Cornelia Nixon’s new novel, based on real events in her family’s history, begins with a murder. In Civil War-era Maryland, Martha Jane Cairnes, from a Confederate family, murders the man she loves, Nicholas, a union hero. At The Rumpus, Nick Taylor says, “Like all great novelists (historical or otherwise), [Nixon] deals primarily in character, not circumstance—though the historical moment could not have been more perfectly suited to the story.” And though the facts of the case are known early in the book, “With patience reminiscent of Tolstoy, Nixon weaves together a tapestry of events and psychology to explain how an ordinary girl comes to kill her lover, and how she is acquitted by a jury of her peers.” But in the New York Times, Adam Goodheart came away much less impressed. He does credit Nixon with “ably convey[ing] the dark atmosphere of Reconstruction,” but he gets snagged on the smaller details: “Such errors are all the more jarring because the book’s various chapters are written in what purport to be 19th-century voices: those of Nick, Martha and a host of lesser characters. When Nixon has someone hail a friend with ‘Hey, man,’ and another confess, ‘I might have acted more mature,’ it’s as if they were rapid-cycling between 1869 and 1969.”
Jarrettsville
Counterpoint, 352 pp., $15.95
