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Overview
Christopher Bram tells the story of Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, alias Dr. August, a clairvoyant pianist who communes with ghosts, and who finds meaning in his life through a strange love triangle with a righteous ex-slave and nervous white governess. Spanning the years between the Civil War and the early 1920's, this riveting and ambitious historical novel displays the immense talents of a prodigious, highly esteemed author working at the height of his powers.
Synopsis
Spanning more than 60 years, from the Civil War to the early 1920s, and moving from the battlefields in the South to New York City, through Paris, London, Constantinople, and Coney Island, The Notorious Dr. August features August Fitzwilliam Boyd, a.k.a. Dr. August, an improvisational pianist who believes his music is sometimes isnpired by the spirit world. He is in love with Isaac Kemp, an ex-slave who sporadically returns his affections and who himself successfully woos Alice Pangborn, a rather prim, white governess. The trio, locked in a strange and often painful love triangle, travel the world—until a horrible tragedy forces them to examine the choices they have made, and shakes up their relationship in ways none of them could have predicted. Rich with historical detail, The Notorious Dr. August is a brilliantly written, emotionally riveting exploration of race, class, spirituality, and sexuality—and of what it truly means to love another.
About the Author:
Christopher Bram is the author of six novels, including Gossip, Hold Tight, Surprising Myself, and Father of Frankenstein, which was made into the movie Gods and Monsters. He lives in New York City.
NY Times Book Review
If only more novelists approached their craft with the imagination and skill of Christopher Bram.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Notorious Christopher BramNovelist Christopher Bram is best known for Father of Frankenstein, basis for the Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters. But his profile and popularity will likely skyrocket with the arrival of The Notorious Dr. August: His Life and Crimes, a dense tapestry of a novel spanning centuries and brimming with brio. Bram deftly entwines several themes, including music, memory, and the fuzzy yet defining nature of sexuality. Through all of the rich historical detail and often-anguished musings on time, sex, sin, redemption, and reality itself, Bram's powerful central characters and story line hold fast, delivering an accomplished, rare piece of contemporary fiction.
As the story begins, the narrator, born Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd in New York City in 1850, accompanies his lascivious uncle on a musical tour through the war-ravaged South in 1864. Boyd's uncle is abusing young Fitz, that much is clear. However, in a harbinger of the novel's complex ethics, the narrator doesn't seem too troubled by his uncle's advances: "But I cannot claim that his bedtime attentions were torture...his erratic needs gave me a useful trump card in our constant contest of master and servant." Severe repercussions -- more than Fitz or the reader can project -- will follow.
The future Dr. August also displays an intense musical involvement that borders on the supernatural: "Here at the piano I can finger the keys to unlock my thoughts and memories," he explains. Any lover of music will delight in the musical reveries that accompany many crucial moments in the novel, including a surreal sequence near the end where Fitz loses himself completely in his piano -- and Bram's fine descriptions echo Thomas Mann's
But these musical passages are integral amplifications, not mere digressions, woven directly into the central plot. And what a series of adventures awaits Fitz: captured by Confederate soldiers; accompanying an emancipated slave on a Faulkner-like journey to bury his master; exploring the brothels of New York. All this before developing the persona of "Dr. August, musical clairvoyant," who tells his subject's futures (and pasts) by playing the piano in their presence and gaining access to what is either an inner world of spirits or possibly a fraud. In any event, he devises a method of combining two standard 19th-century entertainment practices into one wildly successful routine, at which he's accompanied by Isaac, the freed slave who soon becomes his lover.
The engaging plot takes Dr. August and his ever-increasing band of associates across the United States, to England and the salons of noted mystic Madame Blavatsky, and even to Constantinople, ending back on Coney Island in the 1920s. But the themes of music, the supernatural, and the ethics of sexuality are what hold this sometimes bewildering novel together. Late in the story, when August seems to have finally settled after finding an old brothel friend now turned society lady, he shatters his life by becoming involved with her 14-year old son. And, just as his own adolescent sexual awakenings with a lecherous relation are sublimated only by time, Dr. August is unwilling to discuss this current transgression in clear moral terms, even suggesting that the boy precipitated events.
The ensuing tragedies ensure that fate, at least, looks askance on this coupling, but -- as in Mike Leigh's film "Naked," in which the protagonist is first introduced while attempting a back alley rape -- The Notorious Dr. August is impossible to read without beginning to understand the workings of Dr. August's mind and, therefore, to question his blunt ethics. Given Bram's care and audacity, this revelation feels designed and, ultimately, earned. Thorny, sprawling, catalytic, The Notorious Dr. August captivates. —Jake Kreilkamp
NY Times Book Review
If only more novelists approached their craft with the imagination and skill of Christopher Bram.LA Times Book Review
A truly gifted novelist.Publishers Weekly
Encompassing dramatic shifts in place and time, from the end of the Civil War to the heyday of Coney Island, this sprawling, splendidly imagined novel dramatizes Victorian age yet eminently familiar dilemmas of race, spirituality and sexual identity through the unforgettable journey of a wonderfully motley cast of characters. The eponymous pianist-cum-spiritualist, Augustus Fitzwilliam "Fitz" Boyd, first meets Isaac Kemp, his lifelong love, on a Civil War battlefield, where teenage Isaac is a slave accompanying his master's son. Augustus, himself only 14, has been captured after playing the flute to entertain the Union troops. When both boys are set free, they take off for New York, where, after various vicissitudes, clever, enterprising Isaac becomes Fitz's manager, traveling with him to his s ance-like piano concerts all over the world. Eventually, to Fitz's chagrin, Isaac takes a white wife, Alice Pangborn, a puritanical New England bluestocking. Soon the couple's two children are also traveling as part of the entourage of "Dr. August." At the height of his popularity, Fitz performs for the privileged classes on an international circuit; both the cultural landscape and the musical selections are detailed with beguiling immediacy. Though the surroundings are glamorous, Fitz and his clan find it difficult to make ends meet. So when they are invited to stay in Constantinople with an old acquaintance of Fitz's, once a whore and now a wealthy widow, they seize the chance--but a tragedy tests the bonds that hold their most unconventional family together. Bram (Father of Frankenstein; Almost History) tells his story through Fitz's own recollections as--late in life--he dictates his candid memoirs to Isaac's son, who has never known the full story of his family. Informed by sources as disparate as Ricky Jay's Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women and Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore, this provocative, imaginative exploration is generously endowed with evocative period details and rich characterizations of people from all walks of life. 6-city author tour. (June) FYI: Father of Frankenstein was the basis of the movie Gods and Monsters. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Library Journal
It is difficult to summarize this latest work from Bram (Father of Frankenstein) without sounding tawdry and doing a disservice to his thought-provoking exploration of the human soul. Narrated by the effete Fitz Boyd, who works under the stage name of Dr. August in New York, Paris, London, and Constantinople, the novel ostensibly describes the life of an improvisational pianist working as a musician of the metaphysical, employing chicanery and parlor tricks to capitalize on the 19th-century fascination with the spirit world. But the novel is much more than that, using the complex relationships among Fitz, former slave Isaac Kemp, and Kemp's Caucasian wife, Alice, to explore the meaning of freedom. It is the challenge of discovering whether any one of us can be free of the past and choose the future that stands in such stark contrast to Dr. August's vaudeville tricks, making the novel such a complex and compelling read. Recommended for most collections.--Caroline M. Hallsworth, Sudbury P.L., Ont. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\Larry Duplechan
A rich, mature work...Mr. Bram is utterly in command of his material throughout.—Lambda Book Report
Robert Plunket
This is quite simply, storytelling at its best.—The Advocate
Stacey D'Erasmo
It's an old sweet song of the uncanny, deftly and lovingly played.—Out
Paul Quarrington
[A] wonderful new novel...Indeed, the book is impressive if read only as a history of popular entertainment from the mid-19th century until the 1920's. But Bram's research serves a higher purpose; despite Dr. August's forays into the realm of the spirits, the novel is about what it means to be a human being in a complicated world.—The New York Times Book Review