The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi

Published by Scribner on August 12, 2014

Charlie Stratton reached 25 inches and then stopped growing for several years. Needing money, his parents agreed to let their five-year-old become a circus attraction. P.T. Barnum changed Charlie's name to Tom Thumb and made him famous. During the next two years, while Tom wooed royalty and wowed the crowds in London and Paris, his parents, feeling left out, did not handle his success well. Barnum became Charlie's surrogate father, his God and his Devil, all rolled into one.

After this brief introduction to Tom Thumb, the heart of The Remarkable Courtship begins at the cusp of the Civil War, when Tom has reached 23 years and 32 inches. Convinced the war will be over quickly, Barnum takes Charlie to Manassas. The first battle of Bull Run is about to start and Barnum, like the reporters, congressmen, bankers, and parlor women who line the road, is eager to get a good seat. Contrary to Barnum's expectations, the battle does not bring an end to the war, and so the novel moves on.

Charlie narrates most the novel from his first-person perspective. In many respects, Charlie's life is about what a reader would expect his life to be. He craves normalcy. He wants a wife or lover. Charlie is a lonely dwarf. Smitten with the 8-foot-tall Ann Swan, he experiences "the lust of the tiniest shrub wanting to sink its root into the flank of a mountain." Having been created as an oddity, Charlie believes he is entitled to the "uncommon and unimaginable," including his dreams and desires, but the uncommon life he lives is not the one he wants. Nicholas Rinaldi conveys that convincingly but unsurprisingly. If there is a formula for structuring the life of a little person, this novel follows it.

Eventually Barnum hires a dwarf named Lavinia (Charlie is smitten again) and the novel shifts to her point-of-view as we learn her backstory. Her life is also about what a reader would expect, or perhaps less interesting than a reader would want. Her narrative voice is not distinct from Charlie's. But for letters Lavinia receives from her brother, the Civil War all but fades into the background. Fortunately, it returns to the foreground at the novel's midway point and from time to time thereafter.

The novel does a good job of depicting the Civil War's impact on those who fought and on those who did not, including those who opposed conscription and the class warfare that the Union created by permitting the wealthy to buy their way out of the draft. A similar problem troubles the Confederacy, exemplified by a deserter who explains how he repeatedly collected a bounty for volunteering as a replacement soldier for wealthy landowners, only to desert and collect additional bounties in other towns.

Lincoln briefly appears as a minor character, one of the better characters in the book. Ulysses S. Grant, Walt Whitman, and John Wilkes Booth are among the other figures from history who make brief appearances while adding little to the story. They are dropped names more than contributing characters. As for the major characters, most of whom seem needlessly petulent, I never found myself caring much about them. Rinaldi did not inspire my sympathy or empathy for characters who, in real life, probably deserved both.

The Remarkable Courtship's best attributes are its descriptions of civilian life during the Civil War and of the war itself, as seen from a (diminutive) civilian's perspective. For all the interest generated by the story's background, I was too rarely engaged by the story itself, despite its occasional tense moments. Most of the story's mild intrigue comes from a villainous man who bears malice toward Charles and whose identity we only learn at the end. Rinaldi's attempts at humor generally fall flat. While Rinaldi's writing is fluid and occasionally elegant, it is not the kind of soaring prose that can overcome a novel's deficiencies. My mixed feelings about The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb are based on the sense that this is a decent novel that could have been much better.

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