Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
"New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island. 1746."
I absolutely adored most of this book. The friend that recommended it (Toly, one of the all-time-great book-recommenders) says it has a quality of being "suffused with reality":
For a historical novel, it's when you feel that the author is really so much there in that area of the past, has internalized so much of its everyday details and moments and intricacies that separate the past from us, that they can integrate it all together and present an extremely believable and detailed picture.
This contrasts with a lot of historical novels, where either the details are thin and the characters are just 21st Century Americans dressed in weird clothes,* or they present you
this huge mass of details but it doesn't cohere, you get a feeling that the author reached for a huge amount of trivia but doesn't really have a very detailed map of the reality they're describing. But in the rare extremely good cases you get both an expert guide and a really good map in the guide's head, so to speak
Golden Hill is the best-case case. Toly writes:
near the beginning when [the protagonist, who has just arrived in New York from England] disembarks and walks around the town and notices something weird about all the girls he sees - none of them have pox-marks, which is unthinkable in London - that was the moment I felt it's probably a fantastic book. Because you have to be a good guide with a detailed map to get there, right? It's not relevant to the plot. A modern person wouldn't even think of that detail. But someone coming from London to the better airs of the colonies for the first time would probably notice that. I don't know if it's a true detail (for all I know he's fibbing and e.g. there was lots of pox in the colonies as well), but it's extremely true-looking in a wholesome way, so to speak.
I had a similar moment early on when a character is counting out money and it's this hodge-podge of different bills from different colonies that have different discount-rates, and it all feels incredibly real and like nothing I've ever thought about or experienced. And the "suffused with reality" quality captures for me why (and what) an incredible achievement Golden Hill is: Spufford manages to recreate a very vivid, very real-feeling immersion into 1746 New York... but without making it feel like an infodump, without it feeling forced -- in fact, making it feel deeply fun -- and I truly don't know how he does it.
However, there was one thing I really didn't like about this book, and in some ways it's an annoying "why didn't you write the book I wanted instead of the book you wanted" kind of complaint, and so I feel bad about it but I'm going to make it anyway.
[mild spoilers below]
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Basically, the ending of this book is emotionally mixed -- it has happy elements and sad ones. Even before the end, there's some genuinely sad events that make it impossible for everything to come right, so you get through the last 30% or so knowing that the end will be partly sad. And this feels viscerally wrong to me, given the jubilant joyousness of the prose -- I wanted this book to be a bit unreal in its plot, somehow, I wanted the hero to get deeper and deeper into peril but for everything to ultimately come right and everyone I loved in it to get the things they wanted. [Note: the prose style is based on novels of the period, like Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and maybe the outcomes-mix is also based on them, I just haven't read any]
I don't know if there's a name for it but there's a certain type of book -- I was going to say "style" or "genre" but that's not quite right, it transcends those things -- where the hero just kinda lucks into stuff working out. I think of Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, though it's a very different book from this one. (I also think of Candide as a kind of counterpoint -- from what I remember of it, a zany high-energy adventure where everything goes wrong and right and wrong again). I think there's some kind of literary framework to be built here: do the heroes get into peril? Does stuff work out anyway? is the writing joyous?
Anyway, I desperately wanted this to be a book where things worked out, and with just a few (small!) tweaks to the outcomes for a couple of characters this could have been one. Is it bad that I still want that? Spufford is tremendously talented and wrote the book he wanted, but I kind of want to force him to go back and write an alternate version as the book I wanted.
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* I know no-one really cares, but this sentence is very strongly paraphrased from Toly as well, and I am desperate for a form of punctuation that conveys "I did not come up with this and can't take credit for it, but I changed the words around so I can't really put it in quote marks either."