Sarah Vowell has made a career of putting herself front and center, her personality the lens through which an audience views her generally thoughtful, well-researched essays and radio pieces, regardless of topic. Intelligent and well-schooled in all sorts of liberal arts arcana, Vowell punctuates her pop-culture safaris with enough insight to justify the often self-involved cul-de-sacs her approach inevitably generates. But in recent years she’s drifted from considerations of the meaning of Frank Sinatra into examinations of watershed moments in American history, such as the genocidal deportation of the Trail of Tears, and when foregrounding herself in these forays, Vowell tends to occlude as much as she illuminates. When the subject is 40 pivotal years of American history, the whole shtick may be more distraction than it’s worth.
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In her new book, Assassination Vacation, Vowell leads readers on a virtual tour of the murders of three late-19th-century presidents: William McKinley, James A. Garfield, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. Strapping the narrative to an exhaustive physical exploration of sites associated with the murders–from Ford’s Theatre to the seaside Jersey town where Garfield went to die to the Adirondack rail depot where vice president Theodore Roosevelt learned of McKinley’s death–she gradually develops her canny thesis, which maps the excesses of the Gilded Age, its nascent imperialism in particular, onto the capital-stoked interventionism of our own day. While owning up to some sympathy for the assassins given the current oval occupant, Vowell sees a stronger kinship between the killers and their victims. “The egomania required to be a president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts,” she writes. “The assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?” The comparison is valid if old hat–noted historian Peter Gabriel, for one, made it in 1980 in “Family Snapshot”–and the question is a good one, though one might very well ask it of the author herself.
By the time you get to dead president number two, Garfield, you’re fervently hoping Vowell has run out of asides as well as Lincolniana, a wish that’s temporarily granted. Faced with extracting a story from the byzantine politicking surrounding Garfield’s election and execution, she’s got little choice but to stick to the facts. A compromise candidate within the Republican party, Garfield and his short presidency arose from the complicated intersection of northern triumphalism, New York-style corruption, and the fading of the reconstruction. But Vowell’s recounting of the deals and double crosses–and their bearing on assassin Charles Guiteau’s motives–is the most lucid, arresting section of the book. The utterly forgotten Garfield gets his due, painted in shades more wistful and noble than you’d ever guess, and, as with the Seward sequence, Vowell’s handling of the material–in this case, the trial of the crazy-as-a-loon Guiteau–is perfectly measured. Though she still indulges in some side trips, like the ponderous backstory of the upstate cult Guiteau once associated with, the narrative is better served by them here than elsewhere.
Now, I can only guess how someone who’s never considered that history might be a nightmare from which we’re trying to awake would take that kind of self-righteous condescension–but I can tell you how someone who has did. And in the context of various other self-congratulations and finger-pointings, such pronouncements are reminiscent of the better-than-you elitist media bugaboo the right so loves to trot out, and that the left seems all too happy to play into.
