Every Night For A Thousand Years by Chris Adrian, 1997
The magic trick:
Methodical, unassuming telling of a remarkably ambitious story
This story shouldn’t work. Or at least, speaking for my own tastes, it shouldn’t be one that I enjoy as much as I do. It’s historical fiction. I don’t like historical fiction. I don’t trust it. I don’t want it to fool my brain into remembering history incorrectly. I also find that it often risks breaking that magic spell that fiction holds on me, where I’m fully immersed in the imagined world as being real. Ironically enough, the more that real people from history are featured in a work of fiction, the more I’m reminded that this is all made up out of a writer’s head. I don’t like that. Not at all.
On top of all that, I have never been comfortable with what I’ve learned about Walt Whitman in D.C. during the Civil War. I don’t know a ton, but what I do know has always made me feel inexplicably icky. It didn’t seem like a hero’s tale. It’s always struck me as a bit creepy and morbid; very much like Walt Whitman was helping in the hospitals as something for him, and not for others.
OK, so in case I’m not making sense, “Every Night For A Thousand Years” is a work of historical fiction in which Walt Whitman is our protagonist in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War.
I could not possibly be less of a target audience for this story.
Well, it won me over quickly. It’s a flat out beautiful piece of writing.
So there’s that.
But to be more specific: it takes risk after risk after risk but just keeps plugging away. So much about this story shouldn’t work – and that’s not just because of my specific tastes. Walt Whitman is very, very famous. The Civil War is the American epic. We have such themes here as the nature of human love and a weighing of the costs and benefits of civilization. Like this is an insanely ambitious story.
But, there is something about the writing, the way the narrative continues on methodically, it feels very humble almost. It’s a story that is going to just do its thing. It doesn’t act like it’s an ambitious piece of historical fiction. It’s a story that carries itself like a showstopper. Which I think is why it’s able to deliver on every risk it takes.
And that’s quite a trick on Adrian’s part.
The selection:
He was a man shaped by money. He dreamed his brother’s death at Fredericksburg. In his latter days – and even that is now more than thirty years ago – he was always referred to as “the old man.”
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