Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century

I just finished Emily Barton's most recent novel Brookland. This is the story of Prudence Winship, born in Brooklyn in the late 1700s to a family that distills gin. The frame story for Prue's life story is that Prue's somewhat estranged daughter Recompense writes asking about the "bridge works." We don't know what she's talking about, but Prue starts writing letters to Recompense. We read some of these letters and we hear Prue's thoughts about her history and about the letter-writing, and so the story jumps from first to third person.

Prue is a remarkable character in that, as has been noted, independent woman character in historical novels are rare. Prue is talented at rectifying gin (that is, giving gin its various tastes from herbs and berries), and her stewardship of the distillery, which she inherits, is a large part of the story, as is her long relationship with Ben Horsefield, but the real story of the book is her building of a bridge across the East River. This counterfactual story is the marvelous narrative peg of the book: will this bridge be built? We know, of course, that the bridge is a historical fiction. The first bridge across the East River (the Brooklyn Bridge) was actually opened in 1883. The suspense to know both whether Prue will pull off the bridge and how Barton is going to handle this historical discrepancy is great.

The stories that hang on this narrative peg, however, I found to be simplistic. The prose is assured and often beautiful. Barton is an ambitious writer, and here she tackles love, loss, and other huge topics. At the beginning of the book, we hear that Prue had as a young girl of 5 "cursed" her newborn sister, Pearl, who subsequently turns out to be mute and thus is trapped, as a woman, with none of the freedoms granted to her sisters as proprietors of a business. This crime shadows Prue's relationship with her sister, and Barton does a great job of handling Prue's conflicted feelings of guilt and love. The building and the destroying of that relationship mirrors the bridge's construction, and what Barton does her is nifty. What I felt was lacking was the grandeur the story needed. I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it's because we read about every single loss Prue suffers: her mother, then her father, a member of the community, and so on and so on, and she describes, in great detail, every ceremony the community of Brooklyn goes through, from funeral to wedding to retirement to funeral to funeral and so on and so on. And yes, while life is punctuated by ceremony, after we hear one stiff speech we can likely imagine some of the next one. Barton creates a bygone world so well, but sometimes I felt dragged around. The reason the book feels simplistic despite its ambition is that finally the book's message seem too explicit--we have to come to terms with our own pettiness, hubris is bad, we must persevere through loss.