Booth (2022)

Why this one?

I’ve been dipping my toes in a few of the longlisted books from the 2022 Booker Longlist. For various reasons I’ve no intention of reading them all, but I’m just cherrypicking a few that take my fancy.

I picked this one largely down to having really enjoyed Karen Joy Fowler’s previous novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which (despite feeling to me like I read it a million years ago) was published in 2013 and shortlisted for the 2014 Booker (losing out to The Narrow Road to the Deep North). She was among the first batch of US authors to be nominated for the Prize in the year that the rules were changed to broaden the Prize’s scope. She began by writing science fiction in the 1980s and is also well-known for her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club (which I haven’t read).

Thoughts, etc.

Booth is the story of the eponymous Booth family, across much of the nineteenth century. Ostensibly, it’s about the build-up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the family’s most infamous son, John Wilkes Booth. But it’s really about much more than that. Its extensive scope touches on family dynamics, generational shifts, the Civil War and abolition of slavery in the US, the world of the Theatre in which the Booth family are embedded, and a whole lot more. Fowler began writing the novel while considering one of many recent mass shootings in the States: how might the perpetrator’s family be impacted? Her informative author’s note at the novel’s conclusion also highlights that she stopped writing for some time around the election of Trump, before realising that in writing Booth she was engaging with issues that were still very much present in the modern world.

I’ll start by saying that I unashamedly loved this book. I took it on my summer hols, and despite the dark subject matter it was a constant joy to return to. The world Fowler draws is incredibly vivid, from the claustrophobic interiors to the expansive trips across the Americas. The craftsmanship on display is also hugely impressive. It’s very obvious where the book is going (this is historical fiction, after all) but still has a page-turning quality that it shouldn’t have any right to. And it tackles complex issues incisively (if occasionally as a bit of a sideshow to the main story, as with the enslaved Hall family’s narrative).

Its characters are almost all highly memorable, from the larger than life (and famous) father Junius Booth to the older sister Rosalie, whose (largely invented by Fowler) life in the shadows, doubly bound as a woman in the nineteenth century and the sufferer of a debilitating illness, is worthy of a novel of its own. Fowler presents characters (including the President himself, whose story is told in brief vignettes in between the family narrative) as complex, largely deserving of our sympathy and commanding our interest yet generally piled high with flaws. John is the exception, presented (perhaps inevitably) as the cliche of a future murderer (casually popping off animals for fun; troublemaker at school; shifty lonerish behaviour; etc etc) - but he’s rarely the centre of the story. Instead we see much of the story unfolding from the perspective of a core trio of siblings - Edwin (celebrated actor; genetically predisposed alcoholic; Lincoln supporter), Rosalie (see above; fiercely loyal to family above all else) and Asia (initially sympathetic but later one of the least likeable characters; self centred and somewhat detached from reality).

It isn’t without its flaws. Its denouement is powerful but feels a bit rushed - it doesn’t really go deep on the impact of the assassination on the wider Booth family (odd given that’s Fowler’s stated purpose). I would have preferred it either to explore this further or to draw a line at the moment of the murder (leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions based on the rich insight we’ve already been given on the family members). As it stands, the conclusion feels a little like one of those “here’s what everyone did next” screens you get at the end of slightly cheesy movies.

That didn’t really dent my enjoyment of the book overall, though. It’s an immersive world that I loved inhabiting in the course of reading, and (as with all the best reads) I was left feeling like very little could fill the gap left after finishing it.

Hey pup!

Score

8.5

This score would land Booth around the top 20 of my all time favourite Booker winners, so I absolutely think it deserves to make the shortlist. I’ve read far too few of this year’s potential candidates to judge whether it could be a winner - something inside me says that it won’t be, but I wouldn’t complain at all if it did.

Next up

Another one from the longlist before I perhaps step out of it for a bit, let’s see…