became that much more eager to know him, that much more willing to see him and talk to him again. That instantly set him apart from all the other people I had met since moving back to America. He was more than just a potential drinking companion, I discovered, more than just another acquaintance. An hour after cracking open Sachs’s book fifteen years ago, I understood that it would be possible for us to become friends.
I have just spent the morning scanning through it again (there are several copies here in the cabin), and am astonished by how little my feelings for it have changed. I don’t think I have to say much more than that. The book continues to exist, it’s available in bookstoresand libraries, and anyone who cares to read it can do so without difficulty. It was issued in paperback a couple of months after Sachs and I first met, and since then it has stayed mostly in print, living a quiet but healthy life in the margins of recent literature, a crazy hodgepodge of a book that has kept its own small spot on the shelf. The first time I read it, however, I walked into it cold. After listening to Sachs in the bar, I assumed that he had written a conventional first novel, one of those thinly veiled attempts to fictionalize the story of his own life. I wasn’t planning to hold that against him, but he had talked so disparagingly about the book that I felt I had to brace myself for some kind of letdown. He autographed a copy for me that day in the bar, but the only thing I noticed at the time was that it was big, a book that ran to more than four hundred pages. I started reading it the next afternoon, sprawled out in bed after drinking six cups of coffee to kill the hangover from Saturday’s binge. As Sachs had warned me, it was a young man’s book—but not in any of the ways I was expecting it to be.
The New Colossus
had nothing to do with the sixties, nothing to do with Vietnam or the antiwar movement, nothing to do with the seventeen months he had served in prison. That I had been looking for all that stemmed from a failure of imagination on my part. The idea of prison was so terrible to me, I couldn’t imagine how anyone who had been there could not write about it.
As every reader knows,
The New Colossus
is a historical novel, a meticulously researched book set in America between 1876 and 1890, and based on documented, verifiable facts. Most of the characters are people who actually lived at the time, and even when the characters are imaginary, they are not inventions so much as borrowings, figures stolen from the pages of other novels. Otherwise, all the events are true—true in the sense that they follow the historical record—and in those places where the record is unclear, there is no tamperingwith the laws of probability. Everything is made to seem plausible, matter-of-fact, even banal in the accuracy of its depiction. And yet Sachs continually throws the reader off guard, mixing so many genres and styles to tell his story that the book begins to resemble a pinball machine, a fabulous contraption with blinking lights and ninety-eight different sound effects. From chapter to chapter, he jumps from traditional third-person narrative to first-person diary entries and letters, from chronological charts to small anecdotes, from newspaper articles to essays to dramatic dialogues. It’s a whirlwind performance, a marathon sprint from the first line to the last, and whatever you might think of the book as a whole, it’s impossible not to respect the author’s energy, the sheer gutsiness of his ambitions.
Among the characters who appear in the novel are Emma Lazarus, Sitting Bull, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Pulitzer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Auguste Bartholdi, Catherine Weldon, Rose Hawthorne (Nathaniel’s daughter), Ellery Channing, Walt Whitman, and William Tecumseh Sherman. But Raskalnikov is also there (straight from the epilogue of
Crime and Punishment
—released from prison and newly arrived as an
I have just spent the morning scanning through it again (there are several copies here in the cabin), and am astonished by how little my feelings for it have changed. I don’t think I have to say much more than that. The book continues to exist, it’s available in bookstoresand libraries, and anyone who cares to read it can do so without difficulty. It was issued in paperback a couple of months after Sachs and I first met, and since then it has stayed mostly in print, living a quiet but healthy life in the margins of recent literature, a crazy hodgepodge of a book that has kept its own small spot on the shelf. The first time I read it, however, I walked into it cold. After listening to Sachs in the bar, I assumed that he had written a conventional first novel, one of those thinly veiled attempts to fictionalize the story of his own life. I wasn’t planning to hold that against him, but he had talked so disparagingly about the book that I felt I had to brace myself for some kind of letdown. He autographed a copy for me that day in the bar, but the only thing I noticed at the time was that it was big, a book that ran to more than four hundred pages. I started reading it the next afternoon, sprawled out in bed after drinking six cups of coffee to kill the hangover from Saturday’s binge. As Sachs had warned me, it was a young man’s book—but not in any of the ways I was expecting it to be.
The New Colossus
had nothing to do with the sixties, nothing to do with Vietnam or the antiwar movement, nothing to do with the seventeen months he had served in prison. That I had been looking for all that stemmed from a failure of imagination on my part. The idea of prison was so terrible to me, I couldn’t imagine how anyone who had been there could not write about it.
As every reader knows,
The New Colossus
is a historical novel, a meticulously researched book set in America between 1876 and 1890, and based on documented, verifiable facts. Most of the characters are people who actually lived at the time, and even when the characters are imaginary, they are not inventions so much as borrowings, figures stolen from the pages of other novels. Otherwise, all the events are true—true in the sense that they follow the historical record—and in those places where the record is unclear, there is no tamperingwith the laws of probability. Everything is made to seem plausible, matter-of-fact, even banal in the accuracy of its depiction. And yet Sachs continually throws the reader off guard, mixing so many genres and styles to tell his story that the book begins to resemble a pinball machine, a fabulous contraption with blinking lights and ninety-eight different sound effects. From chapter to chapter, he jumps from traditional third-person narrative to first-person diary entries and letters, from chronological charts to small anecdotes, from newspaper articles to essays to dramatic dialogues. It’s a whirlwind performance, a marathon sprint from the first line to the last, and whatever you might think of the book as a whole, it’s impossible not to respect the author’s energy, the sheer gutsiness of his ambitions.
Among the characters who appear in the novel are Emma Lazarus, Sitting Bull, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Pulitzer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Auguste Bartholdi, Catherine Weldon, Rose Hawthorne (Nathaniel’s daughter), Ellery Channing, Walt Whitman, and William Tecumseh Sherman. But Raskalnikov is also there (straight from the epilogue of
Crime and Punishment
—released from prison and newly arrived as an
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