Melville

Alexandra Petri Rewrites American History (and more!)

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Bummed out by politics, climate change, inflation, long Covid? Alexandra Petri, Washington Post humorist, has the answer as she charges into the controversy over what students should know about American history and literature.

She’s made stuff up. Hilarious stuff, like John Adams and his wife doing the 18th century version of sexting, which doesn’t go very well. And the story of one of the famous colonial Minuteman who were supposedly able to defend freedom in a minute.  This guy wasn’t exactly on time, taking a few hours to get ready because he couldn’t find his musket or his boots and he wanted to prepare some snacks for the battlefield.  His wife had a few things to say about that.

Petri toys with documents like The Federalist Papers and The Gettysburg Address, but some of the funniest entries in this collection are new takes on American literary classics  like Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, The Great Gatsby, Howl, In Cold Blood, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The House of Mirth.  Edith Wharton character dolls?  Why not!  And why shouldn’t the man who bought The Yellow Wallpaper‘s wallpaper request a refund?

English majors, rejoice: Who else in the world would be doing a spoof of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (one of my favorite novels)?  And the Raymond Chandler satire made me laugh all the way through–it’s one of the funniest pieces in the book, and maybe in human history.  At times the dry turns of phrase reminded me of Philomena Cunk.

Petri’s pastiche of iconic figures is always piercing and revelatory, as when Frank Lloyd Wright tussles with a client about the commission to build the perfect home.  Guess what?  It’s not remotely what the client wants.  And her take on The Teapot Dome Scandal eerily prefigures excuses we’ve recently hear that “explain” why certain figures in government have seen so much money changing hands.  I name no names.

Petri is fiendishly well-read and her humor is consistently delicious, like the lost vignettes from Fifty Shades of Gray that pop up throughout the book which range in time from the Puritans to Trump (sic transit insania mundi).  You’ll never think of Patrick Henry the same way again after Petri serves him up to you with special sauce–and who else could have imagined customer reviews of Our American Cousin from the night Abraham Lincoln was shot?

Writers can learn a lot from her satire and may especially appreciate troubled fan mail to Harper Lee wondering about that missing mockingbird as well as the monomaniacal letter Loraine Hansbery gets about promoting raisins.

The title of the book clearly indicates that Petri made all these documents up, but you have to wonder if this book will get devoured by AI chat bots anyway.  I can imagine students turning in essays about how Melville’s publisher wasn’t very keen on the idea of a book (mostly) about whales.  And much, much, worse.

Well, given the state of academia today, with enrollments going over a cliff, professors can likely use a good laugh.   ★★★★★ 

Lev Raphael is the author of the satirical Nick Hoffman mystery series along with seventeen other books in many genres.  He has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, The Washington Post, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Boston Review and a handful of public radio stations in Michigan.

Warning: Susan Cheever’s Alcott Biography Is a Book To Avoid

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When a friend told me she was reading Susan Cheever’s book American Bloomsbury about Emerson and his circle in Concord, I was intrigued, because I’d read Cheever’s memoir about her father John Cheever years ago and had lost track of her career after that.

I went to Amazon, but was drawn to Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott biography instead. I didn’t know much about Alcott and I’m a huge fan of biographies (I have several hundred in my library). The book grabbed me based on the sample because it revealed that Alcott didn’t want to write her famous novel Little Women — her editor pushed her to.

What a great hook.

When the book arrived, though, I gradually discovered it was awful. I hadn’t bothered reading the thoughtful critiques on Amazon — I learned its varied faults myself (reviews of Cheever’s American Bloomsbury are even more scathing and more numerous).

Cheever’s assessment of Alcott is marred by trivialities. You learn that Alcott once dropped a pie box in Boston and it tipped “end over end.” Alcott was teased by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. about her height.  In Boston, she had hyacinths in a window box. None of these details–and more just as inane–add to an understanding of Alcott’s life or writing.

Cheever’s prose can also be gag-worthy: “Death is a mystery, but life is filled with light and clarity.”  Then there are dubious assertions like “good writing is almost always subversive.”

She also claims that the Transcendentalists in Concord “essentially created American literature as we know it.” But the first two American authors to be international best sellers, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, got there before Emerson and company, and they had an enormous influence on major authors like Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Perhaps to hedge her bets, Cheever loves mentioning Hawthorne as often as possible, but he was peripheral to the Concord crew and mocked them in his novel The Blithedale Romance.

Cheever misrepresents Alcott’s relationship with Henry James and basically gives Alcott credit for more books of his than you can imagine. Without her, we apparently wouldn’t have The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians or any of his books with a young woman character. They were also good friends, Cheever says, despite every major James biography I’ve read which barely mentions Alcott — and Cheever doesn’t offer any proof of this supposed relationship.

Sadly, Publishers Weekly gave the book an attention-getting starred review and called it “authoritative.” Somebody at PW didn’t do homework.

Why did I keep reading? Morbid curiosity. That’s right: I couldn’t believe how badly written, badly researched, and badly edited a book by a well-known author could be. In the end, it had a kind of freakish charm.

Lev Raphael books is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders and 24 other books of fiction and non-fiction.