Books, Etc. with Lynn Carey: Jarrettsville

Lynn Carey chats with "Jarrettsville" author Cornelia Nixon about the family history that created her novel

I love it when an author loves talking about his or her work. I had lunch with an enthusiastic author the other day at a great deli in Berkeley (Saul’s—never knew it existed, but felt like I was at Katz’s in the lower East side!). It was Cornelia Nixon, and we were talking about Jarrettsville, her new novel based on a real life incident in her family about 150 years ago.

I mentioned Jarrettsville a few weeks ago when I was just reading it, saying there is so much about the Civil War that I feel I never learned. This could have something to do with having grown up in California, where we tend to concentrate more on Missions than battlefields. But a friend who just moved back to California after living for four years in Virginia says folks are still pretty hotheaded when it comes to the Civil War. He was often asked which side he was on. Still!

Cornelia Nixon didn’t know about her own family’s history in the days of the Civil War until she was 16, and her mother admitted that a cousin of her own great-grandfather was a murderess. That’s the gist of Jarrettsville; a woman (the relative) walks into a hotel and plugs a guy three or four times at close range, shooting him quite dead. Then we go back a few years to figure out how this could have happened, with a dozen different narrators telling their stories. It’s a great way to write a novel, actually. Since everyone has a different perspective of events, it’s cool to see all of them.

Cornelia, who lives in Berkeley just a few blocks from Saul’s, obviously had to do a lot of research to write Jarrettsville. The first version took her eight years, with visits back to Maryland and poring over trial transcripts. The great thing about a gab session with someone who has done that much historical research is you can ask any question. We talked a lot about President Lincoln, scratching beneath the surface of the kindly, sad-looking man who wrote the Gettysburg Address and worked to abolish slavery. Cornelia told the stories about how to get what he wanted in Maryland, a border state that was in danger of seceding, Lincoln imprisoned the state legislature before they could vote.

I do love history, but I love it best when someone who is this excited about it writes the stories. Jarrettsville isn’t having a huge media blitz, but it’s definitely worth reading. It would be a great book club discussion.

For 12 years, Lynn Carey has run the Times Book Club, which now appears in the Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune newspapers. For the past 17 years, she's lived in Lafayette with her husband, Lamorinda Sun columnist Mike Zampa, and their two teenagers.

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