The high road

IT’S always a perilous time in the republic when patriotism becomes a talking point. Our politicians have made an ugly sport of defining the word according to their aims, while historians have clogged the record with hagiographies of George Washington, John Adams and their ilk. So it’s a relief to encounter Salt, the hero of Michael Drinkard’s lively third novel, “Rebels, Turn Out Your Dead.” Salt is a feckless 18th century hemp farmer held captive aboard a British prison ship rigged with hemp.

“After a couple of weeks, lighting up the rigging no longer did the trick,” Drinkard writes of Salt’s efforts to get high. “Even the sail was too harsh. There was no euphoria in it. He needed bud.”

My fellow Americans, meet an entirely new genus of patriot: the Revolutionary Stoner.

Drinkard sets his busy plot in motion with a murder. Salt’s brooding teenage son, James, kills a British officer. Salt takes the fall and winds up -- through a series of events too improbable to warrant full recitation -- floating off Manhattan, minus his stash.

The British, meanwhile, help themselves to everything he holds dear. Soldiers move into his home. Their villainous captain, Drayton, promptly beds down with his wife, Molly, and conscripts James to join the Loyalist army.

The novel’s most insistent notion is that America was founded, in the main, not by intrepid soldiers or high-minded idealists but by energetic rogues whose central allegiance was to their own opportunities. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but Drinkard imbues the particulars with a poetic radiance. He also captures the violence of the era with a surprising tenderness. As Molly stares at the body of a slain British soldier, she is moved to observe: “The British chose red uniforms so blood wouldn’t show, maybe because gore demoralized the unwounded, or because soldiers hoped for immortality. But blood did show, always. A muddy clot on the crimson breast, darkening even the brass buttons. It smelled like tin. The boy was not much older than James.”

In his afterword, Drinkard notes that “Rebels” was inspired by his discovery that more men died aboard British prison ships than in all the battles of the war. He gives an arresting authenticity to the privations of captivity: “Air, he needed air. He began to make his way in the direction he believed the portholes to be. But the captives were packed, body to body. Every breath Salt drew had first belonged to another man, and another before him, anemic and damp and sluttish.” He writes of a prisoner on the brink of death: “De La Luz dreamed until the dream was all that was left of him.”

Salt’s wife is hardly one of Drayton’s victims. In fact, her experiences with him are best left to speak for themselves: “Before long, Drayton let out a bellow and gulped like a fish. She had not yet had her pleasure. She stayed astride this good soldier and, before he could shirk his duties, rode him to her moment.”

Well.

Drinkard is having great fun here, and it’s impossible for the reader not to share in his pleasures.

At the same time, he has a more serious agenda: to recast our national creation myth. He wants us to focus not on the neatly drawn battlefields of textbooks but on the shapeless civil insurgency that gripped most of the Colonies. And he is determined to represent all parties to the drama, from pirates to Indians to Loyalists.

Unfortunately, the effort stretches him a bit thin. He writes from a dozen different points of view, and he often plunges us into scenes without making clear whose perspective we’ve assumed or where we are. I was confused for much of the first 100 pages -- and I wasn’t even stoned.

Most readers, I suspect, will be happiest tracking Salt and his evolution from a dreamy ne’er-do-well to a brave leader of men. It’s certainly an inspirational story -- like watching “The Dude” from “The Big Lebowski” mature into Odysseus.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling the urgent hand of formula hurrying me along. Life aboard the prison ship struck me as suspiciously similar to a Hollywood prison drama. We get inmates trading smokes, implied buggery, a sadistic warden, the required jailbreak. Salt himself is constantly behaving in the sort of flagrantly noble ways that will, inevitably, lead casting producers to peg Mel Gibson for the role. He’s not very interesting in these moments, or believable. (I ask you: Would a beautiful young maiden aid his escape, then take him to bed given that he has pox scars, head lice and no teeth?)

Nor does his fate ever feel much in doubt. We know Salt is going to find his way home and assume his rightful place as the man of the house.

There’s something deflating to this predictable arc. Drinkard has worked quite scrupulously to re-create the chaos of revolutionary America. Why, then, does he populate this world with characters whose fates feel preordained?

Drinkard also has a tendency to get cutesy with his dialogue. Witness this exchange, between James and his grandfather.

“ ‘Stop rattling my chain, grandpa.’

“The old man growled, ‘Young people.’ ”

Cue the laugh track.

This is not to say that “Rebels” isn’t a kick in the pants. It is. The prose is often mesmerizing, and the story certainly never flags. If anything, the novel suffers from excessive ambitions. It wants to be playful and tragic, historical and modern, a dazzling survey of life at the dawn of our greedy empire.

How one wishes Drinkard had devoted his considerable gifts to a smaller cast and let them wander further into the danger of their own hearts. A penchant for democracy, after all, may be laudable in a revolutionary leader. From our novelists we want radical depth.