Review: Books

Backward Glance
By Miles Harvey

The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City, by Robert Sullivan (Scribner, $23). Like almost everyone who has passed through the fetid New Jersey marshes five miles west of midtown Manhattan, Robert Sullivan is of the opinion that the Meadowlands qualifies as "one of the most disgusting areas in America." However, instead of sneering at the 32-square-mile patch of brackish, thoroughly polluted wetlands from the comfort of a car speeding along the Turnpike, Sullivan decided to back up his impressions with field research. He treks through the Meadowlands' garbage hills, its industrial ruins, and its tattered wildlife habitats. Not content merely to observe, Sullivan spends considerable time planning where to dig for the remains of long-disappeared Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa but instead winds up unearthing granite columns from NewYork's old Penn Station, hunks of which were discarded near Secaucus in the early sixties after the building was demolished. In other escapades, the author canoes along mercury-laden creeks, compiles a brief history of mosquito extermination in the Meadowlands, and encounters an 83-year-old muskrat trapper, the last of his breed. With his nimble, deadpan prose style, Sullivan offers an entertaining, blessedly vicarious tour through "an already-explored land that has become, through negligence, through exploitation, and through its own chaotic persistence, explorable again."

Cloudsplitter, by Russell Banks (HarperFlamingo, $28) and The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, by Jane Smiley (Knopf, $26). A pivotal moment in Russell Banks's big and baneful new novel comes when the narrator, a son of the violent abolitionist John Brown, recalls staring into the eyes of a mountain lion, "a beast controlled and driven, from its first breath to its last, by hungers and fears that [we] had been privy to only in the most terrible moments of our lives." For Americans, pondering the conflicts leading up to the Civil War has long been like seeing the savage within — an exercise in self-appraisal that, 133 years after Appomattox, still transfixes us. Perhaps no figure embodies the contradictions of the 1850s better than John Brown himself, the religious zealot whose guerrilla campaign, beginning in Kansas and ending in the disastrous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, did much to hasten the onset of the war. Banks, author of Rule of the Bone, refracts Brown's life through the eyes of Owen Brown, a "reluctant follower" who documents his father's failures as a tanner, small-time farmer, and colossally unsuccessful livestock speculator, and becomes a participant in the antislavery violence that leads to John Brown's political martyrdom. Through the medium of Owen's guilt-wracked memories, Cloudsplitter is an intricate exploration of the varieties of human bondage and of the high costs of liberation, set against a vivid portrait of rural America in the last century. Banks's haunting book takes its title from an Adirondack peak that casts as long a shadow over the Browns' homestead as John Brown's bloody vigilance casts over his son's life — an appropriate metaphor for a tragedy of epic proportions.

John Brown also plays a minor but fateful role in Jane Smiley's picaresque new road novel. The narrator and title character is a bride who moves to the lawless Kansas Territory with her abolitionist husband, becomes caught up in the political intrigue roiling the frontier, and sees her husband gunned down in the wake of Brown's 1856 massacre of five proslavery settlers. Smiley's book has all the makings of a tragedy, only it doesn't turn out that way — largely because, as Lidie explains, "I myself didn't feel like a character in a tragedy." Having always been something of a tomboy feminist, Lidie transforms herself into a trouser-wearing gun-slinger and sets out instead on a long, wild adventure. Though ultimately unsuccessful — both in avenging her husband's murder and in helping a female slave reach freedom — Lidie never loses her pluck, and her story becomes both a rich homage to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a thrilling variation on the derring-do of Lonesome Dove.

Photographs by Clay Ellis