Review: The Whiskey Rebels

The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most historical novelists seem to start out as writers who get interested in history and then turn it into story. That is, I gather, the method that even the best – like Hilary Mantel – have followed. David Liss does it the other way around, though. He began as a historian – and, I believe as a historian in the potentially dry field of economic history – and then he found a way to tell stories that gave a flavor of the historical clashes and processes he came to understand.

I read his Conspiracy of Paper when it first came out more than 15 years ago, and I admired it enough that I wrote him with vague hopes that he might be looking for a job as an academic historian and would consider the place I was then teaching. As I recall, he wrote back kindly, expressing polite interest for after he’d finished his PhD, but I think he must already have glimpsed his coming career path. While this is now only my second Liss, I can see he’s been turning out quality historical fiction ever since.

This novel, at a bottom line, is an assessment of Alexander Hamilton’s footprint on American life. Like a good historian – a better one that the otherwise masterfully talented Lin-Manual Miranda – Liss sees that legacy as mixed. On the one hand, Hamilton established a system of federal credit and wealth-generation that made the subsequent American experiment possible. Without Hamilton’s bank and credit regulations, the Revolution would have withered.

On the other hand, the price of that system was that some spark of the true American rebellion got snuffed. To the degree that early America represented a Jeffersonian vision of small farmers, conquering the land and living in what we might retrospectively see as a nobler Libertarianism, Hamilton’s centralization of economic authority shifted power back to the merchant class. As characters here complain, Hamilton restored some of the inherent corruptions of capitalism that at least some American Revolutionaries understood themselves as fighting against.

Liss deals with that dichotomous view of Hamilton by creating two protagonists here. Ethan Saunders is a disgraced spy, one who feels personally let down by Hamilton but ultimately supports his aim. Joan Maycott is, in spirit, a pure Jeffersonian, a young woman who wants to write the first great American novel, and who determines to help settle Western Pennsylvania with her young husband. When Joan is fleeced by land speculators – and when even worse follows as a consequence of her being tricked – she identifies Hamiltonianism as her ultimate enemy.

The result is a novel in alternating chapters, with Ethan narrating one and then Joan the next (although there are occasional alterations in the pattern). Each protagonist sees some grey to the black-and-white character of what Hamilton represented, but the effect is that over the course of the novel we get a pro/con for Hamilton’s influence.

Remarkably, Liss never lets that feel dry or forced. In fact, it’s only in retrospect that I see what amounts to the history lessons concealed beneath the novel itself. What we have on the surface is a pair of adventure novels – ones that ultimately intersect in satisfying ways – and a pair of nicely imagined characters grappling with the New World of the American Republic.

The result is a legitimate thriller, a novel that moves quickly and that has a great deal at stake within it. I’m sure it’s possible to read this and think of Hamilton as merely an incidental figure, as simply the “client” that detective Saunders works for or the politician that rebel Maycott intends to bring down. You can read this, in other words, as a fast-paced adventure story.

I enjoyed this throughout, but there are a couple spots where Liss is not entirely deft in his narration. The alternating chapters bother me less than I imagined they would, but it did bother me toward the end when he resorted to the sleight-of-hand of not quite telling us what was going on. (For example, Ethan would declare something like, “I determined to go to the one man who could tell me what I needed to know,” leaving it hanging that he was off to see, say, Philip Freneau, for no purpose other than to sustain some narrative uncertainty.) The hardest part of the literary effort Liss set for himself was to weave the two narrative perspectives together, and the seams do end up showing even as the story comes together effectively.

As a side note, Liss continues here some of what he did in A Conspiracy of Paper where, also interrogating economic history, he explored the possibility of what we might call “tough Jews” in historical times. There, it was Daniel Mendoza, the great boxer, who becomes pressed into service as a quasi-detective. Here, it’s Hamilton’s agent Levian, a ruthless and effective spy who partners with Ethan to undertake the dirtiest aspects of their shared work.

In any case, I recommend reading this both for its history and its own energy. Liss knows what he’s doing here, and I suspect he knew what he was doing 15 years ago when he made it clear he saw a better future for himself as a novelist than as a history professor.




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