Customer Reviews

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Jane Smiley is one of those authors who seem to have the need to reinvent themselves with each new book. In The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, she has adopted the stylistic devices of 19th century writing and speech to bring this story of a young woman's experiences in 'Bloody Kansas' to life. So successfully does Smiley present the character of Lidie Newton that it is hard for the reader to believe this person didn't really live - that these aren't the actual words of a real life.

This is a tough book in some ways. What the heroine experiences is not often pleasant. The physiscal and emotional suffering are clear and felt by the reader. I always take it as a sign that an author has been successful when I find myself experiencing anger, disappointment, elation or relief on behalf of a book's charcters, and in Smiley's new book this was a constant. Somehow the story of Lidie Newton seemed personal to me right from the start. I suspect that Jane Smiley modeled the character on herself in some ways, because she lives on the page more vibrantly than any Smiley character I can remember. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant. What is important is that one comes to know and care about Lidie Newton; therefore anything that happens to her or that she thinks about becomes important for the reader. One of the strengths of the book is the main character's intellectual and spiritual growth. Things don't just happen to her, she learns from what happens. Still, the ending may not please some, because it doesn't show her as clearly triumphant. But it is true to life, and that is what the whole book is about.

I read a lot of historical fiction, and am by training an historian, so I feel qualified to give this book a solid thumbs-up review. Smiley has chosen an historical period and locale not frequently visited by modern novelists. Her exploration of the antebellum Kansas frontier reveals many little-known events and interesting historical figures. I found it admirable that Smiley allowed the central character, Liddie Newton, to be shaped and changed by the events of her life. Many authors create a rock-like character and bounce events off of them, but Liddie is very realistically painted. Knowing something of history and of the complexities of public opinion in the pre-war period will help readers enjoy this book more, but I think anyone who likes a good story told gently will appreciate Liddie Newton.

Another great read by Jane Smiley! I first heard about this novel after an Austrian friend's daughter told me how much she liked it - and that she was writing a book report on this novel for her American history class! I read this while down with a bad flu and enjoyed every page. Some of the comments about the book mention the slow pace of the novel. I thought that this was perfectly appropriate for the time - Smiley's talent brings you back and lets you imagine what it would be like for us to live 150 years ago; daily life was so much more physically difficult and repetitive. Still the people in her novels will remind you of people you know while you learn about another time and place from a woman's point of view. Great book!

One comment must be made about the so-called review by "SC" of November 5, 2004. It's fine, SC, if you don't agree with Smiley's opinion piece/political analysis of the red state/blue state divide **PUBLISHED IN SLATE.com, NOT THIS BOOK!** but criticizing THIS book for a political opinion published elsewhere is ridiculous. It is completely inappropriate of SC to leave this sort of negative and completely irrelevant comment about Smiley's OTHER WRITINGS when SC is supposed to be reviewing THIS BOOK!

For example, in my opinion (and in my dad's, as well!) William F. Buckley has contemptible political opinions. Nevertheless, my dad loved his books and would never mix his dislike of Buckley's politics with his criticism or praise of Buckley's fiction.

SC has posted this "thought-police" comment for EACH AND EVERY ONE of Smiley's books. SC's review has no place here - it is clearly contrary to the intent of the rating program.

Let me begin by saying that this is a good book. You would not be wasting your time by reading it. However, there are several problems with the way this is written that make me think Jane Smiley at some point lost control of what she was trying to accomplish.

First, the book is basically divided into two parts--a long segment that takes place in the Kansas Territory, and a not-as-long part that takes Lidie off on the adventures alluded to in the title. The first part is way too long. Although I understand Smiley needed to set everything up in order to knock it down, there must have been a way to do it in fewer pages. Reading about how difficult life is in the Kansas territory gets tiresome after a while, and I was just waiting and waiting for something to happen.

When things finally do begin to happen, however, Smiley crams so much action into the second half of the book that there's barely a chance to take it all in, and the various events lose their impact. After the rush of all these events, the book just kind of fizzles out. You never learn what becomes of the rest of Lidie's life, which is pretty frustrating.

Another problem is that Lidie herself starts out as a neutral sort of character--she becomes an abolitionist because her new husband is one, but she admits that she has never thought much about the issues herself. Maybe Smiley intended to have Lidie become more righteous and firmly abolitionist as the novel went on, but this just doesn't happen. She seems pretty neutral about the slavery issue right up to the end. Which is not to say that the book doesn't take a stand against slavery--it does, in a powerful way. But it does so through an escaped slave named Lorna, not through the ambivalent Lidie herself.

One of the other reviewers here mentions that the book is very historically accurate. This is admirable, and I did learn a lot about the Kansas Territory, which I appreciate. But a novel should do more than just be historically accurate.

If you think the subject matter of this book sounds interesting, or if you're a big Jane Smiley fan, you will probably like this one. But if you're just looking for a really good, engaging book to read, I would respectfully suggest you look elsewhere.

I've read this novel twice and listened to it once on tape and found it to be thoroughly enjoyable each reading. The description of the conflict in Kansas Territory between the abolitionists and the Missourians was rivoting and engaging. Smiley provided an immense amount of detailed history--clearly she did her homework. Some readers find this distracting from the story; personally, I find that it added an originality and realism to the narrative. This is not a conversational piece; rather it is the narrative of Lidie's experiences, not her emotions. Lidie is appealing to me as a heroine because she is portrayed so realistically with a mix of passive and aggressive traits. As a reader I sometimes found her inaction frustrating; however, inaction is a part of life. Other readers have complained that the novel is depressing; I object to that analysis. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton is not an escapist novel and one should not expect it to be. In my opinion, it is a de-Romanticized retelling of Huck Finn with a woman as the lead character. I highly recommend this book as one of my favorite novels and Smiley as one of my favorite authors.

What American writer could without trepidation set a picaresque novel with a young protagonist in the region and time of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in the telling take up the moral questions of slavery and abolition? Doing so invites unfavorable comparison with a master and a masterpiece, even invites mockery. Then, too, there is the question of how you could retell such a tale without descending too deeply into irony. Why would you head willingly into such dangerous territory? Who but a fool would do so?

Jane Smiley must certainly have considered these questions in writing The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. She, the author of a number of exquisite books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, is too talented a writer not to have known what she was getting into. That she chose to go forward in the face of such questions speaks volumes about her courage as a writer and about the importance of her undertaking.

In many ways, Smiley's courage is akin to that of her heroine, Lidie. Lidie Harkness's adventures begin in Quincy, Illinois, a river town where she is being raised by step sisters whose grudging charity seems to reach only as far as to endeavor to marry Lidie off and get her onto another family's ledger. Lidie is not the marrying kind, however. She is tall and plain and makes little effort to improve her appearance or her prospects for matrimony. She has neither talent for nor inclination toward domesticity. She cannot and does not care to sew, tat, cook or clean, the occupations of every other woman in her world.

With her young cousin Frank (a wonderfully drawn "wild boy" character with elements of Huck himself), she cultivates other, eventually far more useful, skills. She can walk far without tiring, shoot a rifle and ride better than most men. She's strong and bold enough to swim across the Mississippi in summer pool and utterly indifferent to the disapproval such unfeminine acts generate. We quickly come to love Lidie for h! er independence and strength.

Spinsterhood seems Lidie's lot until Thomas Newton happens into her life. He is an eastern abolitionist on his way to settle in Lawrence, K.T. (the Kansas Territories). The "goose question" is the issue of the century. Will Kansas come into the Union as free or slave? Thomas and his fellow abolitionists intend to people K.T. with free staters who may then vote the state into the morally correct column. A host of Missouri ruffians and other southerners invade K.T. equally intent on putting the state in their column.

Thomas is quick to spot Lidie's marvelous qualities. She in turn is drawn to this quiet, kind, purposeful man. We wonder, as does Lidie herself, how much of this attraction is love and how much is longing for the adventure of life in K.T. Lidie and Thomas marry and set off to the dangerous frontier of K. T. With that act, the story takes on a momentum much like the historical momentum driving free and slave states toward war. We know something important must happen and we want to stay with the story to see it out.

Smiley's narrative proceeds from this point with the quiet force and inevitability of a river making its way to the sea. She moves you down the page in rich three and four inch paragraphs that are like the glasses of river water her characters drink: clear at the top but dense enough to plow at bottom. At the top, we are taken with Lidie into the turmoil and adventure of K.T. It is populated with characters who might easily have stepped out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn, people who seem like they must have known Aunt Polly or encountered The Duke.

As the goose question heats up in K.T., violence erupts. Lawrence is sacked and someone close to Lidie is shot in cold blood. Lidie rips away her skirts, dons a man's clothing, shears off her long hair and, packing a deadly dragoon revolver, sets off into fiercely pro-slavery Missouri to find the killer and exact revenge.

However, this is not a tale of revenge. The real story, the one Smiley take! s so many risks to tell, is in the muddy depths of Lidie's emerging consciousness and the questions she asks herself. How can she value herself? What is her relationship to Thomas Newton? What is it to be married to someone you hardly know? What kind of creatures are men? What is love? How can good people differ so much on a moral question like slavery? Is all life happenstance, or can you choose to act in meaningful ways? What is there in death or after death? What surprises are there left in life?

I found myself reading ever more slowly as I followed Lidie's story. I wanted not to lose any bit of it, to savor it all. I was unsuccessful in that. It is just too rich to let go after a single reading. This is a book to buy and keep and read again and again.

I have a postscript for any Hollywood types who may read this. If you have any brains at all, get the screen rights to this story. It is linear in a way that lends itself perfectly to film. It is set in a powerful and compelling time. Most importantly, Lidie Newton is a character who can dominate the screen, capture the hearts of an audience and make an important statement. Such roles for women actors are too rare. Here is your chance to fix that.

I just finished "Lidie Newton" last night and I have to say I'm still divided on whether I'd recommend this book. I guess the best way to qualify it is that I'm not sure I'd suggest it to a friend, but I'd definitely like it if my daughters read it.

I make my home in Kansas City and so the historical aspect was particularly interesting to me, probably much more so than for someone who did not grow up here. Having a first-person account from a character as interesting as Lidie also made it more appealing. She's a great character -- more confused than noble, plain, funny, selfish on one hand and tender on the other, smart about some things and really ignorant on others. Jane Smiley knows how to write great characters and Lidie was a much better history lesson than any I remember getting in school. (I had to refresh my memory on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Missouri Compromise when I read this).

However, I do agree with readers who complain that the book drags in places... it does. Those slower places may reveal some interesting tidbit but what could have been said in one page seemed to go on for five. The temptation to skim was really overwhelming, especially after she leaves K.T. for Missouri. People who are looking for a satisfying ending will not get one, as the book just seems to abruptly stop with no hint of what or where Lidie's life will be made. This is what keeps it from being a "five star" book and an unqualified "must read". Because sometimes I had to MAKE myself read it.

That being said, I'm glad I did. It really made me think about the beliefs and the behaviors of the people who settled here -- some, my own relatives. While most of the book is understandably pro-Kansas, anti-Missouri, Ms. Smiley does try to offer some explaination of the seemingly indefensible views of Missourians (and "true" southerners). The novel itself goes a long way in explaining the animosity that existed here between Kansans and Missourians -- a real life-or-death conflict that only remains today as the KU/MU college rivalry. Just expect that when you close the book for the last time, you'll be as exhausted as Lidie must have been at the end of her travels.

I have studied the subject of Bleeding Kansas just before the Civil War intensively. My people were the people in this book, both the slaveholders and the abolitionists and Jane Smiley has recreated them all with all their pimples, meanness, dullness, good hearted spite and spots. This is a living book, because it has heart, and if you can't find it in this book it is because you are too damn dull. I think it is an American classic, but you have got to study on it, it isn't an easy book. Put some time in and you will come to understand that although Lidie Newton talks a lot, she really must be measured by what she does. I have a first edition, and I tell you now that it will be worth some money some day. In my estimation it is the best of Smiley's efforts because it conveys the real smell and taste of the times.

I purchased the abridged version on tape (5 hours) and found it to be quite enjoyable. The listener is treated to a ground level view of the politics of slavery in the 1850s and how violence based on the 'goose question' (code for the slavery issue) swept through households, towns and eventually the entire Kansas Territory.

Smiley's characters are not simple cardboard cutouts - some of the pro-slavery people are quite nice, some of the anti-slavery people are quite insane (she mentions 'Old Brown' and his atrocities and his actions cause some dissent in Liddie Newton's household).

Many readers have complained of the plodding pace. Although my version was abridged, there were still some plodding moments. However, the superb reading by Mare Winningham spared the listener from most of those moments. She is able to express so much emotion and humor with her voice that I found myself forgetting that Mare Winningham is a modern actress. She sounds like she is an older woman telling of her sad, profound trip through a bit of American history.

I give Mare Winningham a grade of A+.

The overall book gets a grade of A-.

I will be keeping this one for my history classroom as a recommended listening for any students with learning disabilities in reading who would be interested in hearing a quality story for my historical fiction project.

This work is certainly nothing like Moo, the only other Smiley book I'd read to date. While I enjoyed that book, I REALLY enjoyed this one.

The world of the Kansas Territory, seen through Lidie's eyes and described in her 19th century voice, was a revelation to me. I was only vaguely aware of this chapter in our country's history.

I was charmed by Smiley's chapter titles, page titles and her consistency in remaining within a sensibility so different from our own. She truly evoked for me how it must have felt to be caught in the time and place of Kansas and Missouri just before the Civil War.

I appreciate Smiley's portrayal of both the good and bad of those on both sides of the "goose question." I believe Lidie sees the many shades of gray that existed in a world we've been taught to think of as black and white. This book was an engrossing read and educational, too. Can't ask for a lot more than that!