Review: 'The Great Mistake,' by Jonathan Lee

Jonathan Lee writes engrossing novels about public tragedies and private dilemmas, fusing vivid character studies with understated humor and aphoristic turns of phrase. The 40-year-old Brit's latest, a meticulous portrait of a real-life New York power broker, is further confirmation that he's among the best writers working today.

"The Great Mistake" isn't a paragraph old when Lee kills off his protagonist. It's 1903, and Andrew Haswell Green, an 83-year-old lawyer who developed famed parks and museums, has been shot to death in Manhattan. The mistaken-identity murder of the "Father of Greater New York," as one newspaper calls him, is the talk of the city.

It's the stuff of a riveting whodunit, but Lee has crafted something a bit more measured. "So much of a life happens offstage, in silence," he writes. Accordingly, this is a rich, unhurried depiction of a man whose success appears to have masked sorrow and alienation.

Then as now, Green's adopted home city is charmed and cursed, a place of astonishing wealth and vast inequality. In one of several chapters on his early years, Green, from a family of thrifty New Englanders, is annoyed that libraries charge membership fees: "Why should books be such elusive objects in this city?" When "his book-obsessed friend Samuel Tilden" dies, Green is inspired to help establish the New York Public Library.

Historical novels require informed speculation, a skill Lee honed in "High Dive," his brilliant novel about an assassination attempt on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In "The Great Mistake," he places Green on a Manhattan balcony, recalling his bucolic boyhood: "There were overhanging fruit trees below. A low Dutch church on the horizon. The delicious smell of apricots in the air." Later, Green organizes the development of Central Park.

Lee's book is populated by entertaining minor characters, among them a doctor whose every sentence is a question ("I have never caused a death — that I know of?") and a publicity-hungry cop who chats up reporters "behind closed doors and in front of them too."

Green never married. Some believed he was gay. This speculation informs two moving story lines. One deals with Green's strained familial relationships. The other focuses on his rapport with Tilden, the loser of the 1876 presidential election, whose sexuality was also a source of gossip. Green is mocked because he loves art, has refined penmanship, never pursues women. Today we'd call this homophobia.

Meanwhile, Lee's description of the discrimination endured by Green's murderer, a Black man who apparently suffered from mental illness, underlines America's enduring hypocrisies and bigotries.

Lee poses an intriguing question about Green's life: "Might our private loneliness, our most crushing inner fears, push us outward, at times, into greater public good?" Yes, according to this beautifully written book.

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.

By: Jonathan Lee.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95.