“THE GREAT MISTAKE”
By Jonathan Lee
Knopf ($25.95)
During last year’s electoral melee, you may have heard about the 1876 presidential election. Democrat Samuel Tilden handily won the popular vote over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but a dispute over electoral votes in some states led to what became known as the Compromise of 1877. Democrats yielded the presidency to Hayes after Republicans agreed to remove federal troops from the South, a move that led to the end of Reconstruction. Tilden became the first candidate to win the popular vote yet not obtain the presidency.
Another of Tilden’s distinctions was his lifelong bachelorhood. Another noted figure of that time who never married was Andrew Haswell Green. Six years Tilden’s junior, Massachusetts native Green moved to New York and studied law with Tilden’s help. Green is best known today as a driving force behind such New York landmarks as Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum.
Green and Tilden were lifelong friends. Put two bachelors who have no interest in women in a close personal relationship, and someone is bound to conjecture that they might be gay. That is one of several complications that animate “The Great Mistake,” British novelist Jonathan Lee’s follow-up to 2016’s brilliant “High Dive,” a fictionalized account of a real event: the 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was staying during a Conservative Party Conference.
An act of violence drives the action in the new novel, too. As Lee expertly describes it, on Friday the 13th in November 1903, 83-year-old Green left his City Hall office at 1:30 to go home for lunch. He was about to ascend his front steps when Cornelius Williams, an elegantly dressed Black man, approaches. He makes an ominous demand: “Tell me where she is, Mr. Green.” When Green, who doesn’t recognize him, doesn’t respond, five shots ring out. Green ends up “lying on the ground with his face to the sky.”
What follows is a multilayered work that is part detective story, part political thriller about graft and power—figures such as Boss Tweed make appearances—and part meditation on the many forms of prejudice that pervade society, then as now.
Lee toggles between two narratives. One is the murder investigation, a plot line that involves such characters as the detective bureau head keen to make a name for himself; and a well-drawn depiction of Hannah Elias, who became one of America’s wealthiest Black women by running a brothel for senators and other luminaries and who might be the key to cracking the case.
The other half of the book chronicles Green’s life, including his difficult upbringing with an often-drunk father; the childhood friend whose father banished Green after he tried to nuzzle his friend’s ear; an apprenticeship on a Trinidad sugar plantation; his legal work bringing to fruition some of New York’s major attractions; and his struggles accepting his sexuality.
Lee’s title refers to what some call the Great Mistake of 1898: the consolidation plan that brought together “the existing City of New York with Brooklyn, western Queens County, and Staten Island.” But the richness of the book comes from Lee’s recognition that many so-called mistakes are instead rooted in wrong yet accepted behavior, from racist attitudes to the mindset that same-sex attraction is morally wrong.
The book feels weighed down with research, which suggests the material may not have felt as natural to him as the British locales and politics of “High Dive.” But “The Great Mistake” entertains with its endless invention and its parallels to the personal and political challenges of contemporary society. Some lessons, alas, are hard to learn.
Michael Magras is a freelance book critic. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Economist, Times Literary Supplement, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage.
First Published: June 27, 2021, 10:45 a.m.