Microreview: Gone Over
Gone Over
David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar
Foremost Press,2009
At the close of Gone Over, David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar’s rambunctious, fantastic historical novel, James DeWolfe, honorable senator from Rhode Island, addresses a fractious crowd:
“Washington, Franklin, Greene. Warren, Revere, Hancock, Adams. All gone. Long gone. The man we honor here today is a reminder of a time when gods walked among us. Men who fought not for personal gain but for honor and country. Who fought the War of Revolution that freed us from tyranny forever!”
The honoree here is Israel Potter, that vaguely Falstaffian figure in the history of the American Revolution, the raffish old hero of Bunker Hill. Potter first told the twisting, remarkable story of his life to Henry Trumbull, author and antiquarian son of poor benighted Norwich, Connecticut, and decades later Herman Melville found that same material irresistible and used it to write his Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile. Chacko and Kulcsar have been equally tempted, and the novel they’ve written deserves the widest possible readership. Calling this book one of the best historical novels of the year is only the beginning of the praise it deserves; in its wit, excitement, and sometimes mordant insight into human nature, it’s every bit the equal of Melville’s neglected classic.
The open secret at the heart of both books – and shining from every page of Trumbull’s original account – is that Israel Potter was, in the parlance of a later day, a big fat liar. The life story he spun is full of meetings with royalty, midnight encounters, hairsbreadth escapes … in short, all the things with which a man might fill his autobiography if he were reasonably sure there was nobody left in the world to contradict him. In Gone Over, Trumbull finds the aged Potter working in a whorehouse and induces him to tell his story, even though Potter is the first to warn him about that story:
“Let’s make a bargain, Mister Trumbull. I’ll tell you the truth, and we’ll decide what the world should know. Too much truth could lose me my pension, and you your reputation.”
“So your life is a scandal.”
“Worse,” he said seriously. “I’m a man without a country, or even a cause. It wasn’t that way in the beginning, though. We were just men who sailed to serve America. We put out from Plymouth in the brigantine Washington, but we were taken prisoner by the British and sent to England. That’s where this story begins. With a question. After a man sails past the gates of hell, what does he find?”
“You tell me.”
“Death or tomorrow,” he said without a smile.
Potter tells his story, and our authors work in a great deal of atmosphere and research in the pages that follow (they previously collaborated on an actual biography of Potter, to the extent such a thing is possible). Since Melville’s book is almost totally unknown to the modern reading public, readers won’t know that Chacko and Kulcsar are doing a bit of homage to Israel Potter by making Gone Over primarily a thrilling adventure story. Their Potter has more than his share of dangerous adventures, and all are narrated with a clean, knowing efficiency that would have pleased Robert E. Howard:
Israel heard a noise that for a moment overrode the sound of his own footsteps on the cobblestones. It was not other footsteps, but a higher, slicker sound that went on a bit longer than any sound like it.
Israel knew when he turned that he would be facing a sword, and that it would be the brightest thing in the narrow street at three-thirty in the morning.
It was that. He could see by the outline that it was a light dueling blade that made up in speed what it lacked in weight. Israel had nothing with him but the knife he had bought in Portsmouth. The only advantage he had was his familiarity with the weapon and his opponent’s ignorance of it.
“Close enough,” said Israel.
The recent success of HBO’s John Adams mini-series demonstrated that Americans are still fascinated by the actual lives their Founding Fathers lived, fascinated by the gaps, the human lacunae, in those storied biographies. Israel Potter lurks on the far fringes of the American pantheon, half-myth even to the men and women who knew him, and maybe that makes him all the more inviting. Certainly the old rascal himself would have been immensely pleased with the first-rate yarn our authors have spun in Gone Over. Do yourself a favor this autumn: skip the latest doorstop biography of Washington and read this wonderful book instead.
–Steve Donoghue
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