Customer Reviews

Grant: A Novel

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A surprising and fascinating book. Author Max Byrd follows the same basic structure as in his previous historical novels Jefferson and Jackson: youngish writer with one foot in Europe and the other in America tries to penetrate the essential mystery of the title character by researching the collected and conflicting observations of well-placed contemporaries. In Grant's case of course, the essential mystery is how Sam Grant, an alcoholic and utter failure approaching 40 years of age, could become U. S. Grant, the man who took command of the oft-beaten Union Army and saved his country, becoming in the process a future two-term president and "the most famous man in the world". Our protagonist, the fictional writer Nicholas Trist, was maimed in the war under Grant's command and thus has every reason to hate his former commander. As he works through his feelings about Grant and more details of various parts of Grant's life are revealed, we draw our own conclusions as well. The events of the novel take place after Grant's military and presidential careers are concluded and concern his attempt to obtain a third term and the well-known (and here well-told) efforts of the bankrupt and dying Grant to complete his memoirs in order to provide for his family. As expected in a book of this nature various real-life personages appear throughout (e.g. Mark Twain, William Tecumseh Sherman). Unexpectedly, one of these characters emerges as the subject of the novel just as much as Grant is. In real-life, famed 19th-century historian Henry Adams expressed his contemptuous dismissal of Grant's abilities and so Adams' prominent role in the book is no surprise, especially given his irresistibly (for a writer) vexatious personality . Where the novel takes its strange turn is the role Adams' wife Marion Hooper Adams (or his"doomed wife Clover" as the jacket blurb would have it) plays. Though hating her husband, Trist becomes friends with the witty, talented, unattractive, and unappreciated Clover and it is their conversations which become the most moving part of the book. I believe the author came to find Mrs. Adams' sad story even more interesting than Grant's and so powerful is Byrd's writing in these passages that I did as well. The book gains strength as we watch and she watches her own life slowly unravel. The most unusual thing of all is that her story and Grant's story are for the most part unconnected and the Trist character in effect shuttles back and forth between Grant's and Clover's lives. Since the novel is called Grant I was very curious to see how Byrd would in the end link the two stories. He does so masterfully but almost imperceptibly, in one seemingly off-hand comment Clover makes near the end of the book, contrasting Grant's actions in his final days to an act of her husband who was motivated by something quite different. I most strongly recommend this wonderfully written book to anyone who enjoyed Byrd's previous books. I hesitate to recommend this to anyone looking for a historical novel in a military vein such as Michael and Jeffrey Shaara's Civil War novels. The book contains no battle reconstructions and Grant's strategic and tactical decisions are only discussed cursorily in the larger context of his character. Anyone who likes Gore Vidal's historical novels should like this book and I suspect Byrd is very familiar with those novels as well.

A historical fiction about Grant beginning in the fall of 1879 and ending with his death in 1885. It begins when the Country and specifically the Republican party is looking for a Presidential candidate. Grant is not actively campaigned for the nomination which, if elected, would make him President for a third term. The author, Max Byrd, uses an interesting technique of describing Grant's persona by telling stories, some well known and some not, about people who touched his life. Some of the people are friends and some frankly, are enemies. Byrd uses a fictitious newspaper reporter as the forcing function to tie the many stories together into an enjoyable and informative novel. Somewhat distracting for me was his technique of hyphenation--that carry substantial and granted informative amplification but in some cases goes on for several lines--to make his point. I enjoyed very much the detailed pictures that Byrd paints of the life and times of Washington D.C. The Republican convention was held in Chicago in 1880. Byrd does a nice job of describing the activities of that gathering where Grant had over 300 votes, but insufficient for nomination. Garfield was continuing to advocate John Sherman and then on the thirty-sixth vote the convention rolled-over and nominated Garfield himself. While the words, or course, are Byrd's creation, most of the characters are real. I found it interesting to take the book and walk around the area near Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. and see the houses where Grant and the other characters came and went. Many interesting facts...for example, I was surprised to learn that Mark Twain convinced Grant to let the publisher that he owned publish the Memoirs of Grant. Twain paid him in advance because Grant's investment partner, Ward, had embezzled all their money. Byrd also has written similar fictionalized novels about Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. I plan to read both of those as well.

This book is a terrific evocation of an era, largely ignored in American history. By painting the shadows around Grant, I thought Byrd gave us "The Gilded Age" replete with the co-author (Twain) himself. Byrd has a rare gift for historical portraiture and wonderful storytelling. For those looking for more biographical facts on Grants life, see Jean Smith's excellent one volume biography.

The title of this book, "Grant: A Novel" is misleading, since Ulysses S. Grant appears in only 50% of the pages. Instead, Byrd has chosen to divide the book into a number of subplots, one of which completely compromises the readability of this novel (the plot involving Mr. Trist). Why he chose to use this method will remain an eternal mystery, because these fictional characters ruin an otherwise good read.

Byrd makes a number of factual gaffes concerning Grant, but his psychological analysis of this complex man is excellent. Curiously, he omits much reference to Grant's wife, Julia, who was an integral part of his life, and his treatment of Grant's children, though brief, is facile and inaccurate. He also makes many mistakes in the time frame of the novel (Twain was not meeting with Grant weekly in 1880) and his scenes with Grant and Twain never ring completely true. Grant was a much more multi-dimensional character than the monosyllabic Sphinx depicted here.

Still, Byrd writes well when he focuses on Grant, which he should have done at the exclusion of his irritating and ultimately defeating subplot involving Mr. Trist. Anyone with a serious interest in the real Ulysses S. Grant will concentrate on non-fictional examinations of his life and avoid this book, which is inaccurate and not particularly interesting.

I was a little disappointed, because I expected a novel about Grant, who I find to be one of the most interesting figures in American History. This book is about the fictitious Nicholas Trist, a journalist, who wrote about several historical figures, including U.S. Grant. The story takes place in the 1880's, beginning with the Republican convention where Grant made an unsuccessful run for a third term as President. It ends several years after Grant's death. Byrd does an excellent job capturing the spirit of America in the 1880's. The writing is historically accurate, and Grant is portrayed as the man I have read about in biography and history. A failure in everything but love, war, and finishing his memoirs before dying, Grant was a very quiet, introspective person that few people really knew. Therefore, it would have been risky to make him the protagonist, because the author would have to invent a character that may not have existed in the real Grant. However, I would love to have read such a creation. After all, this is fiction. Instead, Byrd takes the safer route and creates a character, Trist, from scratch. The story takes us through his career and his love affair with Elizabeth Cameron, vividly showing his mixed feelings about Grant, America, American politics, and his career. Trist is nothing like Grant was, and in my opinion he isn't as interesting. But this novel really carried me away, to a different time in the life of my country, and I found this a good read.

For those who have read either of Max Byrd's previous historical novels (Jefferson and Jackson), Grant: A Novel will seem like a natural extension of the story of America's past that Byrd brings to life in his books. These novels are not so much about the title characters as they are about the age in which the characters lived and acted. His central figures provide a pretext for exposing the reader to the complex detail of everyday life in the past and manage to make that life accessable and real in a way that books of history and biography seldom do.

In the character of U.S. Grant, Byrd presents a figure that is almost a proxy for the America of his day; a seemingly simple, inarticulate, rural man who seems to have few prospects, yet despite failure in his early army career, addiction to drink and abject poverty, rises to become the most successful general in American history, President for two terms and the most famous man in the world, only to suffer scandal, bankrupcy, and a painful death from throat cancer. If Grant were not, on the surface, such an "ordinary" man, this would be the stuff of Greek tragedy. And like the boom and bust economy of America's 19th Century, the ups and downs in Grant's life tell us more about the broader social, economic, and political forces that were at work than they do about the man himself.

The story of Grant's life is preseneted in bits and pieces and not in chronological order. The subplot that pulls the various threads of Grant's story together is the work of Nicholas Trist, a fictional newspaper reporter who lost an arm fighting under Grant at Cold Harbor, and, needless to say, is ambivalent about his former commander. Trist is a totally believable creation and a very sympathetic character. Through his eyes the reader gets to experience a wide variety of Grant's contemporaries, including Henry Adams and William T. Sherman, whose commentary not only advances the story of Grant but also illuminates the many conflicting forces at work in American society at the time. This is an absolutely fascinating book and I was really sorry to see it end. Grant's final triumph - recovering his family's fortune and fallen honor by publishing his memoirs, written as he was dying of throat cancer - is as amazing a turn around as any plot twist in fiction, and much more satisfying.

You would think that a novel entitled "Grant" with an image of Ulysses S. Grant on the cover would be about Ulysses S. Grant. This one is - but only some of the time. Most of the time, however, the reader has to wade through an uninteresting sub-plot about Henry Adams, Senator Don Cameron, his sexy wife, a pair of uninteresting books by an unknown writer and an armless Civil War veteran - all too tangential to the Grant story.

I love reading books about Ulysses S. Grant; he's one of my very favorite American historical characters. I've read every biography I can find. But this book was an enormous disappointment.

Perhaps because this is the first book I have read about Grant (despite being a history major) I found this book interesting. It gave a lot of background on Grant's formative years and events leading up to his taking command of the Union forces. However, I agree with previous reviewers, the subplot was perplexing and therefore distracting. What was the point of including it, and placing so much focus on it? Overall, though, pretty good read if you like historical fiction.

Byrd's book is similar to Gore Vidal's Empire. There's a heavy dose of the execrable Henry Adams and his repulsive colleagues in both books. The tone and tenor of the two books is similar. The difference is that Byrd has created several very interesting and sympathetic characters: the fictional journalist Trist, the pathetic Clover Adams, and, of course, Grant himself. Grant is a saintly figure -- something of a fool to be sure, but an admirable, saintly fool. Thus, I finished Byrd's book and enjoyed it -- and I cast Vidal's aside after a hundred pages.

While Byrd's depictions of the two earlier presidents, in Jefferson and Jackson were good, his offering on Grant stand's out as his best. Byrd follows the same formula in this book, with fictional journalist Nicholas Trist taking on the Short/Schuyler role and providing a very compelling character and observer of Grants career, especially meaningful in that Trist is one of many Union soldiers who was 'sacrificed' at Cold Harbor on Grant's orders. Trist's encounters with Mark Twain, Henry and Clover Adams, the Camerons and other 19th century notables don't intrude at all on the narrative and provide very engaging subplots. Byrd also gives the reader a fascinating look at the start of America's Industrial Age and the sweeping changes new technology had on life and politics in the 1880's.