You Light Up My Life
An exiled writer offers a stark and disturbing portrait of his native Tibet.
THE LIGHTNING KEEPER
A Novel
By Starling Lawrence
HarperCollins. 414 pp. $25.95
In his new novel, The Lightning Keeper , Starling Lawrence paraphrases Thomas Edison's famous remark, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." In his own literary invention, Lawrence has jettisoned the junk but retained the imagination and given us a deeply satisfying novel of love and electricity. It is not only a complex romantic tale, but also a grand story of science and American industry in the years before World War I. We are given a window into the conniving nature of men in power, where brilliance is a valued commodity, but results, no matter how obtained, are gold.
The "lightning keeper" of the title is Toma Pekocevic. We first meet him on the docks of Naples, Italy, in 1908, where he has fled the Balkan Wars. As a teenager in Naples, he has a brief, romantic encounter with Harriet Bigelow, the daughter of a Connecticut ironworks magnate vacationing with her family. After a fluttering of pages they meet again in New York, a scene that relies too much on coincidence in this otherwise tightly constructed novel. Six years have passed, and Toma (now known as Thomas Peacock) is struggling to become an electrical engineer while Harriet desperately tries to save her father's failing company. Toma does his best to help her, but his efforts are disastrously thwarted and Harriet is lost to him.
In 1916 Toma is hired by General Electric to perfect his water turbine under the aegis of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a hump-backed dwarf who is (as he was in real life) one of GE's leading engineers. Steinmetz is a scheming charmer, who early on informs Toma, "No country can be truly great without the foundation of an ample energy supply coupled with a ruthless ingenuity in its exploitation." His goal is to be the first to bring electricity to every home in America. In Steinmetz, Lawrence has created an astonishing character, a man as true to his vision as he is to his word. He's an arrogant genius, and the friction between him and Toma abrades and warms the story.
The setting of much of the novel is Beecher's Bridge (Lawrence's fictional stand-in for Norfolk, Conn.), and he populates it with a fine range of characters. Sen. Fowler Truscott, a wealthy neighbor, is as shrewd in business as he is in politics. He may drink too much and send too many golf balls sailing across his vast lawn, but he plays a crucial role in the lives of Harriet and Toma. Especially compelling are Horatio Washington, the strong-willed black man who runs the water wheel at the Bigelow ironworks, and Olivia, the light-skinned beauty who most people believe is his wife. What happens to Horatio sets the second half of the book in motion, and Olivia, her battered soul released, falls in love with Toma. In this novel, sex is used for comfort, while love remains something elusive and worth waiting for.
Lawrence gives us a number of wonderful interludes, including one where Toma dines with Charles Coffin, the chairman of GE, in his posh, private railroad car parked on the tracks in the middle of Washington, D.C. Another is a golf game with Sen. Truscott, an amateur duffer, and Toma and Steinmetz, who have never held putters before. It is both a comic scene and a telling one -- here Steinmetz unfolds his plan to Toma:
" 'Now, suppose we are playing our game of golf, and a storm comes up. I stand over there, with my feet in the water, and I make so.' Steinmetz raised the putter straight up at the heavens. 'What do you think?'
" 'I would say you are mad.'
" 'Unless?'
" 'Unless . . . unless you wish to be struck.'
" 'Exactly so. That is the object of my plan. I want the lightning to come to me.' "
Lawrence's descriptive gifts are such that the history and science of electrical energy and turn-of-the-century manufacturing are given the power and fascination they must have held for people of that time. His writing is always crisp, often beautiful: "The incandescent cable burst through its vaporized sheathing, the arresters showering sparks, the air around them glowing like the halo of a saint." Clearly, Lawrence has a love of his subject, and readers might very well come away feeling as much fondness for a turbine engine as for the romantic vision of an America once lit by lamplight. This many-layered story pulsates with the power of two hearts beating in the darkness, waiting for that flicker of electricity that will light not only their way, but the way of a nation. ·
Bruce Murkoff is the author of "Waterborne."
