Panama

This thrilling, original novel, set in late 19th-century Paris, offers a provocative view of a world teetering on the brink of modernity, as seen through the eyes of one of its most astute observers. In his search for a missing American woman, Henry Adams, grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, is led into the darker reaches of Paris--and into an impenetrable and threatening political world.

Paris, 1892. The American historian Henry Adams, grandson of one President and great-grandson of another, is looking for Miriam Talbott, a young American woman studying in Paris. Miriam is alive in ways Adams can scarcely remember being: bright, beguiling, talented, and attractive. She draws him out of the "posthumous" life he has led since the suicide of his wife, Clover, seven years before. But when he goes looking for Miriam, no one at her given address has seen her. And when another woman's body is fished out of the Seine and identified as hers, Adams knows she is in trouble and needs his assistance. Adams soon discovers that Miriam's disappearance is somehow involved with the great Panama Affair that threatens to engulf France. Before it went bankrupt, the French Panama Canal Company had bribed nearly half the members of the Chamber of Deputies to gain legislation favorable to its interests. Now one director of the company has been found dead; other directors flee; and for a week, the entire city awaits the revelation of the names of the chequards, the long list of deputies witless enough to have accepted their bribes in the form of checks.

Publishers Weekly

This is that extremely rare find, a first novel that is not only extremely accomplished but also quite unlike anything else. It daringly places a real person-American historian and philosopher Henry Adams-into a historic situation-the scandal in 1892 Paris over the corrupt collapse of the grand Panama Canal plan-and makes of it a dashing, sometimes touching and, yes, thoughtful thriller. Adams is sketched quickly and deftly: enterprising, sensitive, observant, still mourning the suicide of his wife years earlier, half in love with beautiful Elizabeth Cameron. We see him briefly in Panama, stealing a picture that will come to be significant; at Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (naturally), where he is much taken with a young American painter, Miriam, who seems like a new breath in his life, and to whom he becomes quickly, quixotically attached; finally in Paris, where Miriam instantly disappears, is perhaps dead. At once, Adams begins to search for her, becoming involved with Parisian police, including a fledgling fingerprint expert and his young nephew; a coroner is killed, a macabre gift arrives for Adams via a pneumatique and the political plot around the Panama scandal, which could bring down a government and create a new one, thickens. At the heart of it all, Adams barges ahead like a gallant detective with the mind of an aesthete; through his eyes Paris, on the brink of the modern age, has never seemed stranger or more alluring, its people more enigmatic. That Zencey can create a headlong read, with a piercing climax and a poignant final note, out of such esoteric material is almost miraculous. A wonderful debut. 100,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections. (Sept.)

Thomas McGuane lives in Sweet Grass County, Montana. He is the author of eight previous novels and a collection of stories, as well as two collections of essays.