The Historian: Six Fantasies of the American Experience

In elegant prose, Garber ( Metaphysical Tales ) weaves elaborate, arcane allegories about this country's metamorphosis from young republic to plutocracy, on Americans' worship of power and Mammon, and on the suppression of women in American society. The two main characters are ``the historian,'' a Boston professor, muckraker and reformer modeled on Henry Adams, and his cousin Simms, a self-proclaimed frontiersman. Their adventures, solo and in tandem, extend from the Connecticut River Valley in 1807 to a Great Plains train robbery in 1912, with stops in New Mexico, Pittsburgh and New York City. The historian seeks the embodiment of Clio, muse of history, in various magnetic women; one of them, a dancer whose philosophy echoes that of Isadora Duncan, teaches him to rediscover ``inner stillness.'' The cousins encounter other assertive women--an anarchist seductress, a landscape painter, a pioneer, a psychic, a schoolteacher--all figures meant to underscore the unrealized potential of American women and their unjustified exclusion from historical annals. The work is more successful as theory than as narrative, however. Some of the sections are ponderous or silly, though others are effective as parable. Yet Garber's laudable intent--to strip mythology from accepted historical accounts--surmounts his work's inadequacies. TriQuarterly awarded the book its William Goyen Prize. (Apr.)