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Summary
Summary
A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoning
In Dawson's Fall , a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson's great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson's tale weaves her family's journal entries and letters with a novelist's narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country's new political, social, and moral landscape.
Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states' rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier , finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, unswayed by the caprices of popular opinion. But he couldn't control the political whims of his readers. As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Nor could Dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor, which threatened to stain his family's reputation. In the end, Dawson--a man in many ways representative of the country at this time--was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.
Author Notes
Roxana Robinson is the author of five previous novels, including Sparta and Cost ; three collections of short stories; and the biography Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic , The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , and Vogue , among other publications. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was president of the Authors Guild from 2014 to 2017. She teaches in the Hunter MFA program and divides her time among New York, Connecticut, and Maine.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Robinson (Sparta) bases her formidable novel on the lives of her great-grandparents, exposing the fragile and horrific state of affairs in the American South two decades after the end of the Civil War. Frank Dawson is a principled English Catholic who fought for the Confederacy. But he is committed to promoting equal rights, rule of law, and pacifism in the pages of his newspaper, the Charleston News and Courier, and struggles against the simmering rage and continued violence of many white South Carolinians. He's losing subscribers and facing financial uncertainty. His bright, like-minded wife, Sarah, whose own slave-owning family was ruined by the war, forges on with their respectable-if high-minded-ways at home, employing white servants and speaking French at the dinner table. But when Hélène, a young Swiss woman hired to care for the Dawson children, becomes enamored with an unscrupulous doctor, resentment flairs and events spiral out of Dawson's control. The interspersed family letters and newspaper articles, while intriguing, seem spliced rather than woven into a narrative that leaps by years before settling on one fateful day in March 1889. But Robinson's descriptive and imaginative prose sings; this book is a startling reminder of the immoral and lasting brutality visited on the South by the institution of slavery. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A newspaper editor is at odds with both his city and his next-door neighbor in early Jim Crow-era South Carolina.Robinson (Sparta, 2013, etc.) mines the story of her great-grandparents for this bracing historical novel, using actual diary entries, letters, and newspaper articles. But though the story is set mainly in the 1880s, its themes are up-to-the-minute; Robinson uses lynchings, duels, and sexual assaults to shed light on populism and toxic masculinity. Frank Dawson is the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, which has agitated against the region's racist violence since Reconstruction. (A well-turned scene depicts a bloody standoff between black soldiers and resentful whites in 1876 that led to a massacre.) Frank's anti-lynching stance loses him readers to a rival paper. He's facing troubles on the homefront as well. Frank's wife, Sarah, a child of the New Orleans gentry that's fallen victim to poverty and the Civil War, is losing her grip on her young maid and governess, Hlne, who's pursuing a disastrous relationship with the corrupt doctor next door, Thomas McDow, a man scheming to have his wife and father-in-law killed. Such plotlines could easily regress into a lurid, exploitative tale (and, perhaps inevitably, McDow never quite shakes a Snidely Whiplash demeanor), but Robinson handles the material judiciously, using the Dawsons' lives as points in a larger map of civic dysfunction. (She integrates contemporary news stories of murders between chapters to evoke a wider atmosphere of unease.) Robinson suggests that bigotry has trickle-down effects in terms of race, gender, and everyday conduct. All this converges in a climax that's surprising but, given Robinson's careful integration of history and imagination, feels inevitable.A stylish and contemplative historical novel, considerate of facts but not burdened by them. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Robinson's (Sparta, 2013) documentary novel intermingles fiction and family memoirs, period editorials, letters, and journal entries in its penetrating rendition of key moments during the lives of her great-grandparents, Frank and Sarah Morgan Dawson. Their characterizations and strong principles are clearly etched throughout; both were outliers in their time yet inextricably defined by it. English-born and a defender of the rule of law, Dawson is moved to join the Confederate Navy; he later rises to become a prominent Charleston newspaper editor, whose progressive writings championing African Americans' rights and civic participation make him unpopular. Raised in a Louisiana family brought low through loss, Sarah is a talented writer all-too-aware of women's social inferiority. The novel's suspenseful second half details a disturbing incident involving the Dawsons' neighbor and governess. While the patchwork approach means the narrative isn't exactly smooth, it proves unyielding and compelling in its timely themes, with many depictions of how white men's seething resentment erupts into racist violence and how Southern codes of honor and toxic values, particularly slavery, corroded individual lives and the national character.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
roxana Robinson's deeply reasoned sixth novel tangles with the nature of truth and conviction in a society split by racial violence and a runaway media. But this is the 19th century, not our own; this is the story of her own family's past. Isn't history familiar? Isn't familiarity unsettling? The hero of "Dawson's Fall" is Robinson's great-grandfather Frank, an Englishman turned Confederate captain turned liberal newspaperman, one of the few white voices in Reconstruction South Carolina trying to tip the scales toward humanity. More prosaically, he's also caught up in the affair of one of his domestics, a Swiss governess who has been seduced by the drooping mustache of the doctor next door, and not everyone makes it through the scandal alive. Weaving excerpts from her great-grandmother Sarah's diaries and Frank's editorials into her fiction, Robinson embarks on a grand and worthy experiment: to test the sturdiness of truth against the lure of unreality, of embellishment, of fervor. What stands in the way of her family's heroism is the era they're caught in. How, Robinson asks, could ancestors of hers, descendants of a freedomloving Welsh clan, live with the same dedication to honor in a society built and bloodied by slavery, "that dark basilisk reign"? The journey toward an answer is as good as we can hope for: both majestic and faltering. A green Frank Dawson comes to America in the 1860s because the Confederacy feels righteous; the myth of the (white) oppressed that's already snaking around the South's neck is persuasive to this gentleman of principle. As he falls into journalism, we follow the wartime plight of his future bride, whose evacuation during the bombardment of Baton Rouge comes alive in diary fragments. "White and black were all mixed together," she observes in the chaos, "and were as confidential as though related." Against these beautiful fragments from the archives, Robinson's scenes are lovingly crafted, both stark and intimate, and we watch in suspense as the Dawsons begin unraveling purpose from prejudice. When Frank, now the editor of The Charleston News and Courier, encounters the black educator John Langston, he mistakes the man's light skin for whiteness. The slow revelation of his error unnerves Frank, upsets his liberality. "What was confusing was that Langston spoke like a white man," Robinson writes. "His lack of deference: He acted like a white man." Frank remains polite, but as Southerners will tell you, politeness here can come cheap. Like a whirlpool at the center of the book is the Hamburg massacre of 1876, when more than 100 white civilians fired on a black militia, signaling a shift in the political climate from Reconstruction to Redemption. Here was the mirror where I wanted to linger. But Robinson's story must hew to Dawson's, so the climax and denouement belong to the downstairs circus of the governess, Hélene, and her paramour, Dr. McDow, who stain the manse with sordidness and frivolity. Though white supremacy surely funnels its violence into white spaces too, the drama of Frank's life feels flimsy when held up against the Hamburg victims. When Sarah, in a moment of overwhelming personal grief, sees a lame "Negro man... leading a goat and cart," she wonders that he can act "as though nothing had happened, as if the earth had not suddenly quit its revolutions." We are meant to perceive Sarah's blindness, of course, but her own confusion of scale feels too similar to the novel's imbalance. How should a white writer write about whiteness? In no particular way. One sits with the truth, holds it, troubles it and writes as far into it as one's pen will go. Robinson acknowledges that Frank Dawson "wrote to explain the world to itself" and that, in the end, no explanation could suffice. "Dawson's Fall" asks what truth means in an era when conviction matters more, and Roxana Robinson's answer - that morality is friable - should make us sit up and tremble. katy Simpson smith is the author of "The Story of Land and Sea" and "Free Men." Her third novel, "The Everlasting," is forthcoming in 2020.
Library Journal Review
As the author explains in her prolog, this novel is based on the written accounts of her great-grandparents' lives. In his 20s and without prospects, Frank Dawson changes his name and signs on to a Confederate ship docked in England as a way to immigrate to the States. When the navy collapses, he fights with the Rebel Army; after the war, Dawson makes his way to Charleston, SC, where he becomes owner and editor of the Charleston News and Courier and a pillar of the community. He eventually marries Sarah Morgan, the daughter of a prominent Baton Rouge family whose fortune was lost in the war. Dawson and the paper prosper until his more liberal editorials start to conflict with rising Jim Crow sentiment. The novel moves away from the directly political when the Dawson family is undone by a servant's scandal. VERDICT NBCC finalist Robinson (Sparta) paints her characters as nuanced products of their time and avoids unrealistic heroics. A scattering of 19th-century newspaper articles, family letters, and data provides context and veracity for this work of fiction but also connects the Reconstruction era's racism, voter suppression, and violent gun culture to present-day societal divides. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/26/18.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
