Dave's Book Blog: "Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler

Monday, 3 March 2025

"Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler

This is the story of the Booth family leading up to the assassination, by John Wilkes Booth, of US President Abraham Lincoln. It is history in the sense that all the major events actually happened, but in the way that it is told, with added family conversations, it has been turned into historical fiction.

The head of the family was the Shakespearean actor Junius Booth, an Englishman whose grandmother had been a relative of the English radical politician John Wilkes and who had competed with Edmund Kean on the London stage before becoming the foremost actor of his generation in the US. He acted primarily in Shakespearean roles (as rewritten by Colly Cibber) and his large American family was technically illegitimate because their parents had not married, or had married bigamously. His sons included Edwin Booth, who became another star actor, famous for his portrayal of Hamlet, and youngest son Joe who was a doctor. But the family is most known for actor John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln during the performance of a play at a Washington theatre days after the US Civil war had been won by the government troops and the rebellion by the South had been crushed.

JWB believed that Lincoln had monarchical ambitions.

The book is shot through with historical irony. Almost the first page is adorned as an epigram with a quote from Lincoln: “Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” The deep divisions in American society were then over the question of slavery, nowadays the dividing lines may be more nuanced but they are still there. There is one moment in which a riot takes place during which a policeman is killed ... and all those brought to court are acquitted. But the fundamental question that the book seems to ask is whether the upbringing of JWB was responsible for what he did and given that each of the Booth children grows up in a different way I think the answer must be know.

The style of the book is interesting in that the PoV is sometimes omniscient as the author chronicles historical events but when she tells us of what happened in the family (also historical but in rather more detailed close up) she chooses the perspective of one of the siblings of JWN, normally his eldest sister Rosalie, his famous actor-brother Edwin, or his other surviving sister Asia.

It is a well-written, mostly straightforward narrative and I read it quickly, wanting to reach the assassination which occurs very close to the end.

It's also interesting in the way it considers and dissects the different styles of acting.

Selected quotes:

“The house wakes up when Father is in it, the threads that connect the family tightening like violin strings until they buzz.” (2: Edwin, i)
“The way Rosalie sees it, pretty much everyone in London was abandoning their wives to run away with their sweethearts around the time that Father met Mother. It seems to have been quite the fad. Sodom and Gomorrah with tea.” (2: Edwin, viii)
“In a grand tradition reaching back through the centuries, he insists that war was forced upon him by unprovoked aggression. He seizes huge swaths of the West as recompense.” (2: Lincoln and the Whigs at Sprigg’s)
“‘Have you ever noticed,’ Rosalie asks, ‘that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?’” (3: Asia: vii)
“Streetlights have been installed all over the city and that soft glow now drifts in the windows at night, dimming the stars, and puddling on the floors.” (start of Book 4)
“No acting is great which pleases only a single class ... the gods of the gallery are as good critics as the blues of the boxes.” (4: Edwin: xii)
“The war will intensify the growing preference for suppressed over expressed emotion, especially when the suppression comes with evident (though delicately played) struggle.” (4: Edwin: xii)
“Naturalism can go too far. No one wants to pay for a performance of everyday life, scenes from the supper table. Her ideal is an elevated naturalism. Lines with cadence, not overpowered by the delivery, but allowed to echo in their own intrinsic power. Scenes and situations with weight and moral significance. Gorgeous tragedy. Art that inspires. Art that feels like art.” (4: Edwin: xii)
“Fechter builds his characters visually from a myriad of physical moments ... Edwin builds his characters through motive and emotion.” (5: Edwin: 1)