Capital City Book

... for patriotism springs up rank as weeds about a down tree where virility and courage are dying. (94) Maybe even more than It Can't Happen Here, the 1930s novel for the Tr*mp era. Sandoz piles on the outrage a bit heavy - with so little time between them the enormity of any one of the acts of violence and unpunished lawlessness can't be fully absorbed by the reader or, it would seem, the characters. But her outrage puts fire in her pen and the sympathetic reader, at least, will be carried along. Not that this is just a parade of corruption and incipient fascism in the portmanteau state of "Kanewa"; Babbitry, boosterism, labor conflict, love stories, and a "king in disguise" character are all in the mix. This seems like too much, but I can't say I wished the novel to be more streamlined; it gives a genuine feel for life in a trans-Mississippi midwestern state capital from top to bottom. There's some humor amid the grimness, too, usually well integrated with the novel's themes: a widowed socialite who uses her husband's life insurance settlement to re-model her house fits out her library with a bulk purchase of expensive first editions; her thuggish son, a member of the fascistic "Gold Shirts", can only see them as potential fuel for a public book-burning.

Though the action takes place between Labor Day weekend and the weekend after Election Day, there is a lot of backstory shoehorned into the narrative. Sandoz wants to tell us everything about the city of Franklin, from its founding to the present day, a span of living memory for some, covering three generations. She even looks back to frontier days and the Indian wars in a few brief vignettes. Roots matter to this writer, and forgetting them is the precipitating step toward disaster. A great portrait of America in microcosm, like Robert Altman's Nashville.