An earlier version of this review conflated the Pilgrims, who were separatists who arrived on the Mayflower to found Plymouth Colony in 1620, and the Puritans, who later founded the Massachusetts Bay Company. This version has been corrected.
Hugh Nissenson’s ‘The Pilgrim,’ reviewed by Ron Charles
Turkeys aren’t the only ones who take the heat on Thanksgiving. Every year around this time, the Pilgrims are plucked out of context, stuffed with alien ideas and served up on a bed of nostalgia. It’s probably too late for the birds, but with a little honest investigation, our forefathers might still be saved from the honey glaze of caricature. After all, most of us never get any closer to the early Americans than Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” or Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” and after that grim introduction, who wouldn’t rather cut handprint turkeys from construction paper and reenact a Native-friendly feast?
But Hugh Nissenson has just published a strikingly original novel about a young man who comes to the New World in 1622. Without any cranberry sauce or witch burnings to spice things up, “The Pilgrim” offers, instead, the most intimate engagement with those early Americans that I’ve found in a work of fiction. For many readers, to be honest, this will be as palatable as ground Indian corn, but if you really want to taste the physical and mental world in which they lived, here’s a book to explore.
(Sourcebooks Landmark) - "The Pilgrim" by Hugh Nissenson
Henry James once complained that historical novels are “fatally cheap,” which makes me grateful I never had to watch “The Tudors”
with him. And yet we all know what he meant: Even when the plot conforms to the known facts, and the dresses hang with flawless accuracy, and the homes look like a window on the past, most historical novels still ask us to swallow strangely modern attitudes: The heroines are closet feminists, the heroes have a deep respect for blacks and Jews, and nobody — except possibly for a tragic, unstable character — has any interest in religion, unless it’s vague and New Agey.
Nissenson’s solution to the anachronisms of most historical fiction is a kind of suicidal authenticity, which may explain why no large New York publishing house would release this novel, despite the fact that he has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. “The Pilgrim” presents itself as a public confession of faith, a requirement for membership in early New England churches. “I shall write in a plain style and tell the truth as near as I am able,” begins 28-year-old Charles Wentworth in his statement to the “saints” of Plymouth Colony.
With remarkable fidelity Nissenson imitates the jarringly stark voice, the intensely devout tone and the harrowing details of physical survival that mark writings of this period. He also retains enough of the period diction to sound authentic but not so much to leave us baffled. Charles, for instance, admits, “I was lewdly disposed to beauteous language and could not renounce my satanical yearning for the pleasure it gave me.” Despite how chewy this antique presentation can be, it allows us to experience not only the lives of those religious radicals who sailed off to the edge of the world but also their truly separate consciousness.
Today, in a climate of relatively friendly theology, most of us can barely imagine the spiritual anxiety that racked these souls 400 years ago. John Calvin had insisted that salvation was predetermined before the world began: Nothing so important could be earned or forfeited by the actions of men. The devout pilgrim, then, was left to study his consciousness for the traces of grace, the evidence of that undeserved reward, and that’s the burden Charles takes on almost as soon as he can walk.
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