The Night Inspector [Hardcover]

Frederick Busch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 1999

A haunting story told with insight and powerful language, The Night Inspector chronicles an unforgettable character who navigates the desperate days and sleepless nights of a gilded yet polluted nineteenth-century New York.
        
William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, returns from the battlefields to New York City a hardened man, bent on reversing his fortunes. Much of the lower half of his face was torn apart when he was felled by enemy fire, and he is forced to wear a mask in his postwar life as a New York financial speculator. Despite the solitude of his past life, Bartholomew, once a deadly sniper, now lives among all manner of slum dwellers, thieves, and murderers. As he prowls the city, he becomes involved with Jessie, a Creole prostitute who engages him in a venture that has its origins in the complexities and despair of the Civil War. And he befriends a deputy inspector of customs named Herman Melville--who, largely forgotten as a writer, is condemned to live in the wake of his vanished literary success and in the turmoil of his fractured family.

As with his other works, Frederick Busch leaves us breathless with the mastery of his prose and the power of his storytelling. But never before has he delved the depths of this country's heart and soul as magnificently as he does with The Night Inspector. His depictions of the Civil War are harrowing as we witness the mayhem of battle through a marksman's eyes. It is a gripping portrait--of a nation trying to heal from the ravages of war, of the desolation of a people searching for hope in the burgeoning of a new age, and of one man's attempts at recapturing a taste for life through the surging currents of his own emotions, ambitions, and conscience.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his fiction, at least, Frederick Busch is no stranger to the Victorian era: his 1978 novel The Mutual Friend was a meticulous reconstruction of the Dickensian universe, right down to the last wisp of pea-soup fog. In The Night Inspector, he ventures an equally deep immersion in the past. This time, however, Busch takes us to post-Civil-War Manhattan, where a disfigured veteran named William Bartholomew rages against the Gilded Age--even as he demands remuneration for his own losses.

And what exactly has the narrator lost? As we learn in a sequence of flashbacks, Bartholomew served as a Union sniper, picking off stray Confederate soldiers in an extended bout of psychological warfare. Eventually, though, he received a taste of his own medicine, when a enemy bullet destroyed most of his face. Outfitted with an eerie papier-mâché mask, Bartholomew tends to shock postwar observers into silence:

I imagine I understand their reaction: the bright white mask, its profound deadness, the living eyes beneath--within--the holes, the sketched brows and gashed mouth, airholes embellished, a painting of a nose.... Nevertheless. I won this on your behalf, I am tempted to cry, or pretend to. The specie of the nation, the coin of the realm, our dyspeptic economy, the glister and gauge of American gold: I was hired to wear it!

Bartholomew has, it should be obvious, a formidable mastery of rhetoric. It's appropriate, then, that he should hook up with that supreme exponent of the American baroque, Herman Melville--who at this point is a burnt-out customs inspector (and candidate for some Victorian 12-step plan). Together these outcasts embark upon a plan to rescue a group of black children from their Florida servitude. This caper--along with Bartholomew's attachment to a gold-hearted, elaborately tattooed prostitute--allows the novel to veer in the direction of the penny dreadful. Yet Busch's mastery of period detail, and of the very shape of century-old syntax, remains extraordinary on every page. And true to its title, The Night Inspector is a superb investigation of darkness--in both the physical and psychological sense. "I was reckless," the narrator insists, "and born with great vision though not, alas, of the interior, spiritual sort." By the end of the novel, most readers will decide that he's undersold himself. --Bob Brandeis

From Publishers Weekly

Sweeping pathos, historical knowledge, philosophical density and gruesome violence make Busch's 19th work of fiction both profound and a page-turner. Busch's articulate narrator, William Bartholomew, served as a Union sniper in the Civil War until an explosion maimed his face; now it's 1867, and Bartholomew works as an investor in New York City, hiding his scars behind a pasteboard mask. The Civil War may be over, but slavery isn't: slave children are stuck at a Florida school, and Jessie, a Creole prostitute romantically involved with Bartholomew, entangles him in a plot to bring them North to freedom. Bartholomew seeks help from Herman Melville, once a bestselling novelist, now a customs inspector (the "night inspector") in Manhattan's shipyards. Rapacious journalist Samuel Mordecai tags along, hoping for scoops on the demimonde of the docks. After struggles with corrupt bureaucrats and money-hungry merchants, Bartholomew's mission collapses in a grisly climax. Flashbacks intersperse the 1867 plot with Bartholomew's horrific wartime experience. Busch's rich work can be savored simply as historical suspense, or as a detailed picture of Civil War combat and post-Civil War New YorkAfans of The Alienist should like it. So should fans of Billy Budd as Bartholomew and Melville himself (called "M") enliven and deepen the novel with allusion and argument: "Do I seek a stay against oblivion on behalf of my little actors on the vast page? Or do I seek my own eternal life?" Bartholomew is a strange mix of self-hatred, honor, vulnerability and violence, Melville a morbid, self-declared defeatist. People back then used longer, slower sentences, and so do Busch's characters: learning to hear them is part of a reader's reward. Buttressed by Bartholomew's backstory and all the characters' thoughts, The Night Inspector becomes a serious, nuanced meditation on history, redemption, commerce, conscience and literary vocation, as well as a gripping read. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; 1st edition (April 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609602357
• ISBN-13: 978-0609602355
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #540,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fails to Gell, October 7, 1999

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Night Inspector (Hardcover)

I fully expected to enjoy this gritty suspense set in the same gilded age NYC of E.L. Doctrow's The Waterworks. For whatever reason though, I found it rather tedious and affected at times. The story follows a former Union army sharpshooter, who must always wear a mask to conceal his wartime disfigurement. This is presumably a metaphor for the city itself--as Busch manages to put tidbits of its historical sordidness, such as child prostitutes, on display for the reader. There are a lot of flashbacks, telling the background of this man, and of his wartime exploits, where he is used as any other tool. These struck me as much better written and interesting than the bulk of the book, which revolves around the man's attempt to liberate some child slaves with the aid of Herman Melville and various other cultivated allies. The characterizations are quite good, as is the period detail, but the story itself never quite gelled for me.

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Good night to "The Night Inspector", August 23, 1999

By 

"kevarama" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Inspector (Hardcover)

The only other Frederick Busch book I own is "Girls" and I can't recommend it highly enough. That's why "The Night Inspector" gauls me so much and has prompted me to write. This book is a HUGE letdown, a clumsy read, and about as engaging as a trip to the dentist's office. Before anyone writes "Well, you should compare apples to apples" or anything when comparing "Girls" with this book, there are quite a few similarities between this book and "Girls." (A haunted narrator with a violent past trying to save the innocents of the world.)

Yes, Busch's descriptions of exploding heads are quite clever but not jaw-dropping, not tension-packed, nor anything much except, well, dull. I did not care one smidge for the narrator not on his terms, my terms or Busch's terms. I thought the mask was silly (yes, sure, people wear masks) but this is a mask worn by a character in a book, OK? It's heavy-handed, it's old, it's clunky, it's a Big Fat Overdone Symbol like a dove or a rainbow. (You know, check me if I'm wrong, but he's saying that people wear metaphorical masks, right? Whoa, man, heavy....) On the heels of reading "Girls" this story felt programmatic, calculating and a rehash of his previous book in several ways only without the wife, the dog, the wonderful nature descriptions and the slowly building sense of doom. He's taken away those wonderful, subtle things and plugged in a Civil War hero (to catch that post-"Cold Mountain" craze) and a Brush With A Celebrity (in this case Herman Melville to tie into the celebrity fiction craze--see "I Was Amelia Earhart" and "Underworld" and "Dewey vs. Truman" and "The Hours" to name but a few.)

I got really sick of this book early on what with the fact that there's only a cursory attempt at a plot (maybe I didn't tease the plot out enough) but more so during one moment when Melville and the narrator are talking about books and Melville, speaking for the author of course, dismisses the popularity of the memoir--a trend popular then and now and forever more it seems. I took this as an authorial swipe at a very valid art form, albeit an overdone one sure, but for Busch to criticize (through Melville, of course) the authors and/or publishers wanting to produce books that tap into a craze is puzzling. After all, isn't he tapping into popular forms as well, the historical fiction craze, the civil war craze, and giving us, basically, a retread of his last book in the process, only dressed up in this year's finest colors? People do horrible things in the name of capitalism as this book points out with a leaden thunk, but what of it? There are worse things to do something for than money. Yes, of course, there are better reasons too, but money and capitalism are here to stay. Anyway, I wish I had my money back for the purchase of this book. It's an ice-pack of a book that chills and drizzles and puts you right to sleep.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Night Inspector both haunting and lyrical, July 5, 2000

By 

will thomas - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Inspector (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

Frederick Busch has given us a heady mixture of emotion, narrative and history in The Night Inspector. This is a powerful novel, a gripping tale of a hero who is damaged emotionally as well as physically. William Bartholomew is a civil war sniper whom fate has punished with a hideous face wound, forever hidden behind a papier-mache mask. The title character of the book is the then for gotten author, Herman Melville- Bartholomew's new friend- who lives a twilight existence as a customs inspector. Melville and the Phantom-like wander a bleak Victorian New York City, drinking heavily and visiting sights of depravity in the old city. Interspersed with the narrative, the masked protagonist's mind keeps wandering back to his days in the war, and the grisly but efficient assassinations he made on behalf of the Union side with his Sharps rifle, prior to his disfigurement. This is a fascinating adventure, written by an excellent storteller. Atmospheric, moody,violent, and sometimes bawdy, this is a novel well worth a few night's reading.