Customer Reviews

Henry and Clara: A Novel

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This is simply one of the best books I have ever read, and I've been recommending it to people ever since I first read it. I've even been known to grab people in bookstores and convince them to buy it.

These are not 20th century people dressed in funny clothes. They are real, live, breathing 19th century people come to life. I think too many of us have read too many bad historical novels or seen too many Hollywood films to recognize the aura of truth when it appears.

The simple facts of Henry and Clara Rathbone's lives are interesting enough. Raised together as stepbrother and stepsister after his mother married her father, they fell in love, and had to battle social conventions to marry. They had the supreme ill fortune to be with President and Mrs Lincoln on that terrible night when the President was assassinated, and forever after Henry Rathbone was blamed for not preventing the murder.. His descent into madness and its terrible effect on Clara and their marriage is well presented.

In the end, what eventually happened to them is revealed. I found myself reading the last thirty or so pages with my mouth open in astonishment. I'd never heard of these two, and yet they were a footnote to history we should all know about.

Thomas Mallon is the rare writer who can bring an era to life. He puts us inside the minds and souls of the people who lived long ago. They are like us, and yet not like us. They grew up and came of age in a completely different world, and he shows us both their similarities and differences to us, to our time.

Last year I visited Washington DC for the first time. I walked for hours and hours. And I was charmed, as I never expected that I would be. Soon thereafter, I read Henry & Clara - a novelization of real people and events.

Henry and Clara Rathbone - two people who grew up together in the pre-civil war era. Henry went to war; was damaged by war. Clara fell in love - with Henry, with politics, with Washington. What would their story have been like without the war? By the time they came together in marriage, their interests and goals in life had diverged. Clara's interests drove them to Washington where she befriended the troubled Mary Todd Lincoln.

Most beguiling are the descriptions of Washington as a small southern town. Clara crossing the square in front of her house to the White House across the street; meeting up with Robert Lincoln in the park. The carriage rides and salons. In that time, the President and family lived in and were part of a neighborhood .

Look at any picture of a momentous event, of famous people. Who are the people in the background? The other people who were there? A hundred years from now, looking at a picture of the motorcade in Dallas, will we know that was Nellie Connelly in the car with the Kennedys? Henry and Clara were at the theater, in the box with the Lincolns that night when John Wilkes Booth struck. What happens to people who experience such trauma? People who, in memory, replay in slow motion the events of the evening until their lives resound with could have beens, would have beens, if onlys, maybes and guilty wishes coming true. Did I wish it? Did I want it? Could I have done something? Should I have done something? Did I even want to do something?

It is a book about loss as much as anything else. Mrs. Lincoln lost her husband. The nation lost its innocence. Henry lost his way and finally lost his mind. Clara lost her dreams and finally lost her life. And what was the real trigger? The war? The assassination? Conflicting goals in the marriage? The sweep of events that was too momentous to survive? Who and what died in the theater box that night? I think it was more than just Lincoln

This is a great read for anyone interested in good literature, or history, especially for those who are civil war buffs. It is a wonderful period novel, giving the reader a good sense of the culture and society of the era. The characters are well developed and absorbing, paritcularly the intracicies and psychological complexities of Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris (guests of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln at Ford's Theater on that fateful night.) I found the subject highly intriguing and fascinating, the examination of the impact of Lincoln's assination on Henry and Clara as individuals and as a couple. There are many historical facts in this novel, and it is fun to sort out fact from fantasy. The novel is a complete offering, providing a great narrative, depth, social and psychological study, and suspense as well. I found it very difficult to put this book down.

An interesting and well-written historical novel. For most of its length it is rather unexciting, but this is made up for in the later chapters which give a vivid, harrowing picture of a doomed marriage slipping into violence and madness. The story of Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris is a sad, indeed tragic, one, and Mallon does a good job of tracing the seeds of destruction that overshadowed these two from their earliest days together. He also avoids many of the usual traps historical novelists fall into, such as long-winded explanations of vanished customs and dusty disertations on forgotten politics. Mallon moves things along smoothly, with a minimum of description, and nicely fleshes out the known facts about his primary characters with fictionalized details and motivations. If Clara is ultimately the more sympathetic of the two, it is perhaps because her predicament (a brilliant, but stubborn woman trapped in a marriage which she realizes has become a nightmare)is the more easily grasped. Henry Rathbone remains something of an enigma despite Mallon's careful work, just as his inaction (or delayed reaction) on that fatal night at Ford's theater remains an enigma to history. For a more exciting, but equally touching, non-fiction sketch of Henry and Clara, turn to Gene Smith's "American Gothic" about the theatrical Booth family, the assassination of Lincoln, and the repercussions for all those involved in that horrid event.

I have read a great deal about the Civil War, and am drawn to both fictional and non-fictional accounts of this time in our history. This was the principal attraction of Thomas Mallon's 1994 novel Henry and Clara. Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were the son and daughter respectively of Pauline Rathbone and Ira Harris, prominent Albany residents who found themselves unmarried, with children, following their spouse's deaths. Pauline and Ira married; Henry and Clara were raised in the common household as brother and sister; Henry and Clara fell in love and married; and tragedy ultimately ensued when Henry, over time, went mad. Henry and Clara Rathbone are an interesting footnote to history, in that they were guests in the Lincoln box at Ford's Theatre on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and Henry was himself wounded at the same time Lincoln was fatally shot. A central question in Mallon's novel is what caused Henry's madness. Was it the seeming "unnatural" marriage; was it Henry's horrifying experience as an officer in the Civil War; was it Henry's presence in the Ford Theatre box; was it simply fate or heredity? Mallon does not -- indeed cannot -- answer this question. While this book was well received critically, I found my interest wandering through the first half of this novel. Mallon redeemed himself mostly through the harrowing accounts of a marriage slipping into madness following the assassination. (I much preferred Mallon's magical novel, Dewey Defeats Truman, a very different book based on another "historical" theme).

I found this book to be very uneven in quality. I am an avid reader of material related to the Lincoln assassination, and I approached this book expecting it to be interesting if for no other reason than its relevance to that historical event. However, I found the book to be exceptionally boring and slow in its beginning, so much so that after about a fourth of the book I put it down expecting not to finish it (very unusual for me). The characters were dimensionless, stereotypical, and uninteresting, and at many points the characters' psychology and the central sexual/romantic liaison struck me as irritatingly inauthentic for the period depicted. However, I did return to the book--skipping right to the assassination scene itself since the first part was so damned boring. From this point forward, the action got really engrossing and suspenseful, and the book became one that I couldn't put down. The action was very well paced, though the main characters' personalities and their relationship to each other still seemed inauthentic--or at least the book left me wondering how much of these depictions were rooted in fact and how much they were pure fiction. It would be nice for the author to clarify which elements or dimensions of the story are historically known and which are his own invention. In the end, it was a book that was very memorable, one that really impacted me insofar as it has changed my notions of this who this couple was. But again, I wish I knew whether my new understanding of their personalities and their relationship--and of the assassination's apparently lasting dominance over their lives--derives from an accurate or a purely imaginative portrayal of the characters.

Henry and Clara was an elegant psychological study of an obscure historical figure. One gets a true sense of the emotional traumas soldiers suffered during the Civil War and the effects of post traumatic stress disorder on their lives. Of particular interest is thesubtle way in which the reader learns about the social pressures of the times and how those pressures eventually lead to Henry's psychosis and the family tragedy.

A beautifully written historical novel with an expertly realized sense of time and place. The characters are finely drawn and richly depicted, truly unforgettable. Mallon is one of the finest American writers and this is one of his most memorable and engrossing novels.

On April 14, 1865, an engaged couple, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, accepted the Lincolns' last-minute invitation to join them in their box at Ford's Theatre. For the nation, the impact of that night's tragedy would be felt at once; for Henry and Clara, the denouement of their own private tragedy occurred years later.

"Henry and Clara" follows the titular couple from their childhood in Albany, New York, where Henry's widowed, ambitious mother sets her cap at Clara's widowed father, Ira Harris, whom Pauline Rathbone sees as a promising politician. A marriage soon follows, and young Henry and Clara find themselves stepbrother and stepsister. Though neither child cares much for the other's parent, Henry and Clara soon gravitate toward each other, and as they mature their feelings grow into romantic love. Before they can marry, though, they must overcome the opposition of their parents, and the outbreak of the Civil War throws yet another obstacle into their path.

There is another difficulty, one the determined and devoted Clara doesn't much want to acknowledge: Henry. For Clara, the mercurial Henry is Byronic, but the horrors of war soon disclose how fragile Henry's psyche truly is. Nonetheless, Clara, deeply in love and not willing to give up easily, presses on with her marriage plans, even after the Lincoln assassination strips yet another layer of sanity from Henry.

Though the story "Henry and Clara" tells is a tragic one, Mallon's wry narrative voice and his sharp eye prevent it from being a gloomy one. His characterizations are superb, with Clara, the main viewpoint character, being a particular success. Even as Clara becomes more isolated and her situation more grim, she never turns into the pathetic victim she might have become with a less skilled author.

If there's a rough patch in the novel, it's at the beginning, where the immersion into Albany politics may be too much for some readers. Persevere, though, and you'll be well rewarded. This was one of the best historical novels I've read.

Reading this book is like watching the Titanic. Throughout the story, you feel a sense of dread and you hope, maybe, just maybe, the inevitable may change.

This book is a quick read and gives you a good flavor of civil life during the Civil War. After reading a number of Civil War "battle" books, this story was a refreshing observation of the events. I use the word "refreshing" only to describe the perspective. The characters themselves are a bit depressing. The story does take a while to pick up. However, Thomas Mallon does a good job describing the Washington in the 1860s.