Fresh starts

Jeffrey Lent’s Lost Nation

By Amrita Narayanan Bruce

Lost Nation By Jeffrey Lent. Atlantic Monthly Press. New York. 416 pages. $25.

Jeffrey Lent reads at the Portland Public Library, July 31, at noon. Call (207) 871-1700.

LENT: even readers who dislike historical epics will be intrigued by Lost Nation’s complex characters.

Few historical novels succeed in marrying an examination of classic American themes with an original and compelling context from which to examine them. Lost Nation pulls this off through a desolate game of emotional hide-and-seek brightened by momentary flashes of humanity. Set in the inhospitable wild country of 19th-century New England, the novel chronicles two individuals striving for happiness and freedom from the past, set against a backdrop of violent political upheaval.

The two main characters we know initially only by their first names: Blood and Sally. He is seeking to establish himself as a trader in the new, ungoverned New Hampshire territory known as Indian Stream. She is the 16-year-old he won over a game of cards in Portland and will form part of his trade. Together they travel through Maine to New Hampshire both hoping for the quintessentially American features of relocation: a fresh start and a better life.

Blood is tormented by a secret that drives him to move, in the desperate hope that a constantly changing landscape will allow him some peace. Indian stream, he thinks, may be his last stop, the place he will finally be able to settle.

The township at Indian Stream, however, mirrors the bleak landscape that surrounds it. Life is hard and circumstances are rugged. It is in the midst of its own identity search, juggling its past as a lone, uncharted, territory and its present attempts at independence and self-governance, the hallmarks of a civil society.

These are challenging circumstances for any newcomer and this is especially true in Blood’s case. His bar and one-woman whorehouse become both an oasis where the men of the area can relax and a source of much moral controversy in the small community. A shrewd and confident businessman, Blood deals with the villagers’ idiosyncratic outbursts as determinedly and calmly as he drinks his nightly ration of rum.

The mixed response to Blood’s trade is aptly illustrated when Blood allows a traveling musician to entertain at his bar. As the musician plays his squeezebox, the men begin to dance with abandon. However, when the musician’s act culminates with a gratuitous masturbation performance by his dancing monkey, Blood knows there will be trouble. “Word will spread,” he says “and there’s God fearing righteous people here will be dismayed over accounts of this evening passed. I can promise it. They will vilify me but I am used to it.”

It is a prophecy that goes further than Blood could have imagined. First, he is upbraided by some of the local men. Moving forward, the censure and discontent that surrounds Blood’s role in the community makes him a perfect political scapegoat. Despite his peaceable stance, he finds himself at the center of the altercation between the people of Indian Stream and the authorities and militia associated with the nearby province of Lancaster.

It might have been another failed fresh start for Blood, were it not for the moments of redemption he finds in the development of his business and personal relationship with Sally. As their relationship grows from master and servant to something approximating partners, friends, and sometime lovers, Blood opens up to Sally. He speaks of the family he abandoned, his full name, the years of travel, but mostly his overwhelming sense of guilt and regret. Their intimacy is made tense by Blood’s mounting confusion around his role as the owner of the bar where Sally sells her body.

For her part, Blood’s unlikely confessor listens patiently. Her new life as a prostitute and Blood’s employee is far superior to “the unbelievable horrors” she endured in Portland. Indian Stream is therapeutic for her but we can guess that this is mostly because she no longer has to work non-stop. Sally’s rejuvenation comes from the joys of early-morning gardening, the wonder of eating her first potato, and the “quiet time of it where her mind and body folded all to one without her ever having to consider the needs or desire of another.”

Don’t be mislead. Such moments of beauty, leisure, and healing are few and far between. Despite the apparent moments of tenderness shared with Blood, Sally remains fiercely determined not to trust him: “She was not a girl smitten and there were two things she believed certain of Blood . . . it wouldn’t last and however it ended, Blood would abandon her altogether. She guessed he saw her as something he might make amends to, amends for a fester that tracked back to before she was even born.”

While Sally may be mistaken about the shallowness of Blood’s feelings for her, she is right about his past. There is indeed an unnamed fester that raises its ugly head mid-novel. With the appearance of two strangers at Indian Stream, Blood is called upon to face his past and the opening of a Pandora’s box of proportions even he cannot imagine.

As the novel careens toward its bloody dénouement, there is still light amidst the carnage. The violence escalates, but Blood, Sally, and the Indian Stream community as a whole arrive at a clearer comprehension of their identity. This, and the protagonists’ relentless drive to find truth and happiness offers a flicker of hope, the barest scent of redemption that holds the reader to the novel. Without it, the riveting story would be utterly depressing.

As it is, we find much resonance with issues faced by the characters of Lost Nation. Even those who balk at epic historical fiction cannot fail to empathize with complex characters of likeable yet ambiguous morality whose lives are marked by a search for resolution, meaning, and self-understanding.

Amrita Bruce can be reached at amritabruce@yahoo.com.