It has been said by a number of people that the institution of slavery damages everyone involved in it. The slaves, obviously, are brutalized, but slave-owners suffer, too, whether they recognize it or not, for they must become brutes, and lose their humanity. This book is, among other things, an illustration of the long reach of the many-tentacled institution of slavery, destroying lives willy-nilly. Roxana Maury is the daughter of a South Carolina plantation. She doesn't have the stomach for it. She disowns her family and marries a Northern abolitionist. But she never breaks free from the bitter accusations of her family. Letters from home trigger days of weeping. Roxana and Thatcher's son, Liberty Fish, is raised in upstate New York, deep in all the most liberal ideas of the day. When the Civil War breaks out, he goes off to fight for the Union. While he is fighting in Georgia, he learns that his mother has died in a possible suicide, and he seeks to gain something (understanding? closure?) by wandering off and visiting the old family plantation. There he learns that his grandfather is mad, certifiably looney, and torturing his slaves in medical experiments in attempts to turn them white. Grandfather Maury reacts to the approaching Union army by running away, and by taking Liberty with him. That is the plot of the book. But this is not a plot-driven book. It is a series of wild vignettes, over-the-top with color and bombast. Little Liberty meets a pirate in the woods. Uncle Potter fights in the Kansas Troubles. Liberty and Thatcher ride a packet boat on the Erie Canal. Uncle Potter and Liberty see the sights in New York City. Some of these scenes advance the story. Some just seem to describe the tumultuous mix of ideas and bigger-than-life characters that populate the age. And the language. Oh, the language! Perhaps the first thing I noticed about this book is that it sure has a lot of words in it. It is a rare noun that doesn't have its adjective, and sometimes two, and occasionally three. And no character is going to use a plain, simple word if he can find a multi-syllabic substitute, or better yet, a bit of slang. According to what is being taught about writing these days, when a spare, lean prose is considered strong, this is entirely wrong. Yet all of those many words are chosen with precision. You can see every scene and every character with complete clarity (even things you would maybe rather not see). The jacket blurb says that this wordiness is an imitation of period style, and that may be. There is a little bit of Dickens about it, a little, perhaps, from what I remember, James Fenimore Cooper. One of the second things I noticed about this book is that it is funny. When Liberty is afraid to sleep alone in his new bedroom, his mother comforts him by bringing him a plate of cookies-- in the shape of chained slaves. There is a lot of such absurdity and craziness. But there is also a lot of dark grotesquerie. During the first part of the book I read slowly to savor the language. Toward the end I couldn't wait to get away from the evil grandfather. But that's the problem. The Civil War will not be over when the shooting stops. The conflict will go on. The grandfather tells Liberty that he may think he is on the other side, but the slave-holding Maurys are a part of him. When the master dies, Liberty tells one old slave that he is free now, and the old man points at his head, and says, "But he is still alive in here." The "amalgamation" of the title is the mixing of the races, and the polka the choppy dance it is to be. Is there no hope? Well, yes, actually, there is. But that is all I will say.
A largely successful but imperfect historical novel, The Amalgamation Polka offered a colorful and convincingly violent portrait of a Union soldier's journey "home" during the American Civil War. The plot was an interesting one, relaying the protagonist's (groaningly named Liberty) abandonment of his soldierly duties and his efforts to locate the Southern slave-owning grandparents he never knew. The author's voice, leaden with appositives that stretch sentences to the length of paragraphs and paragraphs to the length of pages, draws much attention to itself, sometimes at the expense of the book.The author's verbosity works better when describing landscapes or portraying the vernacular of the time, but when describing the characters' feelings, it feels false and showy. Their thoughts become so mired in the presentation that one gets the impression that Stephen Wright is enamored with the sound of his own voice and his characters merely offer a means to use it. And that's not entirely unjustified; Wright absolutely has a gift for detail and memorable turns of phrase. But too often it feels like he's going for memorable before convincing, and I think the emotional impact of the story might have been more strongly felt if Wright kept the average syllable count a little lower and seasoned less frequently with excessive commas.The book's strongest feature is that it earnestly attempts to explore the complexity of wartime racial tension. Wright looks at the issue from the staunch Northern abolitionism of Liberty's parents as well as the ludicrous reasoning of his slave-owning grandparents, clearly and rightly presenting the former as the morally justifiable position. Some time is also given to the Northern anti-abolitionist point of view and the foreigner's abstained one via the two ship captains Liberty meets over the course of the book. It's hard to say if Wright achieves what he sets out to do, though, because the message becomes so muddied by the book's third half.Liberty's arrival at his grandparents' decaying plantation starts off promisingly, as Maury walks him through his perverse experiments like a grotesque Eugenics house of horrors. But Wright exchanges verisimilitude for shock, and Liberty's steadfast refusal to act or react to what he sees leaves the reader perplexed. Wright, ever so briefly, dabbles in allegory, as Liberty struggles to save Maury's ridiculously named Slavery in a room of all white. It paints an interesting picture, sure, but the message becomes unclear because Liberty seems to acquiesce to so much of his grandfather's demands. It's a strange way to end the book and it doesn't seem to be in keeping with the author's beautiful portrayal of Liberty's experiences in the war and the memorable passages detailing his mother's abandonment of the plantation.Kudos should be given for Wright's surprising veiled mention of the Confederados, even if it is a little anachronistic. The Amalgamation Polka is a good book, but the series of flaws that come at its conclusion keep it from being a great book.
What do You think about The Amalgamation Polka (2006)?
323 pages.Race relations before and during the civil war.Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a bright star in the literary sky,” Stephen Wright now extends his astonishing accomplishment with a Civil War novel unlike any other.Born in 1844 in bucolic upstate New York, Liberty Fish is the son of fervent abolitionists as well as the grandson of Carolina slaveholders even more dedicated to their cause. Thus follows a childhood limned with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways in the house, his Uncle Potter’s free-soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents—a conflict that ultimately costs her her life and compels Liberty, in hopes of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.Rich in characters both heartbreaking and bloodcurdling, comic and horrific, The Amalgamation Polka is shot through with politics and dreams, and it captures great swaths of the American experience, from village to metropolis to plantation, from the Erie Canal to the Bahamas, from Bloody Kansas to the fulfillment of the killing fields. Yet for all the brutality and tragedy, this novel is exuberant in the telling and its wide compassion, brimming with the language, manners, hopes, and fears of its time—all of this so transformed by Stephen Wright’s imaginative compass that places and events previously familiar are rendered new and strange, terrifying and stirring. Instantly revelatory, constantly mesmerizing, this is the work of a major writer at the top of his form.
—Ruth
It’s a boy,” Aroline declared flatly, thrusting into dramatic view a wailing, wriggling, shimmery thing of mottled red and blue that Roxana recognized instantly as a glistening piece of her own heart.” (15) “One idle afternoon, several months after Liberty’s passing under the tutelage of Ma’am L’Orange, Thatcher – curious as to the health of his son’s academic life – inquired casually, “Who is the president of the United States?” / “Jesus Christ,” Liberty promptly answered. / Father looked at Mother. Mother looked at Father. Liberty never saw Ma’am L’Orange again.” (35) “Took a new missus recently, so I hear.” / “Yes sir, indeed I did.” / “Comely women, I expect.” / “Yes, Captain Whelkington, she surely is. Why do you ask?” / “Because I am to fuck her from stern to stern soon as I get done tanning your scrawny hide.” (72) “After a couple of reiterations, alert observers noted with amusement that the oaths “God Almighty!” “Jesus Christ!” and “Judas Priest!” were, in fact, the actual names of Red’s animules.” (75) “…and as Eben hastily turned the carriage out onto the Boynton Road the head seemed to turn, too, watching her from its vacant sockets, and Roxana began to scream and there was nothing Eben could do about it, there was nothing anyone could do, this was the world, her world, and her cries the sound of Roxana being born, however belatedly into it.” (133) “So however much the decision pained her, she believed that allowing Liberty the freedom to go when he wished might assure that he would also come back when he wished.” (151) “Maybe now, after all this bloodletting,” said Liberty hopefully, “it will finally end.” (190) “Cherish the past, no matter how bitter, he remembered hearing his mother declaim, therein lies the gate to future freedom.” (229) “Well, there are not many in this confounding existence who truly understand the different between right and wrong.” / “You understand nothing.” (276) “No short commons on this vessel,” replied Wallace proudly. “Please, everyone, take your seats. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the wearisome notion of our earth as a prison and we its inhabitants as condemned inmates who can never be certain when the man in the black hood is going to come knocking on the door. Well, if this be so, why fritter away our brief sojourn in funks and humours? Eat! Drink! Celebrate!” He raised the first of what would be numerous glasses of French wine.” (282) “How can anyone know for certain?” argued Liberty. “Blood flows across time like water, going where it wants, when it wants, without respect to boundaries geographical, physical or social. Tributaries converge, branch, reconverge in a pattern that may not be so random as it appears. Life, I suppose, and ultimately it makes mongrels of us all.” (311)
—Maduck831
The latest novel from the author of Meditations in Green (my top book of the year for 2003), this book is based on a picture drawn during the 1800s that shows African-American men dancing with high society white women with the caption “The Amalgamation Polka”. But this book is less about one picture, and more about America during the Civil War and its struggle with the issue of slavery. The novel focuses on Liberty Fish, the son of abolitionists, and it traces his time as a youth growing up in a house that served as part of the Underground Railroad to his entry into the Civil War to his journey to South Carolina to meet his slave-owning grandparents whom he’d never seen before and to confront his own heritage’s experience with slavery (his mother fled the South because she was morally disgusted by the behavior of her parents). The prose in this novel is very different from the stylistic flair that I’ve seen in other Wright novels (see the subsequent reviews for Going Native and M31: A Family Romance); this novel is told rather straightforwardly. But like the other Wright novels, the prose is technically and aesthetically breathtaking. The atmosphere and detail of this novel reminded me a lot of Cold Mountain and The Known World, while the dialogue was reminiscent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The ending gets a little sloppy with some scenes that seemed rather irrelevant, but other than that, I rank it right up there with my other favorite Civil War novels of all time. Highly recommended.
—Tung
