Date: 25 March 2018
Location: Reynolds & Linda
As usual the Bookers’ meeting—at Linda and Reynolds—featured excellent food and congenial conversation. The food was worth remembering: baked chicken, green salad, zucchini, corn casserole, chocolate pudding pie, and bread pudding. The conversation featured people’s grandmothers among other topics.
The book, a historical novel of the “current wars” (DC vs AC) in New York, 1887-1895, impressed us with its accuracy to fact, though the timeline of events was condensed and rearranged and, as is to be expected, some conversations, unrecorded items of history, and characters’ mental states were created as fiction. One complaint said that the historic-fictionalizing got in the way of the real story, that a straightforward reporting of the facts of history would have been preferable. A response countered that the novel was a fun read: the chapters were three to five pages long, and each one started with a hook and ended with cliff-hanger. This technique, however, left some feeling that they had been talked down to, as if we had no attention spans.
The book included lots of walking around New York City for the purpose of contacting people in their offices and homes. Telephones popped up as a rarity. Nevertheless all the nineteenth-century communication—pedestrian visits, face-to-face confrontations—seemed unnoticeable background until one was struck with surprise by a horse and carriage or the like.
Much of the character development was true to history. Thomas Edison was in fact vicious, Nikola Tesla was schizoid, J. P. Morgan was world-weary.
The elaborate double-crossings, deceits, and financial bullying were breathtaking. One did not leave the book feeling great trust in great corporations and billionaires. The Cravaths’ generosity and public spirit (postlude type chapters) were all the more impressive.
— John