Blindspot

Carolyn See

Blindspot is a novel both frisky and learned…written by two historians who are lifelong friends. They must have had a wonderful time putting this good-natured project together…an engaging way to relearn American history! And how amazing (and more than a little sad) to realize that we, as a country, are plagued by many of the same conundrums—pervasive racism, class distrust, venal officials—now as we were then.
—The Washington Post

Marilyn Stasio

While the 19th century boasts Jack the Ripper and all those drippy Romantic poets, the 18th century can lay claim to swashbuckling wits like Jonathan Swift and William Hogarth and the roguish Gilbert Stuart, the American-born portrait painter (most notably, of George Washington) who studied in Scotland and appears to have been the inspiration for the appealing hero of Blindspot, the first novel by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. Both are professors of American history…and they have adopted the various modes of 18th-century fiction, along with its breathless style. The result is an erudite and entertaining re-creation of colonial America on the brink of the Revolution.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Professors Kamensky and Lepore try for playful historical romance, but deliver instead a novel that is, if rich in period detail, also overwrought, predictably plotted and at times embarrassingly purple. The year is 1764 and portrait painter Stewart Jameson has been chased by debtors from his native Scotland to Boston, where he quickly opens shop and takes an apprentice, the half-starved orphan, Francis Weston, who turns out to be Fanny Easton, the disgraced daughter of one of Boston's leading citizens. Stewart does a good business with Boston's better class, which puts Stewart and Fanny in a good position to solve the murder of an abolitionist. They are joined at this task by Stewart's old friend from Edinburgh, Dr. Ignatius Alexander, a university-trained runaway slave. The mystery plays out with little surprise; rather, the narrative is driven by Alexander's hatred of slavery and by Stewart and Fanny's tawdry relationship. Unfortunately, however, both of these lines prove awkward, and while students of the era may find enough period detail to carry them through, the cheesy plot and facile characterizations are likely to turn off most readers. (Dec.)

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Library Journal

Portrait painter and libertine Stuart Jameson arrives in 1764 Boston as many arrived in the American Colonies, one step ahead of the law. Fleeing a sheriff and debtor's prison in Edinburgh and hoping to start anew, he makes his first stop in the New World at the print shop of Benjamin Edes to purchase cards, a map, and a history of the city, but he comes away having found prospective lodgings, more information than he cared to know about the deteriorating situation between the Colonies and their British rulers, and a staunch friend. He also places an announcement of his services as a portrait painter and an accompanying advertisement for an apprentice, both of which bring him unexpected surprises. Francis Weston, the apprentice, is talented beyond his wildest dreams, and Jameson's burgeoning business soon plunges him into the dramatic affairs and intense politics of Boston's most influential families. Readers not put off by the slow start will be rewarded by a beautifully crafted debut historical novel that is at once a tender love story, a murder mystery, and a brilliant sociological and political portrait of a turbulent time. The authors are noted historians. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ8/08; see also "Editors' Fall Picks," p. 28-33.-Ed.]
—Cynthia Johnson

The Barnes & Noble Review

Blindspot is a love story and a murder mystery suspended between the picaresque journal entries of Stewart Jameson and the letters of Frances Easton, and couched in the exigent art of seeing, really seeing, things as they are. Or not. For our minds play tricks with how and what we see, and our perceptions are riddled with blind spots, some real, some metaphorical -- ignorance, say, or prejudice. Then there's love, a blind spot often big enough to drive a car through.

The setting is Boston in 1764. Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, historians teaching at Brandeis and Harvard, respectively, have given their collaborative novel an 18th-century cast, with its decided earthiness and a joy in clever wordplay that seeks after the spirit of the idiom ("crapulous claw-baw") but avoids being smothered by it. Shades of Sterne, Fielding, and Richardson, though the authors are clearly too mischievous for only that; Jameson can as easily sound like the Captain in Tintin -- "Judas Iscariot on a flaming red chariot!" he barks -- as exhibit Ben Franklin's inclination for puns or Yogi Berra's for malapropisms.

Jameson has fetched up in Boston -- and what a Boston, chromatic in its role as backdrop, even in its state of shabbiness after a number of hard years -- on the run from a very big, bad debt back home in Edinburgh. He's a decent fellow, as well as a bit of a rascal. He has knocked around some in his 30 years and has a hand for portraiture and a knack, as David Hume put it, for reading the internal fabric of his sitters. He also has a head full of steam for quips, digressions, and womanhood, which is why he is unnerved, once he has set up his humble atelier in Boston, to be passionately, ineluctably drawn to his apprentice, young Francis Weston, "more beautiful than I would wish him to be."

Weston is an urchin fresh from the streets when Jameson takes him on because he shows a gift for painting. At the interview, Weston pulls a few samples of work from a grubby bag: "Out came half a dozen likenesses, such as Hogarth himself might have made. Sweet Jesus," marvels Jameson. Outwardly, the penniless Jameson shows less awe; better to keep Weston without airs, and thus without wages.

Weston is also Easton, Frances "Fanny" Easton, outcast daughter of Edward Easton, a despicable man who will become chief justice of the colony's highest court. Her knocking around has been at the hands of men -- her lover, her father -- and with a little help from her streak of rashness, she has gone from elegant townhouse to vile sweatshop in a single bound. Escaping, her breasts bound and hair shorn (though she can't hide the long-lashed eyes or radiant blush), she answers Jameson's advertisement.

Meanwhile, Boston is beginning to roil over taxes imposed by a parliament 3,000 miles away and the arrival of the royal grenadiers. (The history here is smart, stylish stuff, unsurprising if you know anything of Kamensky and Lepore's books, or Lepore's essays in The New Yorker or Common-place, the sophisticated, online journal they started that fuses academic and popular interests in American history.) The authors are obviously not unaware that they are fiddling with dates, but the soldiers play an important, quietly ominous role fanning the town's sense of persecution. One of the pleasures of Blindspot is to watch as two meticulous historians take fiction's liberty.

Liberty -- it raises its proud head on every page: Jameson needs to be liberated from the (quite literally) bad debt and the prickings of his conscience concerning his apprentice; Easton, from her dissembling and the ghosts of her past; the working folk of Boston, from ruinous financial burdens.

And though many want to, there is no way of avoiding the elephant in liberty's living room: slavery. The "great paradox" is played like a stringed instrument by the authors, a mournful music for sure, sometimes aching its way to a dirge. Attitudes toward slavery cut across class and ideological lines in Boston. Both the good and the bad are held up to the light. Foul deeds are done as a result of the ignominy, and the novel's mystery hinges on it. A blind spot, then, for the book's more unsavory, entitled, blackmailing, and supercilious characters, and a petard with which to hoist them. The murder mystery is a knotty one, involving a Boston graybeard -- Samuel Bradstreet, a not-so-dim likeness of James Otis Jr., one of the real town's deepest-running revolutionaries -- and Ignatius Alexander, a friend of Jameson's and a runaway slave. As a child, Alexander had been bought off a slave ship by an English nobleman, who had wagered a bet that, given a proper English education, he could be "civilized...indistinguishable, except for his skin, from an English gentleman."

Alexander is the most complex, or at least the most inscrutable, character. His intellect has indeed become prodigious, and he is still a black man, with all the tribulations that entails once he's been wrested from Guinea. He is also imperious, demanding, cryptic, and insulting -- a strange friend -- as he endeavors to solve the murder and secure a slave's freedom. He orchestrates the story's tension: there may be an obscure method to his madness, but he is like a ticking time bomb, in one world but combustively not of it. A slave once again, he may have seen and endured too much.

Under the circumstances, the love angle inches along in fits and starts. It is not giving away anything unexpected to tell that Weston's guise drops, and she and Jameson get on with it, "it" being a good dose of merrily bawdy nookie, told with a color and carnality that would do another Fanny proud -- with plenty of sweet, tender caring to boot. And if, perchance, they fornicate too much for some, it sure beats reading about economic theory.

Kamensky and Lepore have great fun in these pages, as will readers. Yet the book is more than a takeoff on 18th-century novels. It is a window into the everyday lives of its characters, commoners and grandees working to find their measure of deliverance and satisfaction, though as long as the institution of slavery blots the moral landscape, it will diminish -- at the very least -- all those it touches: a blind spot to some, and a terrible sore spot to others. This is a learned, engaged entertainment; you leave it quickened in a number of ways. --Peter Lewis

Peter Lewis is an editor at the American Geographical Society. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, Outside, and Public Radio International, among others.