The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

By Jane Smiley

It has been a long time since Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was first published and today we know it as an American classic. Almost all of us have read or at the very least know the plot of the book. Mixing boyhood adventure, a dark cynical view of society and a voyage along an artery of slave America, Huckleberry Finn managed to arrange disturbing and controversial material under the naive perspective of an ignorant young boy to achieve a strange mixture of cruelty and innocence that in many ways symbolized the America of that day. In "The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton," Jane Smiley seems to be trying to create a female counterpart to Huck Finn. Her main character, Lidie Newton, is older than Huck; old enough to be a woman and experience marriage and the duty of being a wife and prospective mother and yet young enough to be naive and adventurous and to do the impulsive things that no rational adult would do.

Smiley, famous for her modern day Midwestern narratives, goes back in time to Kansas Territory when the future of America was being decided in pitched political and physical combat between pro and anti-slavery forces. Lidie Newton grows up as the unwanted daughter, unfit for any of the traditional female roles until she meets and marries an abolitionist and follows him west to the frontiers of the conflict. From there, a significant portion of the book is dedicated to a detailed description of the daily procedures of life, which can best be described as a very long-winded and well researched version of "Little House on the Prairie" without the dynamism. Despite violence constantly being foreshadowed and talked about, life goes on and very little happens. Realistic, but again, not very interesting. The running commentary placed in Lidie's mouth ala Huck Finn is meant to shed light on the world around her, but in Smiley's hands the commentary keeps coming off as either too knowing or too naive. Where Mark Twain managed to create the illusion of a boy seeing the world for the first time, Smiley is far too heavy handed, and line after line clunks like extracts from a technical handbook. We do learn many interesting facts about the period and place but historical pop summaries are not the goal of literature, and when it comes to drama and narrative the first half of the novel comes up almost utterly empty.

The core of the conflict is meant to begin with the murder of the husband Lidie was never sure if she really loved, when Lidie dresses as a man and goes to hunt for the killers of her husband. This too rapidly ends up going nowhere. Up till now, Lidie has been presented as an observer, not an active participant, and although it is conveyed to us over and over again that Lidie is exciting and adventurous, her response to most situations is passivity. Where dressing up as a man and going to kill the murderers of her husband is meant to be an action that springs naturally from her bold and adventurous character, it is in fact out of character with her pervasive indecisiveness and confusion. Unsurprisingly, it takes very little time before the indecisiveness and confusion become dominant again.

This might be somewhat more tragic if we had the faint notion that the main character thought this was tragic or cared about it in any real way. Where Huck Finn was full of energy, curiosity and passion, Lidie apathetically makes her way through the novel as if she'd rather be somewhere else. By the time the reader is finished with the novel, he or she generally wants to be somewhere else too.

'The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton' makes vast claims for itself and for its character and delivers a lackadaisical narrative that is well researched and ultimately as interesting as an encyclopedia entry. The novel intones darkly about horrific violence that forever scars the characters, and while the violence may be impressive by modern Midwestern standards, it's quite silly by the standards of modern day New York or the actual Kansas Territory of the day. It sets out to parody a style of fiction and instead only copies its most annoying qualities, dispensing with its positive aspects in a way that does not amuse or reveal. The book bases itself around one main character on whose merits the novel succeeds or fails and proceeds to craft a character with all the dynamic qualities of drying paint. In short, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton has few merits and many flaws, suggesting that writing historical fiction is not quite as simple as just having all your facts, themes and directions set up all in a row.