America’s self-belief, its sense of specialness and destiny, the profound conviction of so many of its citizens that it’s the best place in the world to live – these notions are simultaneously fascinating and infuriating to many non-Americans. With the spectacle of American democracy in action enthralling half the world in 2008, it seems like a particularly good time to have read Stephen Wright’s Amalgamation Polka, a novel that explores the institution of slavery and the American Civil War that brought about its demise through the eyes of young Liberty Fish, and in doing so seems to also explore Wright’s unsettling relationship with his native land.

Liberty is the son of a Northern industrialist and a Southern slaveowner’s daughter who has been a fervent abolitionist since her youth – though they have both profited from slavery, they are not proud of the fact, and name and raise Liberty in accordance with their principles. Indeed, he is brought up in a household that acts as a station on the Underground Railroad, the informal network of safe houses that smuggled escaping slaves to freedom (as they live in upstate New York, we imagine the destination to be Canada in this case). His childhood is populated with a variety of vivid characters, including Euclid the one-eyed servant, a deranged hermit who inducts Liberty as an honourary pirate, and the bear-like adventurer Uncle Potter. We do not see much of Liberty’s personality during his childhood – he seems to be a cipher for the lunacies of the adult world – though we do learn of his considerable fervour for exploration, which is to serve him in good stead in later life.

The most striking episode of Liberty’s childhood is a packet boat trip with his father on the Grand Western Canal, during which he is exposed to the pace of change in American society (the packet boats being threatened by the rapidly expending railway network), and the fundamental tensions between the slave states and the free. The violence and destructiveness inherent in the American dream are laid bare for all to see.

“Yes,” Thatcher admitted, “we are the great devourers. We devour experience, we devour geography, we devour time, we devour each other. A nation of unrestrained appetites, no question of that.”

Liberty is 17 years old come the outbreak of the Civil War, and his parents’ entreaties cannot prevent him from joining the Union Army, soon after which he finds himself at the Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest encounter of the entire American Civil War. Surviving that carnage, he eventually deserts the Union army when he sees the treatment being meted out to plantation owners on the drive in to the South, setting off ahead of the Union advance to the plantation of his mother’s parents, Redemption Hall.

Liberty has never met his grandparents, his mother’s abolitionist stance having caused a total break with them, and he feels a burning curiosity to meet them, as well as an obligation to warn them of the predations of Union troops, operating under orders to live off the land. What he finds at Redemption Hall is more than just a pathetic attempt to cling to the old plantation lifestyle; it is a desperately grim place, made grimmer by the misguided genetic and chemical experiments of his grandfather, who is seeking his own solution to the race issue that divides the country, and who drags Liberty along on his strangest adventure to date.

The Amalgamation Polka is a beautifully written book – Wright’s lyrical, sometimes rambling prose contrasts with the understated Liberty’s style of speech; it is by turns dark and oppressive, wryly funny, and strangely surreal. The quality of the writing is such that one could chose almost any paragraph to demonstrate the point; my selection is from Liberty’s coming of age visit to New York with his Uncle Potter:

New York. A fanciful realm where all the noise and heat and general untidiness of desire unfettered was allowed full and natural exhibit in a daily frenzy of banknotes. People were different here, Potter had instructed his young nephew, money was an elixir to them, their health, their mental harmony dependent upon a vigorous regiment of the stuff. So should you happen to spy a nearby chap suddently erupt into a sweat, eyeballs a-dancing, limbs a-twitching, quickly stand aside ’cause likely you’ve come unknowingly between the slathering habitué and his dose of corrective tender.

The title of the book alludes to various approaches and suggestions for resolving the problems of race in America: from selective inbreeding to sexual violence and alchemical experimentation, none of the solutions devised by Wright’s characters for ‘amalgamation’ are pleasant. Only Liberty’s acceptance of the validity of equality presents a viable option, but we are reminded that in antebellum America, he was very much in the minority.

The picture of America that Wright paints, of the great devourer, remorselessly expanding, all consuming, is also of a country that is simultaneously animated by a shared spirit and totally unaware of how its actions contradict that spirit (as Potter says to Liberty, “People like to be fooled. It’s the national pastime.”). Ultimately, perhaps Wright sees in that contradiction the seeds both of America’s downfall, and its redemption. As an English steamer captain says near the end of the book:

“Here’s to you, Mr. Fish: here’s to your America. I suppose if there’s even a fool’s glimmer of a feasible utopia lying about unnoticed in the shadowy corners of this world, you are indeed the people to find it.”

It’s Wright’s America too, and you sense that however hard he might try, he can’t truly bring himself to give up on it.

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