Lives intertwined

Charlie shrugged. "Maybe I'm just being a novelist." Novelists liked to imagine the interconnectedness of things -- as though all the people in the big city were part of some great organism, their lives intertwined.

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Edward Rutherfurd gets personal twice in his 2009 novel New York, and the lines above mark the second time. Commenting on one of his characters he is also commenting on himself and on what he is attempting to do in this novel and all the others he has written: to imagine the interconnectedness of things -- as though all the people in the big city were part of some great organism, their lives intertwined.

He succeeds admirably, even more so than he did in an earlier Rutherfurd novel I read, London. The reason may be simply that New York City has a much shorter history than does London. In his novels he follows a few fictional families through the entire history of a city, country or region, conveying important details of history while displaying how key events impact his characters and then showing how these characters impact the lives of descendants who will not remember them. That task can be daunting in a place with as long a history as London. New York, however, has been around just a few hundred years, and so some of his characters can stay around for several chapters in some cases, and readers can follow more closely as one family member passes the baton to the next generation.

Rutherfurd's main characters are part of the Master family, some of whom lived in the city when it was still called New Amsterdam at the time of Peter Stuyvesant. The family business prospers, and the Masters become part of the New York elite. They witness the Revolution, the impact of slavery on the city, the Civil War, major fires and the blizzard of 1888, the arrival of large numbers of immigrants, the Great Depression and, eventually, the terrorist attack on the twin towers. The author mixes in families representing different groups, including blacks, Irish, Jews and Puerto Ricans. In a sense, Rutherfurd demonstrates that the history of New York City is also the history of the United States.

The author errs here and there in his massive novel. At one point, for example, he writes that "General Grant had just smashed the Confederates at Gettysburg." Grant was attacking Vicksburg at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg. Later the British author rites of a family going to the beach for a few days, saying it "was one of the best holidays they'd had in years." Americans normally refer to such days away from home as vacations, not holidays.

This novel proves totally absorbing, demonstrating as much as any novel can the "interconnectedness of things."

And as for the other time Rutherfurd gets personal. He pokes fun at himself when he has one of his characters say about another, "Of course ... he was never a gentleman. He even wrote historical novels."