Tim Brown, "Second Acts"

Book Review

ONE ACT PLAY

Are there any second acts in U.S. history?  With foreknowledge, could we have somehow acted differently and gotten it right?  According to Tim Brown’s latest novel, Second Acts (2010, Gival Press), perhaps the best thing the Twenty-first Century has to offer the Nineteenth is Oprah Winfrey-style interview formatting with a dash of local suffragist or abolitionist spice.  Nothing too radical, unless you want to get tarred and feathered—which sometimes happens in this otherwise delightful romp across Jacksonian America, when Chicago was still a skunk-cabbage patch and Wall Street got burnt to a cinder in the Great Fire of 1835 (an event we might consider re-enacting today!).  

Set in the near future of our own time, Brown’s jaunty narrative (which won the 2010 London Book Festival Award for General Fiction) tells the story of one Dan Connor, an average but likable computer engineer, who rides a time warp back to 1833 to retrieve his adulterous, cocaine-snorting wife, Rachel.  She’s ditched him for an egomaniacal, award-winning physicist named Bruce Bilton.  With the help of his colleague Barry Stompke, Bilton has figured out how to break the time barrier, propelling himself out of the 21^st Century and back to the past with his other, less licit partner, Rachel, leaving Stompke behind to reap the rewards.  Outraged, the jilted Connor forces Stompke to send him back too so that he can track down the randy pioneers.  It’s not exactly clear why Connor wants Rachel back, except to spoil her plans and hopefully enjoy once again the great sex she’d already stopped giving him before running off. 

On the road to finding her, he meets up with native-American squaw Listening Rabbit, or “Bunny,” who identifies him right away as a time traveler, thanks to her mystical powers.  She is also a transvestite male, which our right-thinking hero fortunately discovers before making any social gaffes with her.  Bunny’s cross-dressing or “two-spirit” lifestyle appears to have always been tolerated among her Potawatomi tribe; but having recently been jilted by her own husband for an actual female, she agrees to accompany her empathetic visitor from another future in a practical, if uneven, alliance (i.e., as his servant).  Connor’s and Bunny’s unlikely but likable team-up amuses the reader but unsettles the westward moving folks they keep encountering on their journey east, thanks mostly to Bunny’s antics and yelps, her sexual adventures with men, and the harsh cultural judgments she offers on other native Americans she happens not to like.  (Rival Huron women are routinely derided as dog fellators.)  It’s one of the quirky realities of 19^th C life that Brown illuminates and exploits in his wacky fusion of historical and science fictions.   

While told from Connor’s point of view, chapter by chapter, the story intercalates Rachel’s manic diary entries fraught with all the 21^st Century frustrations an independently-minded woman might experience in the backward backwoods of American history.  Her entries always seem to be completed just before Connor arrives in time to discover he’s missed her.  But instead of feeling freed of the shackles of marriage, Rachel finds herself oppressed by Bilton and 19^th Century gender codes.  Despite rigorous prepping for their journey—one that Bilton had hoped to profit big from with his advanced scientific knowledge—Rachel must come to terms with her lover’s entrepreneurial deficiencies and spendthrift ways in a younger, less forgiving America.  Flight is always prompted, not by Connor’s belated arrivals but by Bilton’s latest business debacle, usually the result of overestimating his own intelligence or underestimating his new contemporaries’ ignorance of basic physical laws.

By contrast, Connor’s narration represents the rational voice of the morally-centered white male hero working methodically to jump-start his broken marriage in an America that should seem utterly alien to him.  But it’s clear that, despite the inconveniences and nasty prejudices, the 19^th Century fits Connor’s temperament fairly well.  Armed in advance with a supply of pure-gold krugerrands, Connor is safely transported across Lakes Michigan and Erie to

the cities of Buffalo, Niagara, and finally New York itself, the Emerald City of the Americas in its economic adolescence.  Unlike Bilton, Connor is propelled to the top of the social pyramid as an incipient philanthropic plutocrat.   He’s even learned how to wield a mean bullwhip, either in self-defense, or—to the astonishment of his proto-leisure class chums—to smite a rampant boar!  In a sense then, the book is also a sort of postmodern, pre-term Horatio Alger story wrapped up in a familiar Twainian jokiness, though most of it set in Manahatta.  

The old patriarchal order seems gentlemanly enough at the top, albeit under the benign, watchful eyes of Connor’s new friends and flunkies:  Mr. Gallatin, a former senator and current president emeritus of the National Bank in New York, and Mr. Pemberton, head of a detective agency that mistakenly traces Bilton and Rachel all the way to Louisiana (where they never once set foot).  It’s hard to believe the aging Gallatin is already in a genuine struggle with Tammany Hall’s emergent political machine.  In the end, it will take the intervention of another time-traveler who shows up later in the story to bring the city back from the brink of its more anti-democratic tendencies.  (He will fail, more or less.)

Of course, it’s the ugly part of the 19^th Century that unsettles us most as readers.  Consequently, the novel can’t always afford to go into it too much:  to do so might disturb the comic effect of the book’s more generic aims, regardless of what hybrid elements are also at work.  But Brown is too sensitive a student of American history not to remind us of its checkered past or its pockmarked present.  Brown admits the big apple can get pretty wormy at nighttime when the muggers come out—and downright life-threatening in the Five Points district.  But readers of Second Acts won’t have to tangle too much with the denizens of such places.  Nor with the blacks—though at least one African-American manservant is on call, as well as a “negro” banjo-player who sings a version of “Turkey in the Straw” that tells the story of “Zip Coon” who becomes the first black President of the United States!  (The singer turns out to be a white man in black face, prompting Connor’s one spontaneous moment of 21^st Century liberal ire.)  Slavery is mentioned as a topic of continuing debate, but Connor never publicly takes sides, even if his sympathies are with the abolitionists.  To do so would put him too much at odds with the establishment and with the success he’s managed to find in old New York.

 In effect, he’s a postmillennial member of the silent majority!    While Brown implausibly suggests that 19^th Century New Yorkers were racially and ethnically tolerant, it’s illustrated only in cases when the Other arrives in small numbers.  This makes tolerant curiosity easy enough.  It also makes life pretty good for Bunny, thriving in New York as an assimilated native-American who takes to wearing corsets and flounces, cooks exotic meals of wild game for Connor’s distinguished houseguests, and finally becomes a marriage counselor to paleface couples.  She also ends up instructing Mr. Gallatin in the finer points of Potawatomi grammar as a native informant for this early founder of American ethnology. 

On the other hand, Rachel—as a kind of proto-post feminist—also turns out to be in a minority of one.  But unlike Bunny, she regularly takes issue with her surroundings.  Indeed, she becomes the most adventurous of Brown’s 21^st Century protagonists, exploring and debating the country’s social and political fault-lines in its ante-bellum context.  And while she, too, is gradually assimilated to New York society, she has moments of crisis she can only overcome by ideologically engaging with that society.  She ends up organizing public lectures at the “Downtown Lyceum” to be given by the most radical speakers of her day—or at least, of their day.  It is at one of these events that she and Connor come closest to meeting up before most of downtown New York goes up in smoke, the catastrophe that reunites the couple for the big come-uppance and for final reconciliation.

The great advantage of going back in time is that one might alter the course of history for the better.  This is the view of one Sam Tilden who has followed Connor from an even later time (the year 2075) with the express purpose of ending slavery before the Civil War can take place!  The great fear, of course, is that one might accidentally make things worse or even annul the conditions necessary for one’s future existence.  The irony of Brown’s novel seems to be the fact that there really are no second acts in the way one would like—just a few improvised stunts that reaffirm the pathos of American imbecility and greed.  Brown’s narrative suggests that a truly comic clash of discursive formations can only happen when visitors from the future avoid head-on confrontation and just let history be.  When such conflicts become naked and raw, we get mass destruction—as Mark Twain’s conclusion to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court reveals in one of that book’s less amusing gambits.  In Brown’s book, however, the great make-over-er, Tilden, sees his quixotic undertaking get snuffed-out in turn by historical realities no historically-displaced reformer could ever uproot alone.  Tilden’s efforts produce almost the reverse of his desired effects, effects that confirm, not alter, the history we may or may not already know from the books:  The so-called Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876, which resolved a disputed presidential election and led to the removal of all remaining Union troops at the end of Reconstruction—not to mention emboldening Southern Democrats who promptly began legislating Jim Crow laws in their respective states.  The fictional Tilden of the future can only repeat the failed presidential candidate of the past he already was.  Instead of trying to stamp out slavery, perhaps he should have focused on preventing the Hayes-Tilden Compromise that hastened segregation, an object-lesson for any future Al Gore who might be waiting out there.   

            In the end, the novel is a story of marital redemption, a fact that explains—by contradicting—the reference in the title to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quip that there are no second acts in American lives.   Second Acts offers a philosophy of reform and forgiveness that our own culture of contests and political circuses mostly derides (consider the recent Wiener roast in American politics).  In his eccentric, comical tale, Tim Brown manages to look critically at these derisive attitudes—though he, too, reaffirms them in a fundamental way, if one considers the broader spectrum of historic acts and political actions.