Where the Sidewalk Ends: Jeffrey Lent's America

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Where the Sidewalk Ends: Jeffrey Lent's America


One of the stranger voices of recent US literature comes from a corner of thr country, the New England of Jeffrey Lent. Appearing on the scene with 2000's *In The Fall*, the mysterious ultra-American appeared to ask an impossible question: can you be "nativist" without being xenophobic?


Lent's books are *historiques*, not "historical fiction": the magic of the ages in the books was none and the US "social technology" that enabled hard but remarkable lives all too real. Those of you who learned, perhaps to your surprise, that you could "take the skinheads bowling" to some salutary effect may have intuited that this was, in some fairly definite sense, the point of the bowling-alley at all.


Similarly, America beyond the "great cities" inhabited by relatively few follows some fairly definite plans, both for living and for traveling through social space. What it does not follow is a "grand plan" for enabling or inhibiting any kind of miscegenation, as even avowed racists know. There was always something extra to the girl who was "red hot" or the man who could understand, and from his Northern state Lent looks at several famous cases of this.

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*In the Fall*, Lent's first book, was perhaps not obviously what it is: the story of a famous American family and a "normal" trajectory through their times.


The romance between the Union Army soldier Norman Pelham and the escaped slave Leah, perhaps impossible to imagine for some, may in fact be a 'stalking-horse' for a bigger American story.


Foster Pelham, who at the end of the book 'lights out' for the West after a long period in America's serious demimonde, may be more than an allegory of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's 'right-hand man' who invented welfare as we know it.


Hopkins is not forgotten today, and yet a deep truth of our life is that his 'Norman Pelham' might have been a bigger star to him than he was to posterity.

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*A Slant of Light* chronicles another aspect of 19th Century America, the interplay between religious enthusiasm and social justice. In New York State in the middle of the century two things were born: the Mormon church and the Seneca Falls movement.


The Latter-Day Saints are even at this late date impossible to scan from outside their fold, but an idea might be an American Christianity dealing fully with the power and horror of America. We think we know them as they are, but perhaps we do not.


The Seneca Falls movement associated with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woodhull is, in one writer's opinion, the font of all genuine US leftism and never far from a "freedom in loves" which was entirely practical. The "slant of light" in the title? An imported concept which is not salutary, but necessary in certain quarters.

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*A Peculiar Grace*, a more modern story, in truth deals with what is a very common situation: a romance between two people of high status and very differrnt cultures. A man named "Hewitt Pearce" might not be the WASP dreamboat his doggedly conformist actions and high idealism led you to think he was, even in the "bucolic" confines of rustic New Hampshire, and his girlfriend something else entirely.

Hewitt's girlfriend Jessica might have been concerned with an illness that had recently been in the headlines, to wit, sickle-cell anemia. That is, even if the language the couple spoke between them was a curiously "blanched" patois reminiscent of high-school classrooms. They might be "speaking across a gulf" that did not on that level exist - no matter what showed up on the doorstep in the end.

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*Lost Nation* is an exercise in what we in the American literary world used to call *Columbiana*, a lie-dream of the nation's origins and what could be made of them. (Many "Westerns" fall in this category.)

The "Indian Stream" may be more than a metaphor for a feature of a corner of North America, and (a literary device known to some) Blood may be more than one person, a "twice told tale".

These days it is supposed that free blacks played little role in early America, and perhaps not supposed wisely. It was not necessarily a tale of racial "mixing" at that early date, but one of the African-Americans being "imbued" with knowledge in the portentous and scientific "modern" sense.

(Their mind could set them free, in other words.)