The War at Home

By ADAM GOODHEART

JARRETTSVILLE

By Cornelia Nixon

340 pp. Counterpoint. Paper, $15.95

If a successful work of fiction is an illusionist’s trick, then surely successful historical fiction requires a kind of double deception. The reader’s mind must be drawn cunningly out of his body to inhabit not only an unfamiliar realm of experience but an alien time. This is tough to pull off, since the telltale colors of the author’s own era always end up seeping in. The phenomenon is similar to what happens with art forgeries: most experts say that even the cleverest fake rarely goes undetected for more than a generation. Sooner or later, that dreamy young woman in the newly discovered Vermeer will end up looking just a little too much like Reese Witherspoon.

In her third novel, “Jarrettsville,” Cornelia Nixon has the advantage of telling a true story, one that took place in her own family. Just after the Civil War, a distant ancestor, Martha Jane Cairnes, made national headlines after she shot and killed her sometime lover, Nick McComas. With the steady hand and steely nerve of a practiced marksman, Martha gunned Nick down on the porch of the barroom at the local hotel. The ensuing trial blended all the elements that, then as now, thrilled and fascinated the prurient American imagination: illicit sex, betrayal, murder — and the specter of race, since local rumor held that Martha had also had a liaison with a black man.

While Nick was a Union Army veteran, Martha and her family had been Confederate sympathizers. Their town, Jarrettsville, lay in northern Maryland, just a few miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, occupying its own strange no man’s land between North and South. A slaveholding state, Maryland had nonetheless remained in the Union while clandestinely sending thousands of men to fight for the rebels. Nick McComas’s murder took place, perhaps not coincidentally, on the very day that he and other pro-Northern townsfolk gathered to celebrate the anniversary of Appomattox while their pro-Southern neighbors (and, in many cases, kin) fumed on the sidelines.

Nixon, who teaches creative writing at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., first heard the story of Martha Cairnes’s crime as a teenager while returning to the West Coast from a trip to old family farms back East. As she recounts in an epilogue, she later inherited family papers that included a sepia-toned photograph of the murderess, “but before it came to me someone took a red crayon to her lace collar and cuffs, perhaps to show she was a scarlet woman.”

In preparing to write her novel, Nixon returned to investigate the long-forgotten drama. She ably conveys the dark atmosphere of Reconstruction, which, in a place like Jarrettsville, could be more brutal — and even, at times, more bloody — than the wartime period itself. Compared with the states of the vanquished Confederacy, Maryland felt only a minimal federal presence. Newly freed slaves were left to fend for themselves against the physical violence and legal intimidation that whites used, in many places, to enslave them again in all but name.

Yet Nixon fumbles repeatedly when it comes to the finer details of history that, woven together, form a credible fabric of the past. For anyone who knows a bit about American history, it’s irksome when — to pick out just a couple of examples — she talks about the supposed cotton plantations of antebellum Maryland or uses the 20th-century word “segregationist” to identify opponents of black equality in the 1860s. Such errors are all the more jarring because the book’s various chapters are written in what purport to be 19th-century voices: those of Nick, Martha and a host of lesser characters. When Nixon has someone hail a friend with “Hey, man,” and another confess, “I might have acted more mature,” it’s as if they were rapid-cycling between 1869 and 1969. A few pages later, on the other hand, the dialogue plunges into mucky 19th-century cliché when Martha is referred to as a “perfect bud of Southern womanhood.” Even more cringe-producing, Nixon’s African-American characters, though sympathetic, often speak a kind of Uncle Tom dialect. (“He got hisself some pigs and chickens and a mule and whacked up a old tree for a plow, and fore you know it he got greens and ’tatoes and ham he done smoked hisself.”)

Not that the white characters in “Jarrettsville” are much better. Here’s Nick, describing a passionate encounter with Martha: “Something ferocious seemed to possess her, and she took my mouth in hers, her jaws moving as if to masticate me, as if every minute we had spent apart poured over her in a white avalanche.”

That kiss left me gasping for breath — and not in a good way. While badly rendered history, like a forged painting, may pass undetected for only a little while, writing like that is timeless.

Adam Goodheart is director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Goodheart-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3