Alan's latest effort, The Residence of the Soul, is a remarkable novel that represent's Alan's first, and hopefully not last, foray into historical fiction. (I am excluding All of Gaul, the best-selling comedy from his early "New Orleans" period. All of Gaul consists of the dispatches of a Roman general to his compatriots in Rome, intended to burnish the general's reputation but in fact revealing him to be a petulant, self-regarding buffoon. The book makes no pretense to historical accuracy, and should be categorized not as a historical novel but as a farce.)
Residence is a much darker work. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist, Andrei Solovyov, sails to New York seeking work as a war reporter. (Solovyov is not to be confused with Andrey Soloviev, a real-life Russian war photographer.) Solovyov is not so much chasing foreign adventure as fleeing domestic strife: both his mistress and his wife are pregnant, and his creditors are hounding him for his gambling debts. Solovyov may also be envious of the attention paid to his younger brother, Anatoly, who fought in Crimea and who is now a respected opinion columnist with a decidedly nationalist bent.
Solovyov's experience in the United States is first sobering and then shattering. He expects to find an egalitarian utopia, but instead is repelled by the unrefined and avaricious Americans he meets. He is surprised to find himself nurturing a snobbish disdain for the Americans' lack of culture and their barely-disguised social-climbing, and he wonders if this undignified scramble is the price of democracy, and if so, whether it is worth paying. However, in a stab of painful introspection, he admits to himself that his family would be better off if he were imbued with some of the American passion for money.
Solovyov briefly mingles with politicians and diplomats in Washington, and is amazed that an ungainly and unpolished rube like Lincoln has been entrusted with the presidency. But soon Solovyov is on the front lines, filing reports of the major battles in the Western theater and becoming accustomed to a rough and unpredictable way of life. It is here in the heart of the country that Solovyov will lose himself.
Following the surrender of Vicksburg, the last holdout of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River, Solovyov heads north to follow the Union's Army of the Cumberland, which, under the able leadership of General William Rosecrans, is chasing the Confederates out of Tennessee. (Coincidentally, Vicksburg's surrender came on the day after the withering Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. The tide of the war has turned, though much blood remains to be shed before it is through.) Solovyov's abolitionist, pro-Union sentiments have already made it difficult to file objective reports, and at Chickamauga he goes over the edge. Responding to cries for help, he finds a Yankee soldier who has taken a shot to the head and who is missing a large piece of his skull. Union surgeons have made a fateful mark on his coat—according to the cruel dictates of triage, he is to be left for dead, since he is beyond medical help. But the soldier is a mere boy, and Solovyov cannot ignore his need for water and his desperate fear of being abandoned to the advancing Rebels. Solovyov cradles his head in his lap, trying to keep the brains from spilling out, and alternately cries and talks to the boy. Clearly slipping away, the soldier starts slurring his words and becomes incoherent, and finally Solovyov must leave him. As Union soldiers hustle him away in front of Longstreet's charging Confederates, Solovyov casts his mind back to his parting from his tearful son in Russia, now thoroughly ashamed of his own indifference. Solovyov is almost literally beside himself, perceiving with terrible clarity the wretchedness and selfishness of his existence. He finds a kind of purity in his self-abhorrence and in his love for the dying soldier, whose name he never learns. (Rosecrans, too, is unnerved by the slaughter at Chickamauga, and despite Lincoln's reassurances, he effectively resigns his role as leader of the Army of the Cumberland.)
Abandoning his journalistic pretensions, Solovyov joins the Union army as a nurse and follows General Grant from his ingenious reinforcement of Chattanooga (besieged after the Union's retreat at Chickamauga) through his pursuit of General Lee and the remnants of the Confederate army two years later. President Lincoln joins Grant in Virginia, where he is thronged by ecstatic freed slaves (freed not just by the Emancipation Proclamation but by the Thirteenth Amendment, recently passed by the House of Representatives and awaiting its inevitable ratification by the states). Solovyov is ashamed by the shallowness of his original assessment of Lincoln, who is now his idol. When Lincoln is shot, Solovyov, beset by grief, decides that his time in the United States has come to a close. It is time to return to Russia to face the music.
Now begin Solovyov's trials. His family is shocked by his self-proclaimed pacifism, and his brother goads their father into disinheriting him. (Characteristically, Solovyov refuses to accept the label "pacifist," insisting that his standards for just war are simply too high for any actual war, short of the Civil War, to satisfy them. His father declines to honor this distinction.) His wife, fearing for the welfare of her children, leaves Andrei for his younger brother. Andrei tells Anatoly not to get too big a head: "she comes with the house."
This is unfair. His wife is actually impressed by his new depth, and where before he was sleek and rakish, he is now lean and hardened. She has never been so attracted to him. But she is frightened by his political extremism and strange philosophical meditations, and his spiritual awakening strikes her as a convenient way to deflect her anger over his mistress. Solovyov sails back to the United States alone, this time for good.
Alan now draws a curtain over Solovyov's life, hereafter revealing only the general shape of things. The Russian expatriate, head in the clouds, moves to Philadelphia and experiments with Quakerism; after several theological quarrels, he renounces the faith and moves to New York City. Revealing unexpected talent as a bookseller, he nevertheless lives in borderline poverty because of his tendency to use his money to support any oppressed minority that comes to his attention. He is particularly concerned with the welfare of freed slaves, and as a result he becomes involved in Republican politics. Predictably, though, he has a falling-out with his fellow Republicans over an arcane point of political philosophy, and he founds his own political party, which attracts a few dozen members at its peak.
All of this is presented in detached, sketchy prose. But Alan pulls back the curtain when Solovyov's daughter, now a young woman, arrives to tell him that his wife has left Anatoly and wishes to reconcile. Solovyov is in turmoil. He has embraced celibacy and fears the temptations that his wife will bring him. Mixed with this fear is his shame about his financial condition—he is little better off than he was when he left Russia, and without his estate, he has no way to provide for his family. Unable to corral his unruly thoughts, he takes his daughter on a trip to visit the battle site of Chickamauga. There for the first time he tells the story of his life-changing encounter with the injured soldier, and he breaks down.
I'll leave the story there (in fact, Alan doesn't take it much further), and part with a few thoughts. I'm gratified to find that Alan's immersion in Civil War history has yielded big dividends in the form of immediacy and verisimilitude. The war is not just a backdrop to the story, it provides the impetus for the big philosophical and spiritual ideas that animate the novel. I wish more authors would bring this kind of unifying conceptual coherence to their work.
This coherence can also be found in my favorite scene of the book. Solovyov, seeking refuge from family drama, goes for a ride through the Russian countryside. Here, he encounters a former serf who begs him to describe his encounters with Lincoln. (By itself, this is a fascinating set-piece, a serf freed by imperial proclamation, mostly ignorant of the world beyond his village and yet hungry for information about the great American emancipator.) Solovyov's conversation with the peasant lasts only a few pages, but in capsule form it captures Solovyov's volatile feelings, his grandiosity (almost justified by the subject matter) and his depression (almost appropriate given his idol's tragic end). We see a man gripped by powerful feelings but unable to navigate them or channel his frantic but sporadic energy, a man with rare moral vision but no means to turn it into anything meaningful. A waste of human potential, maybe, who recognizes himself in the vast waste that was the Civil War.
