A nation is a living thing, and as a living thing—not to mention a thing of tremendous potential for both prosperity and peril—it requires ongoing examination. Definitions of nations are useful, yet they are not fixed, and as the US rapidly builds toward a new opportunity to re-define itself following a tumultuous period simultaneously characterized by unprecedented power and influence and unprecedented international disdain, it’s as good a time as ever to take the long view.
With What is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (Knopf, $29.95), essayist Ronald Wright, author of Time Among the Maya, Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress, does just that, surveying the trends in defining American life from the arrival of the first Europeans and the gradual crushing of the old Americans by the new. The national character as described in this new book’s pages—one that is forever “losing its innocence” thanks to an unusually strong penchant for historical amnesia—is not very much flattered to say the least, but Wright’s aim is not to pat anyone on the back but rather to flush out the essential, long-circulating venom that plagues the heart of what, like it or not, is our world’s best hope. (Okay, them and, maybe, the European Union, but that would surely call for another book.)
What is America? is, as Wright admits, an eccentric book. As concise in volume as it is expansive in chronology, it spends precious little ink reiterating certain historical events, however enormous in implication, that have been exhaustively dealt with elsewhere. Thus slavery and the Civil War, to name two sweeping examples, are duly accounted for in the book’s thesis but left largely undiscussed in favour of more iconoclastic takes on other, still more unruly histories, such as that of the centuries-in-the-making extermination of Native Americans. Wright emphasizes the fact that it was not simply that white settlers usurped their territory and decimated their rank but that this territory was already being occupied by organized, sophisticated, agrarian peoples—not ranging savages standing in the path of civilization. He does this to make clear just how much the New World was founded upon not just the raw terrain but the time-tested developments of the Old: “The Pilgrims thanked their God for saving them in a ‘wilderness,’ but the feast speaks for itself: turkey, corn, beans, pumpkin, cranberries, potatoes and the rest came from thousands of New World civilization. It was the heathen, not the Lord, who saved them.”
Wright aligns the spin doctoring and self-deceit that facilitated the extermination of the Indians with like contemporary practices, aligning the rhetoric of Andrew Jackson with Ronald Reagan, or that of William McKinley, who needed to consult directly with God in order to allow him to justify invading the Philippines, with George W. Bush. Wright also gives a gracious nod to the work that fellow contemporary writers for laying the groundwork for some of his thesis, such as Jon Krakauer, who’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of violence in Mormonism, is cited in Wright’s exploration of the continuous role of fundamentalist religious thinking, not to mention paranoia, in the development of America’s march toward self-realization.
Yet while its list of dishonorable patriots is impressive, part of What is America? is also given over to paying tribute to the countless voices of intelligent dissent that are equally intrinsic to American identity. Besides Krakauer, Wright also draws upon the barbed lamentations of such luminaries as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Gore Vidal, Davy Crockett, Henry David Thoreau and Alexis de Tocqueville. And were he to take a gander at some of the other titles sharing the new releases section with What is America?, perhaps Wright would go on to include Paul Auster in his list, since Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $26), Auster’s latest novel, is also in a sense a work of American historical revisionism and Auster’s most clearly politically charged work since 1992’s Leviathan.
“I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.” These are the first words of Man in the Dark, which reads as the testimony of a 72-year-old retired book critic named August Brill. The wilderness he writes about is figurative, a vast landscape of relentless shadows, while the literal space he inhabits for the whole of the novel is but the single darkened room where he lies, his leg shattered by an accident, his mind roiling with persistent ghosts, those of his wife, deceased, his son-in-law, separated from his daughter, and his grandson-in-law, killed horrifically on foreign soil. Brill makes up stories to ward off misery, and the one he’s working on as Man in the Dark begins concerns an America embroiled in a new Civil War, one ignited by the corrupt presidential election of 2000.
Stories within stories are the gleaming mulch of Auster’s garden of ideas that deliberately slip away when sifted for singular meanings, but one of the things that I think ennobles Man in the Dark in particular is how boldly it exudes a faith in the redemptive power of storytelling, and how it locates the storytelling capacity in not just writers but in every one of us. The novel lights upon a dizzying catalogue of hot-button issues, from the war in Iraq to the erosion of civil liberties, yet it is the confluence of Brill’s imaginings with the stories he’ll later share with his grieving granddaughter about their family’s past that provides Auster with the meatier political statement, one founded in this crazy notion that a democracy really is meant to empower the individual, and that the access to individual dreams, to the inner lives of others, is the gift that novels give to readers to sustain them through troubled times.
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