Not as fun as whiskey or rebelling

In one of his remarkable essays from the mid-1930s, the great German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger wrote: “I admit to loving historical novels with a passion. I do understand the prejudice against this form of literature, but it is a prejudice.”

Noting the genre’s importance to his own work, Feuchtwanger went on to muse on his inability to “imagine that a serious novelist, when working with historical subject matter, could ever regard historical facts as anything other than a means of achieving distance, as a metaphor, in order to render his own feelings, his era, his own philosophy, and himself as accurately as possible.”

As the bestseller lists show, year after year, legions of readers share Feuchtwanger’s passion and so, thankfully, do many contemporary serious novelists. Colm Toibin, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry, Emily Barton and the late Tom Flanagan are names that come immediately to mind, though that’s simply because they’re personal favorites.

When problems arise with historical fiction, it’s usually because the genre has fallen into the hands of a writer determined to both entertain and instruct, but who doesn’t quite bring that difficult synthesis off.

David Liss, the author of three previous historical thrillers that earned admiring notices and better-than-brisk sales, slips in and out of that problematic category with his new novel, “The Whiskey Rebels.” That’s a pity, because Liss has his hands around a fascinating and consequential bit of American history and approaches it with an obvious measure of ambition.

Set in Pennsylvania in 1792, the story turns on the events that, two years later, would produce the new American republic’s first popular insurrection, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. (The earlier Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts had occurred under the old Articles of Confederation and helped solidify elite opinion in favor of a new, more centralizing constitution.) The new national government had agreed to assume the Revolutionary War debts incurred by the individual states and, to finance their repayment, the first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, pushed through an excise tax on whiskey distillers. Now, anybody with a pulse -- let alone a modicum of historical consciousness -- knows that anti-tax sentiment is imprinted on our national DNA, but this levy was particularly onerous because it taxed the product of small family stills at a substantially higher rate than that of larger distillers.

Moreover, in late 18th century America, whiskey played particularly important social and economic roles. America’s industrious farmers and fertile lands produced a glut of grain, particularly corn, in the newly settled territories west of the Appalachians. (There’s poetry for another occasion in the fact that our mellow bourbon was born there, when ingenuity and natural beneficence conjoined.) There were no markets for such bounty, no way to store it and no roads to transport it elsewhere. So, farmers began converting their surplus into whiskey.

When the British blockade during the Revolution cut the Colonies off from their preferred spirit, rum, the trade in whiskey boomed. On the frontier, where there was little currency, it even became a medium of exchange. Foreign visitors, including De Tocqueville, remarked on how even cultivated Americans consumed whiskey with their meals, which often made after-dinner conversation, if not incoherent, frequently uninspiring. That was one of the reasons Thomas Jefferson sought to promote wine-making and George Washington encouraged the brewing of beer. (When he left office, however, our first president also became his country’s biggest commercial distiller.) By 1810, Americans’ per capita annual consumption of alcohol reached eight gallons, which is more than four times the current level.

For all these reasons, the small farmers-distillers on Pennsylvania’s western frontier were ill-disposed to accept Hamilton’s excise tax, and they revolted rather than pay it. Liss has elected to explore the stirrings of this insurrection through two first-person narratives delivered in alternating chapters:

Ethan Saunders is a disgraced ex-spy for Washington’s Continental Army, down on his luck and on the sauce in Philadelphia, when he receives a plea for help from his onetime fiancee, Cynthia Pearson. She also is the daughter of Saunders’ former partner in espionage; both fell under a cloud when they were falsely accused of treason. Cynthia’s husband, a financial trader in the nation’s embryonic commercial exchanges, has disappeared. It soon emerges that the missing husband has been caught up in machinations surrounding Hamilton’s new Bank of the United States and the speculators whose frontier land swindles are fueling the discontent over the whiskey tax.

Fans of Liss’ earlier historical novels will recognize in Saunders more than a little of their rough-and-ready but essentially decent protagonist, Benjamin Weaver, the retired Jewish pugilist turned 18th century London proto-sleuth. (Weaver’s characterization has a genuine force, in part, because it’s based on a historical person, Daniel Mendoza, who essentially invented systemized boxing and, after retirement, worked as a debt collector. The translation of Mendoza/Weaver to Weaver/Saunders makes for a certain dramatic attenuation: The characterological blood runs thin in the third generation.)

The novel’s other narrator is Joan Maycott, an aspiring novelist, married to a Revolutionary War veteran, who has pushed west to the Pennsylvania frontier. They have been swindled by the speculator William Duer, an actual historical character and an associate of Hamilton’s. He and Aaron Burr are major figures in Joan’s account of events.

Other historic figures from the period, including Washington, make cameo appearances -- mainly arbitrary and mainly for effect. Joan and her husband have managed to get back on their feet with a distillery that produces excellent whiskey from a private formula, so Hamilton’s tax hits them hard. They’re soon deeply enmeshed in one of the conspiracies that will end in rebellion. Before that happens, however, Saunders’ and Maycott’s narratives merge in a violent denouement whose worst intentions are foiled by the ex-spy, though Joan does get to set off the Panic of 1792, the new nation’s first.

As in his previous novels, Liss is strong on historical detail, particularly when it comes to the origins of modern finance and markets and, these days, there’s something rather compellingly apt about the notion of making historical romance out of financial history. (His first Benjamin Weaver novel deals with the South Seas Bubble, and one coming next year involves the East India Co.) Still, “The Whiskey Rebels” sometimes grinds virtually to a halt under the weight of convoluted economic explication.

There also are serious issues with the dialogue. Liss has spoken about his wariness of replicating 18th century speech, because it might “jar the reader.” Fair enough -- though others, including Barton in her novel “Brookland,” have run the risk and survived. But what is one to make of things like this speech of Joan’s: “What does it mean to be a patriot? You love the America in your head and your heart, but is that the same America that takes from poor men money they don’t have so rich men can have a corrupt bank? Is that why you fought in the war? . . . Is that why your friends died? They died for liberty, not so that oppression might spring from nearer tyrants.”

It does have a certain contemporary ring.

Then there’s this from Saunders to Joan: “It never ought to have been like this, Joan, you are better than this. You are so much better. Imagine what you might have done had you only tried your hand at creating rather than destroying.”

Oh, dear: though at least there’s nothing jarringly 18th century about those sentiments.

This sort of thing might be forgiven, but after more than half-a-thousand, less-than-propulsive pages, “The Whiskey Rebels” comes to a neat conclusion that manages to be both contrived and preposterous. Now that’s jarring.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com