Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator begins with a description of Dillsborough. Might as well call it Dullsville.
Trollope explains that Dillsborough county has no special landmarks, the village is small, the populace is mediocre, the curate doesn’t preach well, the church is shabby, the prominent families are not that prominent, and no one is notably prosperous. Nothing of interest. He goes on to describe the family history of several generations of the Morton and the Masters clans. Somewhat complex, as most family histories are, but devoid of dramatic tension. Dillsborough is dull. The residents of Dillsborough are dull. Ho hum. Is there a Seahawks game on TV? I’m not a football fan, but when there’s nothing better…
Why would anyone want to read this book? Well, I, for one, love it. I’m reading it a second time now with an online Trollope reading group. If you like Trollope, join the group. It’s informed, witty, welcoming, and civil. If you like Trollope, you’re one of us.
I bought a copy of The American Senator in the book department of Harrods on a business trip to London twenty years ago. A few years before, I received Trollope’s headliner Barsetshire and the Palliser series as a premium for joining the New York Review of Books book club, read, and enjoyed both series, but I had not read much else of Trollope. I was surprised at Harrods’ range of Trollope titles. I came home with as many of Trollope’s less well-known books as I could cram into my roll-aboard and read them all soon after.
I am in the straits of interesting a literary agent in my own novel and have read more about how to construct a compelling story than is likely good for anyone. Trollope breaks all the so-called story rules in the first three chapters of The American Senator.
Henry James complained that Trollope talked to his readers too much. He does that in the first few chapters of The American Senator. When a little interest sparks, the omniscient narrator informs us more will be said later about this person or that place, so we best not trouble our little heads about it. Today, critics would cite Trollope for reader abuse if such a thing could be done, but they would be wrong. Anthony Trollope was no fool. When The American Senator was written, he was a seasoned novelist with his craft well in hand. He was economical and he knew how to keep his story lines straight.
An omniscient narrator is somewhat rare these days, but it’s one of Trollope’s strengths. His narrator is a character speaking in the first person. The narrator is not an active participant in the story line, but he is a distinct and appealing personality. The reader hears the narrator’s voice as he tells the story and his role is as important as any of the plot characters. At times, I suspect that Trollope is offering us an unreliable omniscient narrator, if such a chimera can be permitted. I don’t question the omniscience of the narrator’s knowledge of events, but sometimes I catch a hint that the narrator’s commentary is designed to raise the reader’s hackles rather than represent an interpretation that Trollope, the author, believes is true.
From the day I started reading Trollope, I was amazed at Trollope’s descriptions of people and places that are fiercely remote from my experiences as a farm boy and software engineer, and yet somehow as familiar as neighbors across the line fences when I was growing up. The first chapters of The American Senator exercise that draw on me. Trollope’s descriptions are perfectly scaled to yield a sense of living community. In The American Senator, he adds piquancy to familiarity with the observations on Dillsborough society from a bizarre apparition from a sister planet in a distant galaxy, an American Senator from the imaginary state of Mikewa.
By the time Trollope wrote The American Senator, he was an experienced novelist and author; critics like me should not kid themselves; he knew exactly how far he could go before events had to begin to pop. And he knew how to build a setting to turn pops into explosions.
Trollope exercised some brinkmanship in these three ostensibly dull beginning chapters. The American Senator is anything but dull as the narrative rolls out and the story is enhanced by its contrast with a seemingly dull backdrop. He risked putting impatient readers off, but Trollope was saying “See, even in this dull place, life is intense and dramatic.” The seasoned master novelist takes readers to the edge of boredom, plays them with telling details, then yanks them back like a fly fisherman luring mountain trout.
The first three chapters of The American Senator are clearly not the failure predicted by modern novel writing rules or Henry James’ scolds. And I don’t accept the snide explanation that Victorian readers were starved for entertainment and therefore willing to suffer boring introductions to overly long novels. These chapters are successful for a significant swathe of readers of any era including the digital network age of the twenty-first century.