In The Night Inspector, Frederick Busch, no stranger to the
Victorian era, ventures to post-Civil-War Manhattan, where a disfigured
veteran named William Bartholomew rages against the Gilded Age--even as
he demands remuneration for his own losses. And what exactly has the
narrator lost? As we learn in a sequence of flashbacks, Bartholomew
served as a Union sniper, picking off stray Confederate soldiers in an
extended bout of psychological warfare. Eventually, though, he received
a taste of his own medicine, when an enemy bullet destroyed most of his
face. Outfitted with an eerie papier-mache mask, Bartholomew tends to
shock postwar observers into silence: I imagine I understand their
reaction: the bright white mask, its profound deadness, the living eyes
beneath--within--the holes, the sketched brows and gashed mouth,
airholes embellished, a painting of a nose.... Nevertheless. I won this
on your behalf, I am tempted to cry, or pretend to. The specie of the
nation, the coin of the realm, our dyspeptic economy, the glister and
gauge of American gold: I was hired to wear it! Bartholomew has, it
should be obvious, a formidable mastery of rhetoric. It's appropriate,
then, that he should hook up with that supreme exponent of the American
baroque, Herman Melville--who at this point is a burnt-out customs
inspector (and candidate for some Victorian 12-step plan). Together
these outcasts embark upon a plan to rescue a group of black children
from their Florida servitude. This caper--along with Bartholomew's
attachment to a gold-hearted, elaborately tattooed prostitute--allows
the novel to veer in the direction of the penny dreadful. Yet Busch's
mastery of period detail, and of the very shape of century-old syntax,
remains extraordinary on every page. And true to its title, The Night
Inspector is a superb investigation of darkness--in both the physical
and psychological sense. "I was reckless," the narrator insists, "and
born with great vision though not, alas, of the interior, spiritual
sort."