Booth
If I had to do a mash-up style quickie summary of Booth by Karen Joy Fowler, I’d say this novel about Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth and his famously theatrical family is part Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell), part Shadowplay (Joseph O’Connor), part Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders). Stylistically, it reminded me most of Hamnet. (Plus it’s full of Shakespeare references). But Shadowplay is about Victorian theater and Lincoln in the Bardo is about President Lincoln’s grief for his son, so we’ve got points for thematic overlay there.
Booth is about familial love — love (or perhaps lack of) between siblings and definitely the love of a parent for a child. But it’s also about the stage — family patriarch Junius Brutus Booth was a well-known stage actor and son Edwin was the “foremost tragedian” of the mid- to late-19th century. And we all know that JW was an actor. So what does familial love look like when it’s “performed” and has an audience? Is it different than how love might be displayed in private?
The scene we all know — the one that takes place in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC and subsequently mars a family name while throwing an already fragile nation into even more turmoil — takes up very little of this novel…just the last 30 pages or so of this 450+-page book. But all I kept thinking about as Fowler unfurled that historical scene was how a family’s tragedy had been ushered onstage. What does it mean to have everyone else be “tourists to the land of grief,” as Fowler writes?
All the world’s a stage.
originally published on instagram