Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
About the author
Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her new novel Booth published in March 2022.
She is the co-founder of the Otherwise Award and the current president of the Clarion Foundation (also known as Clarion San Diego). Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and seven grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California. Fowler also supports a chimp named Caesar who lives at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone.
Review
James Bradley
Thursday 28 April, 2022
The Sydney Morning Herald
Despite its title, Booth is not principally a novel about John Wilkes Booth, but about the large and fractious family of which he was, at least until his assassination of Abraham Lincoln, one of the lesser members. At the centre of the family is its patriarch, the Shakespearean actor, Junius Brutus Booth. Originally English, Booth emigrated to America in his 20s, leaving behind a wife, a son, and a successful career to embark on a bigamous second marriage to a flower girl. A man of immense talent, Booth is also a terrifying and unpredictable drunk, driven by sudden enthusiasms and obsessions, and capable of such erratic and dangerous behaviour he could not be allowed on tour without somebody to guard him.
Around their father’s dark star orbit his wife, Mary Ann, and their children, Junius Jnr, Edwin, Rosalie, John and Joseph, plus the ghosts of eight children lost to fevers. Perhaps appropriately given this sprawling cast, the novel proceeds in a breathless series of beautifully composed if occasionally somewhat cursory vignettes, leaping from one member of the sprawling Booth clan to the next in rapid succession.
Fowler brings the humour and psychological acuity that distinguish not only her brilliant short fiction, but also novels such as her Man Booker-shortlisted We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves to this process, capturing not just the damage wrought on the Booth siblings by their father’s violent mood swings, but also the complex alliances and tensions within the family.
In places this involves considerable invention and interpolation, something that is particularly evident in Fowler’s sensitive portrayal of the eldest sister, Rosalie, a woman whose life is only recorded in the most cursory terms but is given full and moving dimension in the novel. Yet even where the historical record is richer, as it is with Edwin, who followed in his father’s footsteps to become one of the most celebrated actors of his generation, Fowler brings them vividly to life.
Simultaneously, the novel sketches in a portrait of the tensions and divisions that roiled 19th-century America, and its slow stumble to war, tracing out the differing allegiances of the various family members. This process is somewhat hamstrung by the fact most of the siblings were more involved in the business of their own lives than they were in the political debates and events that shaped their times.
At times this is a strength – the focus on the domestic means the novel powerfully captures the degree to which even the most basic social and economic structures of pre-Civil War American society were dependent upon slavery. Similarly, the book has interesting and unsettling things to say about the ways in which even those who opposed slavery found ways to accommodate and – more importantly – profit from it.
Booth snr, who proclaims his distaste for slavery and threatens to beat his children if they kill fish or animals for food, nonetheless convinces himself it is acceptable to engage in “term slavery”, where slaves are promised freedom after five years (“Work hard…and I’ll free you”), as well as making certain any children born during such arrangement are his until they’re 24; others draw a distinction between leasing slaves and actually owning them.
But it also means that despite the buoyant energy and wit of Fowler’s writing, the novel struggles to bring John to life, or to offer a convincing analysis of the confluence of personality and politics that would see him leave behind the convictions of his family and become a defender of slavery and the South. We see the flashes of violence, the wildness of his temperament, the way he is praised for his looks and charm but fails to make good on them, but for the most part Fowler’s version of John remains a cipher.
Fowler might argue this is at least partly deliberate: in her afterword she says she did not want to write a novel about John, “a man who craved attention and has had too much of it”. But even setting aside the fact that our interest in the other Booths is mostly a function of their connection to John (a fact the novel tacitly admits through its use of a parallel account of Lincoln’s life as a structural device), this does not feel like enough, especially in a moment when the forces of racist violence and wounded privilege that led John to Lincoln’s booth that night in April 1865 are once more on the rise.