A bridge to 18th century Brooklyn

THE Greeks originally had but three muses and so too the American literary imagination -- progress, success and loss.

All three have their subtle say in “Brookland,” Emily Barton’s marvelously engrossing historical novel. In her highly praised first novel, “The Testament of Yves Gundron,” Barton created a richly realized imaginary world that was touched by and parallel to our own. In her second book -- no sophomore jinx here -- she has armed that imagination with facts and tone that realistically evoke 18th century New York in an utterly convincing and involving way. Make no mistake -- this is not a book about history but a novel set in the past. The distinction is critical to its success, which is considerable.

It isn’t easy to get the 18th century right. Unlike the 19th century -- whose preoccupations still are very much our own -- the mind of the 1700s can seem very distant. Barton does full justice to that essential strangeness by peopling it with achingly human characters. Her narrator, Prudence “Prue” Winship, and her sisters, Pearl and Temperance, operate a gin distillery inherited from their father in what is now Brooklyn. Prue, a brooding child of stunningly dogged competence and with all the independence her era permits, has ambitions that propel the story forward.

One of the marks of Barton’s authorial tact is that she resists even the hint of turning the formidable Prue or her sisters into proto-feminists. They remain what they must be: intelligent and capable women firmly fixed in an era that inevitably constrained them. Thus Prue chafes when taking out a mortgage on the distillery she inherited because her husband’s signature is required but not her own -- yet she thinks nothing of employing slaves and, later, indentured servants.

Barton has written elsewhere that “[i]t’s one of the most cherished American myths: that in the vast sprawl of our varied landscape, personal destinies can unfold without limits. Here, we like to believe, people are free to shape the places they live in, not the other way around. But in reality a particular setting can have a deep and subtle influence over the fate of its inhabitants -- a reality that, paradoxically, is often best explored in works of fiction.”

You couldn’t find a better case in point than “Brookland.”

Early on, the child Prudence -- left to wander by parents preoccupied with their distillery and each other -- unobtrusively sets two of the poles that will hold her story in tension. First, she calls her home by its Indian name:

“Ihpetonga! I’d think passionately, feeling the resonating power of the rocky Heights on which I stood as I called it by its ancient name. The natives of the place had been driven east into Nassau and Suffolk generations before my parents had arrived (though, on occasion, I dug one of their arrowheads, or a wampum shell, or a shard of pot from the soil of our yard), but I still liked to let their words roll round my mouth, like smooth river stones. These were clearly the names by which the places knew themselves. I felt them respond to my call, however quietly I voiced it; and I half expected the ground to tremble and send forth some spirit.”

Around her, she catches the “scents of ripe corn, horse dung & my father’s juniper berries.” By contrast, the city she could see across the water, New York, “had no smell but brine. All the life I could see was of people and horses in the immediate vicinity of the docks. Some other child would have thought nothing of these circumstances, but it was by these signs ... that I came to believe the Isle of Mannahata was, in fact, the City of the Dead.”

Bridges, obviously, are metaphoric as well as physical unifiers of the divided. Prue’s resolve to construct a bridge that will span the East River is at the center of this epic narrative, but Barton redeems this obvious device by delineating the emotional transformation of a consuming private obsession into a public work that is costly in every sense. This is a deeply, almost mythic American process, one repeated to this very day, and the convincing intimacy with which Barton conveys it is one of her book’s many pleasures. Watching as her characters’ public ambitions exact their toll upon private lives and are, in turn, wrecked on the shoals of deeply personal failures is instructive and moving.

So too is the way in which Barton adroitly handles one of contemporary historical fiction’s more difficult challenges: how to deploy the insights of contemporary psychology without ripping your characters out of context. Barton meets this problem by imbuing Prue with a quality greatly valued in the 18th century: frankness of character. Though she maintains silence toward others, Prue is unfailingly candid with herself and, ultimately, with her daughter, Recompense. Details of her own observations, while never out of context or character, are allowed to accrue into insight.

For example, there are Prue’s quick observations of her parents, so unavailable that they are unable to transmit to her a sense of their hard-won religious unbelief (18th century America was a much more free-thinking place than current pieties credit). Looking back at her mother, Prue recalls that “[i]n those days, it seemed she only surfaced from beneath her thoughts for my father.” When her father, fugitive from his own religious education, takes Prue to visit her “grim old” minister grandfather, she glancingly notes that an old boot was the only toy permitted her father as a child. “The result of which, I deduced,” she later recalls, “was that he’d grown into a man who could not refuse a measure of port, and who, though engaged in a grubby business, was known for his attention to the cut of his clothes.”

One of the delights of Barton’s art is the way in which the ultimately consequent is foreshadowed so delicately and unobtrusively that it seems less a literary device than a fleeting premonition. There is, for example, this choice of epigram for the novel from Robert Hass’ translation of Buson:

Chrysanthemum growers --

You are the slaves

of chrysanthemums!

Chrysanthemums grow in the Winship gardens. But what is at war in the Winship souls is foreshadowed by the choice of poet -- Taniguchi Buson, the haiku master who, during the era in which the Winships contend with distillery, bridge and each other, returned his art to the concrete purity of nature. It was called fuga-no-michi, or “the way of elegance.”

In “Brookland,” Emily Barton has taken an elegant way with questions of thought-provoking substance and has made a very fine and satisfying novel. And, if there is heartbreak at its end, those hearts are broken over things that mattered then -- and still.