Mistaken identity -- Fiction. |
Murder -- Fiction |
Errors -- Fiction. |
Biographical fiction. |
Historical fiction. |
Mistakes |
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Searching... James White Memorial, E. Freetown | FIC LEE | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Searching... Rehoboth - Blanding Free PL | FIC LEE, J. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Searching... Taunton Public Library | LEE, JONATHAN | 1ST FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An exultant novel of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, about one man's rise to fame and fortune, and his mysterious murder--"engrossing" ( Wall Street Journal ), "immersive" ( The New Yorker ), and "seriously entertaining" ( The Sunday Times, London).
Andrew Haswell Green is dead, shot at the venerable age of eighty-three, when he thought life could hold no more surprises. The killing--on Park Avenue in broad daylight, on Friday the thirteenth--shook the city.
Born to a struggling farmer, Green was a self-made man without whom there would be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library. But Green had a secret, a life locked within him that now, in the hour of his death, may finally break free.
A work of tremendous depth and piercing emotion, The Great Mistake is the story of a city transformed, a murder that made a private man infamous, and a portrait of a singular individual who found the world closed off to him--yet enlarged it.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lee (High Dive) dissects the life and murder of Andrew Haswell Green, one of New York City's preeminent city fathers and adversary of the corrupt Boss Tweed, in this ambitious outing. In November 1903, at the age of 83, Green--a onetime comptroller and architect of Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Bridge--steps outside his Park Avenue home and is shot dead by a man in a bowler hat in broad daylight. To uncover the motive, Lee moves backward and forward in time. The detective assigned to the case probes the entanglements of wicked and wealthy bawd Bessie Davis and unstable gunman Cornelius Williams, who seems to have acted on private struggles. In chapters devoted to Green's past, the reader learns of his father's failing Massachusetts farm, his apprenticeship in Trinidad, and close friendship with New York governor and future presidential candidate Samuel Tilden, whose rise prefigures Green's own pursuit to become "an elegant man." Lee's two-tiered structure falters slightly under the weight of Green's copious resume, but he sustains a captivating strangeness in his depiction of the period, such as the practice of hunting stray dogs on city streets for a bounty. By and by, a dynamic all-American character emerges, making for an audacious historical. (June)
Guardian Review
Jonathan Lee's The Great Mistake is a novel so comprehensively steeped in American literary history that it comes as something of a surprise to find that its author is a fortysomething from Surrey. It's as if Lee, whose three superb earlier novels include a reimagining of the IRA bombing of the Grand hotel in Brighton, has distilled more than a century of American letters into a single book. There's Fitzgerald, of course - The Great Gatsby is echoed in more than just the novel's title. There's Hemingway in the muscular lyricism of the prose; Sherwood Anderson and Steinbeck in the beautifully drawn portraits of rural America; there's the restraint of Henry James in the sinuous sentences; and then there's a host of lesser-known writers who took for their subject turn-of-the-century New York and the riotous excesses of early capitalism: Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair. The Great Mistake examines the life of a great American, Andrew Haswell Green, through the lens of his death. Green might have greater claim than any to be the father of modern New York. Brought up on a hardscrabble farm where he was judged too feminine and myopic to wield an axe, he made his name first as a crusading lawyer, then as the architect of the union of Manhattan with Brooklyn and Queens - a move called by its detractors the "Great Mistake of 1898". Green was a man as guarded in his private life as he was expansive in his public works: he was devoted to his "intimate friend", Samuel Tilden, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1876. Green founded the Public Library of New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, most famously, that breath at the heart of the city, Central Park. Lee opens his novel with Green's death, shot aged 83 on the steps of his Park Avenue home by a man named Cornelius Williams. The narrative then laces between the bloody present moment and Green's past, seeking to discover the reason behind this apparently motiveless murder. Lee has great fun with the conventions of the mystery novel, with the police procedural elements of his tale and with the strangeness of New York at that time - great herds of pigs roamed the city; there was a bounty on the heads of its wild dog packs. Against this rollicking narrative more serious and contemporary themes emerge. Green's assailant is black and we discover that he spent a year working on a plantation in Trinidad - might his murder have something to do with his slaving past? There's also the question of Green's sexuality; it was often said of Tilden that he would have been elected president had he been married. Lee handles the relationship between the two men with exquisite delicacy, telling a love story that both men might only have recognised as such in retrospect. It's perhaps fitting that at a time when the Great American Novel is at a low ebb - reeking too much of the gentleman's club for our enlightened age - a Brit should write what is likely to be the best American novel of the year. The Great Mistake is a book of extraordinary intelligence and style, written in language at once beautiful and playfully aphoristic. It's a novel whose protagonist - decent, dignified, wounded - will live long in the mind of those that read it, a novel that delivers wholeheartedly on Lee's early promise.
Kirkus Review
An exceptional work of historical fiction about one of the key figures in the development of 19th-century New York City. In November 1903, on Friday the 13th, Andrew Haswell Green was shot dead in front of his Park Avenue home. Largely forgotten now, he had been essential to the establishment of many of the city's parks, museums, and bridges and to the linking of its five boroughs into Greater New York. As he did in High Dive (2016), Lee sets up two narratives: one following highlights of Green's life up to the murder and one on the police investigation afterward. Born in 1820 into a Massachusetts farming family, young Green realizes that he doesn't grip an ax the right way, that he has "no interest in girls." At 14, he is seen almost kissing another boy. (Present-day readers may find the allusions to his sexuality euphemistic or otherwise indirect, but that is period appropriate and could mean the historical record lacks more-explicit references.) Shortly after that incident, Green is sent to New York to work in a general store, where future New York Gov. Samuel Tilden appears one day seeking pills for indigestion. They develop a lifelong friendship that will lead to Green's many civic achievements. Meanwhile, a police inspector stumbles on a clue to the shooting after visiting a bordello whose madam is linked to the case. She provides one of the book's most colorful sections (and its only significant female character), and she and the inspector dominate the novel's lighter moments. There also are two very different strands of suspense: in the whodunit, which hinges on an accepted haven for straight male urges, and in the biography, with its question of how a man deals with feelings that don't fit into the conventional narrative of the time. A highly satisfying mix of mystery and character portrait, revealing the constrained heart beneath the public carapace. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Lee's (High Dive, 2016) lushly detailed novel delves into the life of the formerly famous Andrew Haswell Green, who was instrumental in creating New York institutions like Central Park and in unifying the city's boroughs before being largely lost to history. In 1803, the 83-year-old "famously frugal old bachelor" was gunned down in the street. Lee moves between documenting Green's life and detailing the search for his killer by a cocaine-sniffing inspector, who, along with one of his objects of inquiry, the wealthy woman owner of a bordello, gives Lee the opportunity to sparkle as a novelist. About Green himself, and his relationship with his "special friend," politician Samuel Tilden, Lee is frustratingly discreet, sticking to the historical record and imagining Green's inner thoughts and feelings but refraining from describing any outer actions other than his documented public ones; this leaves Green as something of a cipher. Fortunately, the city in which he lives, that "cathedral of possibilities," is so vividly realized that it makes up for the lack of a compelling central character.
Library Journal Review
In 1903, 83-year-old lawyer Andrew Haswell Green was shot dead in broad daylight outside his Park Avenue home. Greene, a real-life New York figure, is at the center of Lee's (High Dive) historical novel. Penniless and friendless when he first came to New York to apprentice in a mercantile shop, Green overcame his family's misfortune and his father's disapproval to become the "Father of New York"--the man behind the creation of Central Park, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Natural History, and much more. Despite his achievements, he never overcame the sense that he didn't belong. Inspector McClusky, himself an outsider on the police force, is tasked with uncovering the truth behind Green's murder. Told in chapters that alternate between events in Green's life and McClusky's search for the truth, Lee's novel details the remarkable life of a man now almost forgotten and a city that would not be the same today had he not lived. It's light on details of building projects, focusing instead on the man who created them. VERDICT Give this entrancing story of an exceptional man to novel-reading fans of Erik Larson and those who enjoy a little mystery with their historical fiction.--Portia Kapraun, Delphi P.L., IN