Tom LeClair

The historical William Herndon worked with Lincoln, knew Lincoln as a friend, and even co-wrote a biography of the famous president. But the protagonist of Tom LeClair’s Lincoln’s Billy is a much more interesting character than these surface facts might show. Written in the voice of Billy Herndon and spiced with recollections of his famous friend's well-told stories, the novel reveals a man deeply devoted to truth, with nicely nuanced views on the emancipation of both women and of slaves, and a dogged determination to understand what turned a poor river-rafter into a president. This Herndon has tried, ever since Lincoln died, to wage his own “civil war against a confederacy of secessionists from the truth.” But society, then as now, wants its fables rich with unsullied heroes, Christian presidents, and ever-devoted spouses. Meanwhile Herndon’s “civil war” might need leaders, and Herndon proves unfitted to the task. So the world sees a great man of religion and family values, while Herndon reveals a teller of ribald stories who read the Bible and Aesop equally since they were the only books he could find as a child.

Tom LeClair’s novel has an authentic southern flavor, smoothly blending Herndon’s literary prose with Lincoln’s “Kaintuck” forthrightness. New Orleans—destination of river-rafts—with its “colors mixed up together like the rivers that make up the great Mississip,” becomes a metaphor for Lincoln’s life and humanity’s tangled mess. Its tales are neatly woven through the narrative, like facts through fable, at pleasingly natural intervals. And if truth today is a debatable commodity, there’s something truly satisfying about this novel’s portrayal of debatable truths in the past.

While Herndon struggles to stay loyal to what he knows and learns, family loyalties might be tested, and financial failure looms. But even then, the protagonist remembers of his friend that “Lincoln had also been a failure on the way up.” And in the end, perhaps success can’t be measured on its own, but only as an amalgam of “[b]lack and white together, impure and pure fused, immoral and moral, both sinner and redeemed.” Then we might see real people and real truths, instead of just what we want to see. Meanwhile, we can enjoy a truly absorbing novel of true fiction and see our Lincoln large as life.

Disclosure: I was given a free preview edition of this novel and I offer my honest review.… (mehr)