But it’s funny what a tweak to history can — and can’t — do, an idea Ackerman explores thoughtfully, if at times a little dryly. (Again: President Al Gore.) It’s 2004, and America is largely untroubled by overseas crises. After Bill Clinton was convicted following his impeachment trial, Gore rose to the Oval Office, then handily defeated George W. Bush in 2000. The twin towers were still toppled on 9/11, but America focused its response on Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden was dead by Christmas. “Would Bush have possessed Gore’s forbearance in the Middle East?” muses the novel’s narrator, Martin. “I’ve often wondered.”
Martin is a Civil War historian, working on a book in the guesthouse of Robert Ableson, a wealthy, semiretired lawyer, near Richmond. Martin’s working thesis, borrowed from the historian Shelby Foote, is a centrist crusade to validate “the role of compromise in the sustainment of American life, as well as our relatively recent departure from it as an American virtue.” That “departure” refers to a rise in divisive politics, especially around social justice issues. Front and center in “Halcyon” is the matter of Confederate monuments: A rival historian and an Ableson family acquaintance are leading a protest against the statue of Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. Martin is a milquetoast on the matter, hand-waving about heritage and compromise. Ableson, for his part, is more firm in supporting the sculpture: “Why would a history professor want to destroy a piece of history?”
Ableson can dig in his heels on a counterprotest because of his wealth. (The novel’s title refers to the name of his estate.) He can also persist because, much like the vampires hunted by alternate Lincoln, he’s undead. Medical technology has discovered a way to resuscitate the recently passed, and Ableson is one of the early, secret beneficiaries. This complicates his will, naturally. But it also complicates history in general. “History is what the living think of the dead,” Foote writes in a book inscribed to Martin. So what becomes of history, Ackerman asks, if we all get to live forever?
Ackerman, as much as any working novelist today, is invested in getting the facts of war and history right. Before pursuing a writing career, he was a Marine officer who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’s channeled the tragedies of U.S. military adventures into fiction and nonfiction, including the novel “Dark at the Crossing,” which was a National Book Award finalist. To write a story such as “Halcyon,” in which America avoids a 21st-century military quagmire, is certainly a case of partial wish fulfillment.
But Ackerman also seems to argue that different presidents than those we’ve had wouldn’t eradicate bad foreign wars or stateside divisiveness. The lack of a Middle East war in “Halcyon” essentially fast-forwards America’s domestic reckonings, moving public conversations around #MeToo and systemic racism to the fore. (Gore’s pardon of Clinton, to some, represents “exonerating a man for rape”; Ableson, now revived, is asked to answer for a colleague’s sexual abuse allegation.)
“Halcyon” is an entertaining thought experiment, and Ackerman writes with a gentle, graceful style that befits Martin’s mild character. The tone also suggests something about how we absorb reality. Ackerman’s alternate America accepts its peace dividend almost blithely; if we do ever conquer death, we’ll reduce it to two-minute cable segments picking n
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