Crummy Presidential Novel

by Camy Sorbello

 

 

The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War
by Jimmy Carter

 

 

All US Presidents produce fiction. It comes with the territory.

And often it’s fairly lousy fiction.

Former 39th President of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize Winner James Earl Carter has continued this unfortunate tradition, in both senses. But this time he’s ventured into that area of fiction where only real professionals should dare tread – The Novel. With dismaying results.

Carter is no sub-illiterate, unlike Gerald Ford, who once boasted to the Press of not having read a book in over twenty-five years. James Earl Carter is the author of sixteen non-fiction books, including not unreadable memoirs, a volume of his own poetry, Always A Reckoning, and even such daunting forays into the intellectual realm as The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, illustrated by his daughter Amy.

Regrettably, at age seventy-nine, he chose to publish The Hornet’s Nest, the subject of this review. Carter quaintly names each chapter in his book (my favorite: chapter 20, “Does God Approve Revolution?”) and one chapter, 35, carries the same name as the book itself. But it’s a strange and misleading name for the book – the phrase is an obscure reference to a remote and inaccessible area near the Georgia-South Carolina border where colonists hid from British forces.

What’s it about? The Hornet’s Nest purports to be historical fiction. And it is historical, though it barely deserves to be called fiction. Did you imagine, as I did, Reader, that the American Revolution only took place in the Northeast? Wrong: Carter’s book covers the American Revolution in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, land of his forebears, in the years 1763 to 1785.

Interesting years. And Carter is not wrong in trying to set the historical record straight on the subject, nor in drawing on his own ancestors’ stories. The Hornet’s Nest might well have been a good history, even a good memoir about a man searching out his neglected historical roots. The problem is that he tried to go Tolstoy, and fictionalize those stories and interpolate them into the narrative. And as a novelist, he’s a bum.

More precisely: as a novelist, he’s a historian. He never met a fact he didn’t like, no matter how trivial, minute, or tangential. Thus his characters become bogged down in a mire of asides as tangled and swampy as the book’s setting. I felt at times that I needed a machete to cut through the nearly 500 pages of commentary posing as narrative and trek back to the plot. When I did, I was too tired to care what was happening to whom.

Carter obviously never met his ancestors, who appear to be Legion, who fought in the Revolution. With regrettable filial devotion, he nonetheless seems to have felt obligated to include every last one he could unearth, as well as any anecdote, however numbing or irrelevant to the plot, in connection with them. It’s like trying to write Gone With The Wind and include your town’s voting lists. And though Carter (presumably) had access to portraits and perhaps letters and diaries, the wealth of detail he lavishes over his predecessors comes out on the page as impersonal and flat as paint. Talking heads, stilted and didactic: all the characters sounding like Jimmy Carter giving a pre-scripted stump speech.

‘Conversations,’ such as they are, consist of one person asking another a question that no one at the time would ask since everyone at the time would know, i.e., “What is the difference between the Whigs and the Tories?” A lengthy, uninterrupted speech delivered in perfect and elevated diction follows for pages and pages. And it is informative, if you know nothing about the period. But what action there is stops dead in its tracks.

Example. Two of the main characters are fleeing the British. One is wounded. The enemy closes in, screams and bullets sound around them, the soldiers draw nearer. Then, this:

“... I’m sorry, but one of the shots hit me in my right leg, and it hurts too bad for me to swim. I’ll hide here in the brush and you can come back and get me when they’re gone. If I’m discovered, I’ll just surrender and take my chances as a prisoner. I know Colonel Prevost, and Newota will put in a good word for me.”

Wow. Bullet in his leg, bone broken, swamp water soaking into his bloody boots, horse left behind, Brits on his tail, and still able to get in a bit of social networking. No wonder we won.

Appropriate diction is not something on which Carter wasted much attention. While all the colonists speak exquisite English, bullets flying about them or not, the black characters (shades of Huck Finn’s Nigger Jim!) all talk in southern dialect. In some cases, Carter tries to give the feel of the African-influenced Gullah accent of the Carolina coastal region, but deciphering it is a challenge to the mind and a sorrow to the ear. The American Indians, by contrast, speak the King’s English sans grunt or monosyllabic aside as though they’re introducing this week’s episode of Masterpiece Theatre.

I admit that Carter’s general treatment of the Indians is one of the book’s better characteristics. No political correctness or revisionist history here: the tribes war with one another, would rather ally with the whites against neighboring tribes than band together to keep the colonists at bay, trade with the whites and despoil the environment. Nice. Even true.

But not, sadly, dramatic. And this is where the book really falls apart. It lacks focus, drama, emotion. We know who won the war. What we want is to care about the people who are fighting it. Ethan, the main character, sees his brother hanged and his seven-year-old son hacked to death by Indians. But he just doesn’t seem to really much care. And so neither do we. As with death, so with love: romance and desire and lust are as flat and absent on these pages as, well, they would be on a State of the Union address.

Carter simply knows nothing of the basic techniques of fiction writing – point-of-view, character presentation and development, dialogue, pacing. He’ll stop the story time and again to deliver a paper on everything from agriculture to shoe-making. Yet he presents over a hundred characters, and which are real, which are fictional? Beats me.

The non-fiction areas of this failed piece of fiction are not without substance. I’ll remember what he wrote about politics, geography, agriculture, horticulture, commerce, the details of everyday life in the colonies in that region. Much of it is quite interesting. I’ve already forgotten the characters that occasionally intruded on the lecture.

Carter lamented in a number of interviews that his book was scaled down to 500 pages from God knows what initial bulk. The really lamentable thing is that American publishing is so in the grip of market criteria that they’ll publish a mediocre book purely because the author is a former President, and therefore the book will turn a profit whatever he writes. Respect for the Oval Office alone would have mandated the services of a better editor if not book doctor. But, no, Carter even got to do the amateur jacket illustration. It seems to be Ethan, in buckskins and powder horn, pointing a musket at the approaching redcoats. And it even has a certain folksy charm, like amateur endeavors can. It might well have appeared originally on the Carter refrigerator, secured with alphabet magnets.

But his book cover just ain't art. And neither is the book it covers.