Lenoir

""They are deranged. They are pale, their country is flat and wet, and they have no souls. I believe they are being punished for having only one god."" So Mbatgha--aka Lenoir, African slave and healer--begins this evocative imagined autobiography of the model for Rubens's painting Four Heads of a Negro. Wry, bemused and honest, Lenoir's voice adroitly registers both 17th-century Holland and the soul of a proud outsider who struggles to maintain his beliefs, dignity and self-possession even as he is pulled into the perplexing lives and misadventures of those around him. Greenhall (Deathchain) creates an astonishing but finally convincing array of characters: Dom Twee, a confidence man, Lenoir's friend and sometime owner; Padmos, a doctor searching for a pregnant corpse; Anna van Cott, a painter whose father buys Lenoir's freedom; Katja, a prostitute and secret Catholic; and the two geniuses Rembrandt and Rubens, who come to respect Lenoir as much for his insightful mind as for his expressive face. In the tradition of the picaresque, Lenoir moves from place to place--Amsterdam to Rotterdam to Antwerp--and from one near-disaster to the next. He flees evil twin brothers, sets out to sea in a rowboat with a transvestite sailor and performs with an Italian comedy troupe. However, like Don Quixote (with which Greenhall draws rather too-pointed parallels), this novel transcends its genre, becoming sharp social commentary, a nuanced exploration of character and a sophisticated commentary on our own myths of North and South, Europe and Africa. Resilient and clear-eyed, Greenhall's Lenoir speaks from the margins of his society in a voice of supreme sanity and deep wit. (Sept.)