseness, and violence of the area are so vivid and so disturbing that Dante probably would have rejected them as unbelievable. Alas, Busch is historically correct on this score. Ditto a central plot device in which children are being smuggled as potential slaves in 1868 as if the 13th Amendment abolishing bondage had not been passed three years earlier.
Some readers might enjoy Busch’s unorthodox touches. Bartholomew is not a classic loner, rather a successful businessman who is close friends with an old Army mate. Along the way he makes other acquaintances, a black man he saves from a savage beating, a Creole hooker who does not have a heart of gold, and a Chinese laundress who does. Most unusual of all, he befriends a forgotten novelist with a sad family life who toils as a customs inspector, Herman Melville. This is the cast thrust into the nightmarish and tragic plot that ensues.
Alas, my descriptions of this book are far more clear than anything Busch wrote. This 278-page novel feels longer because of Busch’s tedious style. It is the sort of prose designed to impress other writers rather than readers, and is even more over-written than another Civil War-era book everyone told me I’d love and didn’t: Cold Mountain. Busch’s idea of challenging the reader was to defy traditional narrative structure and leave out linking details. It enhance the moodiness, sordidness, double-dealing, and disquiet of individual scenes, but one is left bewildered. Dante took us to the Inferno as an object and moral lesson; Busch simply rubs our faces in filth for no apparent reason. Perhaps he wanted us to conclude that life was brutish, random, and meaningless, but when even a Thomas Hobbes treatise is more of a page-turner than Busch’s novel, I wonder why anyone would want to work so hard to attain nihilism. Those looking to experience the seedy side of the Gilded Age are directed to Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City and Kevin Baker’s Dreamland, novels that far surpass this one.
This is the setup for Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector, originally published in 1999 and a finalist the next year for the National Book Award. Because I teach post-Civil War history, several people told me I should read this book. I never quite got around to it and forgot all about it until Busch died in 2006, and more people told me I should read it. After finally plucking it from my shelf and reading it, I wish I had let it languish there.
Give the book high marks for accuracy. Early in the book Bartholomew chances upon a stomach-turning scene of children massacred by Confederates that foreshadows another event five years hence. His is no generals-and-glory view of the Civil War, rather a portrait of senseless destruction, inhumanity, and the psychological distancing necessary to survive the conflict. Even more gruesome than the war was the Five Points, an inferno in which life, sex, and death were cheap. His descriptions of the smells, squalor, coarseness, and violence of the area are so vivid and so disturbing that Dante probably would have rejected them as unbelievable. Alas, Busch is historically correct on this score. Ditto a central plot device in which children are being smuggled as potential slaves in 1868 as if the 13th Amendment abolishing bondage had not been passed three years earlier.
Some readers might enjoy Busch’s unorthodox touches. Bartholomew is not a classic loner, rather a successful businessman who is close friends with an old Army mate. Along the way he makes other acquaintances, a black man he saves from a savage beating, a Creole hooker who does not have a heart of gold, and a Chinese laundress who does. Most unusual of all, he befriends a forgotten novelist with a sad family life who toils as a customs inspector, Herman Melville. This is the cast thrust into the nightmarish and tragic plot that ensues.
Alas, my descriptions of this book are far more clear than anything Busch wrote. This 278-page novel feels longer because of Busch’s tedious style. It is the sort of prose designed to impress other writers rather than readers, and is even more over-written than another Civil War-era book everyone told me I’d love and didn’t: Cold Mountain. Busch’s idea of challenging the reader was to defy traditional narrative structure and leave out linking details. It enhance the moodiness, sordidness, double-dealing, and disquiet of individual scenes, but one is left bewildered. Dante took us to the Inferno as an object and moral lesson; Busch simply rubs our faces in filth for no apparent reason. Perhaps he wanted us to conclude that life was brutish, random, and meaningless, but when even a Thomas Hobbes treatise is more of a page-turner than Busch’s novel, I wonder why anyone would want to work so hard to attain nihilism. Those looking to experience the seedy side of the Gilded Age are directed to Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City and Kevin Baker’s Dreamland, novels that far surpass this one.
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