Once again
The Overnight Bestseller is pleased to host a Tribute Books blog tour. We welcome back Jerome Charyn with his novel
I Am Abraham.
I Am Abraham Book
Summary:
Narrated in Lincoln’s own voice,
the tragicomic I Am Abraham promises to be the
masterwork of Jerome Charyn’s remarkable career.
Since publishing his first novel in 1964, Jerome Charyn has
established himself as one of the most inventive and prolific
literary chroniclers of the American landscape. Here in I Am
Abraham, Charyn returns with an unforgettable portrait of
Lincoln and the Civil War. Narrated boldly in the first person,
I Am Abraham effortlessly mixes humor with
Shakespearean-like tragedy, in the process creating an achingly
human portrait of our sixteenth President.
Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln's life from his picaresque
days as a gangly young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois,
through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to
his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his
assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar
Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such
as Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady's
dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost
treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional extras:
wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators,
scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores.
We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the
District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a
no-man's-land between North and South; as well as the Northern
deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed faces, sitting
in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the
firing squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own
generals wanted to discard, but who play a pivotal role in
winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand pageant is
always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White
House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war.
Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century
humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a
profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose
relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons—Robert, Willie,
and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight and
the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an
unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln
comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait
we have rarely seen in historical fiction.
Jerome Charyn's Biography
Jerome Charyn is an award-winning
American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned
a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler
of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him "one
of the most important writers in American literature." New York
Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac,"and the
Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among
American writers." Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel,
Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three
memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short
stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were
named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist
for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal
Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been
named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of
Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the
American University of Paris until he left teaching in 2009. In
addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table
tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in
France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table
tennis,
Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also
Rises of ping-pong." Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
Our Review of I Am Abraham
In I Am Abraham, Jerome Charyn
undertakes the formidable task of presenting the life of Abraham
Lincoln, as seen through his letters, speeches, and other historical
sources. As Charyn indicates in his Author's Note, the novel is not a
biography, but a work of historical fiction: the author has reconstructed
major events and players in Lincoln's life, with the poetic licence to
add fictional characters when needed. The book as a whole
has the feel of a picaresque novel with its expansive cast of characters as it explores
Lincoln's journey through life to its inexorably tragic end. Charyn succeeds in creating a
first-person narrative that feels honest and intimate.
Charyn
does a masterful job in presenting the complexities of Lincoln's
character. He is a dark horse candidate for the Republican nomination
who wins the convention and attains the presidency. Lincoln becomes president at a time when several southern states have formed the
Confederacy, and in the ensuing civil war he must come to terms with the
fact that he is sending young men by the thousands to die. He must
also cope with his melancholia, the 'blue unholies” that plague him
throughout his life, at times incapacitating him, as well as the
increasingly erratic behavior of his wife after the death of their
son Willie. He is the president of a nation divided by war, but he is
also a compassionate family man, often seen carrying his young son Tad on
his shoulders, and a husband who must face the prospect of placing
his wife in an insane asylum. (Mary in fact spent four months in an asylum
following the assassination of her husband before being consigned to
the care of her sister Elizabeth.)
Historians, for the most part, have not
been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln, but Charyn recognizes the complexity
of her character. She is ridiculed by the press for her
plainness, but excoriated when she spends money to improve her
wardrobe and to refurbish the White House, which has essentially gone
to ruin under Buchanan. She recognizes that her husband is regarded
as incompetent by many of the men who surround him, including General
McLellan, who commands the loyalty of the Union troops, but her support for her husband remains steadfast. She is surrounded by flatterers and charlatans, and
often succumbs to their influence. And because she has no real role
in politics, she smothers her oldest son Robert, forcing him into a
profession in which he has no interest. She is a woman born in the wrong century: better
educated and more intelligent than many of the men who surround her
(as Charyn comments in his Author's Note), but relegated to the
background because she is female. She is also representative of the deep divisions and contradictions of the times: Mary Todd is from a wealthy family of
slave-owners in Kentucky, yet her closest confidante is a former
slave. Mrs. Keckley
becomes her constant companion, as well as her dressmaker. Mary must
also deal with the fact that many of her relatives in Kentucky have
joined the Confederate army.
It is important to note that the
subtitle of I Am Abraham is “A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War”.
More than 600,000 soldiers were killed in the American Civil War, and these deaths represented ten percent of northern males aged 20-45 and
thirty percent of southern males aged 18-40. The symbolism of the
novel readily underlines the horrors of the war: the ditches filled
with amputated limbs (one in thirteen veterans suffered amputations);
the sounds of the Friday firing squads killing Union deserters (many
of whom Lincoln would have preferred to pardon); the starved Confederate soldiers outfitted with
cardboard shoes in winter; and the carnage of the battlefields
littered by bodies and dead horses. As Lincoln and
Tad tour the ruins of Richmond, which has been burned almost to the
ground by fires set by the retreating Confederate army, Lincoln recognizes that
there are no real winners in this battle. He looks ahead to the
Reconstruction that he hopes will mend the country's wounds, but
sadly it will be a Reconstruction he will not live to undertake.
I Am Abraham will appeal to lovers of
historical fiction and of the oral storytelling tradition at which
Lincoln himself excelled.
It is an exuberant novel that speaks
equally of life and death, hope and sorrow.
Related Sites
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Jerome Charyn's Web Site:
http://www.jeromecharyn.com/
Jerome Charyn's Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/jerome.charyn?fref=ts
I Am Abraham Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/IAmAbrahamNovel
Jerome Charyn's Twitter:
http://twitter.com/jeromecharyn
I Am Abraham Twitter:
http://twitter.com/NewLincolnNovel
Jerome Charyn's Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/53408.Jerome_Charyn
I Am Abraham Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17987663-i-am-abraham
Tribute Books Blog Tours Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tribute-Books-Blog-Tours/242431245775186
I Am Abraham
blog tour site:
http://iamabrahamblogtour.blogspot.com/
