The Amalgamation Polka
by Stephen Wright
Stephen Wright's Living Past
A review by Tom Chiarella
I don't care what college professors say; historical drama is the great nap of American arts and letters. Predetermined, with no surprises, it makes for lousy art, loaded with all the tension of a waterlogged towel.
What makes The Amalgamation Polka, by Stephen Wright, different is that art does not lie down so that history may mount her. In fact, 100 pages into the picaresque Civil War tale of Liberty Fish--born in upstate New York to abolitionist parents and thrust into the broken world following his mother's death -- only one thing is certain: Art trumps history every time.
No one writes a better sentence than Wright. The underappreciated author of Meditations in Green can make a feces-filled and bloody 19th-century childbirth look like a dark, torchlit circus, a kind of performance art that defines the risk that women undertook in reproducing at all, without making it feel like a taciturn social comment. His America, drawn without the now-standard cameo appearances of historical icons, is peopled by characters who are as blown up and weird as canvas balloons. It is a bizarre place where the extraction of a tooth is a public spectacle, the contents of a slop bucket listed like a sonnet.
Yes, yes, there is a civil war, and there's a president to be assassinated. But that's not why you'll read on. It's the world itself, imagined and recognizable as never before, that will make you turn the page. The writing is so good that you forget you're reading about the past; you lean forward to see what remarkable turn will come next, what rich details will arise in a world that is grotesque, flame lit, driven by money and possession. The language is so generously arcane and richly evocative that it
begins to feel, well, as if it might just be the future.
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