ABE

By Richard Slotkin

Henry Holt & Company

478 pages

 

Sometimes an author comes up with an idea so simple, yet so striking in its simplicity, that it seems like a little bit of genius. Such is the case with Richard Slotkin and Abe, his novel about the first 23 years of Abraham Lincoln’s life.

This is not promising terrain for a novelist. No other American president’s life has been so thoroughly worked over. What’s more, Lincoln was so much larger than life that he has become something like a secular folk saint. What’s left to embroider?

Slotkin wisely decides to focus on one of the early, almost mythological events of Lincoln’s life—that is, his trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans on a flatboat, during which he was fully exposed to slavery for the first time. A raw, barefoot boy, learning about life and race on a raft on the Mississippi. Ring any bells?

Slotkin, a professor of American studies at Wesleyan University and the author of several prominent works of frontier history and two previous novels, makes the association between Lincoln and Huck Finn quite consciously — and successfully. This is due in no small part to the fact that he is a strong and resourceful writer. Just as he manages to weave Huck into Abe, Slotkin works the young Lincoln’s words, thoughts, dialect and society seamlessly into his story.

Slotkin’s prose can be enormously evocative. Take, for instance, his description of Lincoln, as a toddler, waiting for his mother to read to him: ”Her long fingers, big-knuckled with flattened tips like tongues, moved on the face of the page, and the spots and whirls and flashes, black on white, flowed out of them.”

It helps, too, that Slotkin is adept at conveying the hardships and the precariousness of life on the frontier. The sheer variety of Lincoln’s experiences and the things he had to know even as a young man—how to build a fence, clear a field of trees, plow, hunt, fight, navigate a river — seem worth noting in an election season that has given us career politicians, retired athletes and famous sons.

Slotkin is also good at depicting the awe-inspiring quality of the American landscape, including the ”black wall of trees” that greets young Abe’s family as his ne’er-do-well father leads them ever farther west, always searching for the perfect plot of land to make his own. Slotkin’s evocations of the natural world are gripping, whether he’s describing the massacre of thousands of birds in an enormous, rather terrifying ”pigeon-roost” or giving us descriptions of navigating on the treacherous Mississippi.

There has been a good deal written about the two separate trips Lincoln took down these rivers, but little is known for sure about these journeys. Slotkin has combined the two trips into one. Lincoln travels with two partners and a slave named Sephus, whom Abe rescues from the river. On the way to New Orleans there is time for both lessons and adventures, and if this isn’t quite as good a yarn as Huck’s story, well, what is? There are encounters with Frances Wright and her utopian community that go on a little too long and for too little purpose, and it’s perhaps too much to have Abe encounter both Junius Booth, father of his eventual assassin, and Judge Joseph Davis, older brother of Jefferson.

Yet even they make the larger point that Lincoln’s America, for all its vast geographical dimension, was still a relatively small country—a fact that would magnify the tragedy of the Civil War. And if Slotkin’s Lincoln is perhaps too often the one to save everybody’s bacon, consider what a prodigious force of nature the actual Lincoln must have been—the Rail-Splitter, with his immense physical strength, who grew up in log cabins and learned to read and write by the light from the fireplace. He is our ultimate autodidact, a man who made himself from nothing into a lawyer, a legislator—a president.

Slotkin’s Abe begins as a folding in—of Abe into Huck, of our stone Lincoln into the natural environment he sprang from. It ends as a separating out—Lincoln removes himself from his domineering father; decides what he wants from life and what he doesn’t; and ruminates on what he will accept or reject from the many codes he encounters. These include the Bible, the law (which countenances slavery, among other things) and the code of survival in frontier society.  Abe is a rich, satisfying coming-of-age story, a tale that leaves you wishing Slotkin would go on, right to the end of this uniquely American myth.