Bloody Carnival

Young Liberty Fish marches off to the Civil War for a grand tour of the American nightmare.

THE AMALGAMATION POLKA

A Novel

By Stephen Wright

Knopf. 323 pp. $24.95

The Civil War, that most American of cataclysms, held an almost mystical fascination for writers even before Grant and Lee reached their gentlemen's agreement at Appomattox. To judge from such recent entries as The Known World , Cold Mountain and The March , there is still no more effective way to signal that you have something weighty to say about this country than to locate your narrative in Civil War-era America.

Stephen Wright, the acclaimed author of Meditations in Gr een , has chosen to do exactly that in his new novel, The Amalgamation Polka . Essentially a coming-of-age story, the book follows the portentously named Liberty Fish, a kind of abolitionist Candide, from his boyhood as the child of Underground Railroad activists in upstate New York, through an extremely bloody tour of duty as a Union soldier in Georgia and the Carolinas and eventually to a Caribbean island, with all sorts of adventures, both expected and improbable, along the way.

Liberty's mother was born and raised on a grand old cotton-and-bullwhip plantation near Charleston, S.C., and his childhood has been marked as much by his mother's silences regarding her past as by his father's high-toned rants against the evils of slavery. When the tides of war deposit Liberty near the old family estate, he decides to drop out of the army and pay his long-lost grandparents a visit. At this point the novel, which has so far been relatively carefree, tilts abruptly into full-fledged Grand Guignol. What Liberty discovers at "Redemption Hall" is a caricature of plantation life, both more violent and more preposterous than he -- or, for that matter, the reader -- could have expected. Liberty's grandmother, a hate-worn, ghostlike invalid, slashes her cook's palm open with a carving knife for undercooking the turnips; his grandfather keeps his own half-breed daughters locked up for breeding purposes, with himself -- and, in due time, his grandson -- as the sire. Life on the ole plantation, it turns out, was not so much a tragedy (or even a Margaret Mitchell-style melodrama) as a mean-spirited bedroom farce.

Wright is nothing if not ambitious, and the energy with which he throws himself into this world -- which bears only a passing resemblance to 19th-century America -- is a wonder to behold. The novel overflows with charlatans, whores, preachers, soldiers-of-fortune, madmen and even a handful of pirates, all of them declaiming, at the tops of their lungs, in language that often borders on free verse. The prose is unapologetically purple. Consider this exchange, in which Liberty first meets his slave-buggering grandfather:

" 'Are you Asa Maury?'

" 'What's in a name?' He regarded his visitor with detached bemusement. . . .

" 'Have I actually traveled these hundreds of miles, risking injury, imprisonment or worse, to engage in a mere verbal joust?'

" 'Supposing I were the gentleman you take me for, what would you want of me?'

" 'I thought, unwisely perhaps, that simple courtesy required this visit, just as simple human curiosity and the unsparing needs of the soul to comprehend its own origins demanded it. I expected, after absorbing a lifetime of tales about the prodigious man, to meet finally face-to-face the legend himself, my maternal grandfather. And frankly, sir, I presumed the reception would be somewhat more enthusiastic than that provided.' "

It's standard practice, of course, for the novelist, even in completely naturalistic fiction, to allow characters a higher level of articulateness than they might plausibly possess; sometimes it's even necessary. Wright's characters, however, sound less like hyper-articulate abolitionists and yeomen than like stand-up comedians parodying the Royal House of Windsor. Here's another example, in which Liberty, still a boy in his teens, explains to a 12-year-old slave girl named Tempie that she's been set free:

" 'Tell me, how long have you been locked up like this?'

" 'Since before the war come.'

" 'Well, Tempie, I'm here to inform you that the house of bondage is thoroughly ablaze from cellar to ridgepole. The old haunted manse is coming down at last.' He caught her glancing anxiously upward, scanning the ceiling for tendrils of flame. 'No, no,' he tried to explain, 'not this house. The one I'm referring to is more of a verbal representation really, a sort of mental picture made up of words which aren't real but which stand for something that is real, in this case the entire institution of slavery which, of course, is not exactly a house either.' "

The term for art that trades in extremes of taste and plausibility is "camp." When Wright is sitting firmly in the saddle, The Amalgamation Polka reads like a cross between John Barth and John Waters, and is often entertaining; when he's not, it resembles a Victorian morality play by the over-excitable cult porn director Russ Meyers. My guess is that Wright himself, if asked to account for his excesses, would probably admit to them with pride. To quote a phrase attributed to P. T. Barnum, whose "Hall of Wonders" turns up in the novel: "Let them call me unreasonable if they must, but never, ever, let them call me boring." ·

John Wray is the author of "Canaan's Tongue."