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Bernard Cohen

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler, pub. Serpent’s Tail
By the end of Book 1, Chapter IV, of Booth, Karen Joy Fowler’s page-turning theatrical, family, historical and political saga – that is, around one-tenth of the way through, up to the year 1838 – we have witnessed the Booth family’s struggle to maintain their Maryland farm while Father (Junius) travels the country attempting to find work as a Shakespearean actor, experienced their grief in the deaths of children from cholera and smallpox, and heard of Father’s theatrically unsuccessful attempt to kill himself by leaping off the back of a river boat.
The chapter ends with Mother (Mary), yet again pregnant, travelling desperately towards him, leaving three of her four surviving children behind.
This sets up one half of the story: 10 children, six surviving to adulthood, personal and theatrical scandals, mercurial lives, rare happiness.

Moving along to Chapter V reveals the part of the story that has been hidden, the backstage as it might be shown here and elsewhere. “[The two oldest children] June and Rosalie are not left fending for themselves and fending for Asia [the two-year-old] alone in the wilderness with only their drunken grandfather to help. Far from it. By 1838, the farm is home to some forty people, most of them slaves [ …]”
The family, though, see themselves as liberals. They don’t own these people – these are slaves they lease and to whom they pay a wage. They would never own slaves (with a couple of well-excused exceptions).
The slaves, we are told by the Booths and their friends, are family, or like family; their long-term indentured servants Joe and Ann Hall are “more like family than Aunty Rogers”.
We observe, from our privileged 2022 perspective, the power relations at work when slaves reassure their owners that they are happy where they are. So it’s a shock to these “owners” of humans, as much as noticing these invisible humans has been to the reader, when the friendships they have made, the loyalties they feel they have earned, turn out not to be as bidirectional as they had appeared.
Father dies in 1852, widely mourned, a celebrated life and crowded funeral. The book’s title may refer to the family name, or perhaps the memorial that Edwin Booth, the most brilliant of the actor-offspring, builds for his father and all the family’s dead.
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Also by 1852 we see the fracturing of African-American families: “The Hall family resembles much of Baltimore in this respect: Baltimore has the largest community of free blacks in the nation, but mixed among them are term slaves, bound until they turn twenty-five, or thirty-five, or older still. And also slaves for life.
“This was far from the worst thing to come of slavery, but the complicated unnavigable family dynamic in which some siblings were free and others were not was surely a terrible evil.”
Chapters in this novel move among the Booth family and, as the author notes, there are significant historical sources for the work: Junius Booth was a noted actor, even memorialised by Walt Whitman, and at least two children (Asia and Edwin) left correspondence and (in Asia’s case) books.
The theatricality of Booth does not confine itself to the fire-prone theatres of 19th century America. Fowler has a real skill for bringing the theatrical into thoughts and experience.
“Pretty” Edwin accompanies and chaperones his often-drunken father Junius across the Panamanian isthmus: “Edwin’s mount has a striped blanket for a saddle and a backbone sharp as a blade. Every step is an injury.”

The family drama is occasionally cut across with news from Abraham Lincoln’s life and career. These intrusions invest the Booth narrative with inevitability, for the family’s most notorious sibling is John Wilkes Booth, the ninth child, born 1838, baby, fearless child, Confederate sympathiser, actor and (eventual) presidential assassin. From his appearance, the novel’s course is set.
Fowler shows the roughness and disruptions of Johnny’s childhood (growing up among giants of the stage and ghosts of lost children), possible sources for his Confederate attitudes among his school fellows, occasional frustrations and a short temper, but spares us a pop-psych narrative wherein slights, snubs and taunts “cause” the assassination.
This highly readable book is related in a simple present tense, with the effect that we’re always in the moment with the characters, never pausing or stopping to reflect, moving fatalistically forward to that infamous moment in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.


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Abraham Lincoln, whowas killed in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth. (Photo: Corbis via Getty Images

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The cover of Fowler’s book.

The family drama in Booth is cut across with news from Abraham Lincoln’s life and career as the novel builds towards his killing in Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Photo: Corbis via Getty Images

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Weike Wang, author of Joan is Okay

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Irish author James Joyce in Zurich, Switzerland, around 1917. Photo: Getty Images

Peter Kennedy, honorary associate professor, department of English, University of Hong Kong. Photo: courtesy Peter Kennedy

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A family, theatrical and political saga about real characters, Booth blends the author’s imagination with historical source material in what is a riveting read
From father Junius, a struggling farmer and sometime Shakespearean actor, to dead children to John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, it presents a rich tapestry



In Booth, Karen Joy Fowler has written a page-turning theatrical, family, historical and political saga that weaves slavery into the story of the man who killed Lincoln, his siblings and their parents.


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