"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."

Although I may continue with this blog for a century or more (I have enormous faith in the potentialities of gerontological medicine) and, accordingly, read more than ten thousand books, still, it is unlikely that I will ever again essay a work by an author with whom I happen to be well-acquainted personally.

Judge Val L. McGee is the father of my best friend from school in Alabama; like many brilliant and successful Southern gentlemen of a certain generation, he is a vastly erudite amateur scholar of the War Between the States (Yankees of the same social class and economic level tend to gravitate toward World War II, for some reason; perhaps one must be European to appreciate the sacrifices of Flanders).  Be that as it may, Judge McGee's historical novel Selma, set in the small city of that name in 1860 and ongoing, is less an American novel than an exercise in history as a novel.  The operant parallel here is, of course, War and Peace, although Judge McGee would be the first to decry any casual comparisons with Tolstoy, and, less obviously, Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea and, more obscurely, Israel Joshua Singer's The Brothers Ashkenazi.  In all four cases, a gifted writer weaves a similar tale of similar lives in dissimilar settings:  Alexandrine St. Petersburg, the Don basin, shtetl Poland, ante-bellum Alabama.

At this point I should confess to an ineradicable penchant for the roman fleuve and the dynastic biography a la Buddenbrooks and the Palliser novels of Trollope.  I am not so concerned with WHAT will happen to characters so much as why, when, how, and what everything looked like at the time.  I am the only person I have ever heard of who thinks reading all twenty-seven volumes of Jules Romains' Les Hommes de Bonnes Volonte would be a hell of a good way to spend a summer vacation.  I pray for a broken leg so that I can spend six weeks in traction in order to finally get past the "Ouverture" of  A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.  Thus, vast historiographical romps like Selma are very far from earning my enmity.

Do I need to know the in's and out's of Alabama's slave codes of the 1850's?  Do I need to follow the tug of war between secessionists and Unionists in quite the amount of detail which Judge McGee provides?  As I tell millionaires at my place of employment on a daily basis:  "This isn't about need; it's about want."  And I want to know as much as possible about the truth of slavery, because only with the truth of slavery THEN can I have the barest hope of understanding the reality of racism in America NOW.

339 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.