Raising Holy Hell

Through a montage of real and fabricated quotations from historical documents, witnesses and participants, and through the words of an omniscient and oddly ironic narrator, first-novelist Olds offers a fascinating study of slavery in the U.S. and of one of its most ardent opponents, the enigmatic John Brown, whose violent abolitionist crusades foreshadowed-and, arguably, precipitated-the Civil War. This protean narrative, part biography, part essay, traces Brown's life from his childhood in the Ohio of the early 1800s through his execution in Virginia at age 59, while simultaneously encapsulating various American attitudes-both personal and institutional-toward slavery and its victims. National heroes-including Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington-are skewered, sometimes with their own euphemistic bigotry, for their complicity in Southern slavery. Antislavery forces in the territories are portrayed as racists who merely want black people, free or enslaved, kept far away from their new homes. Historic figures like Robert E. Lee, Harriet Tubman, Horace Greeley and Frederick Douglass offer their impressions of Brown and his mission. Olds's mixture of novelistic and quasi-documentarian narrative produces a remarkably complex portrait of the paradoxical zealot. The inevitability of the strangely anticlimactic conflict at Harper's Ferry, Va., creates tension throughout, while the narrator's succinct, sometimes mordant commentary highlights elements of American history not fully acknowledged even today. 50,000 first printing; author tour. (Sept.)