Review: ‘The Personal Librarian’ author tackles 1920s New York in ‘Harlem Rhapsody’

If you’re a fan of historical fiction, which half of that is most important to you: the history? Or the fiction?

It’s entertaining to encounter actual people and events in a novel, where what we already know about them can increase our curiosity and add depth to the portrait. There’s a zing of recognition and verve in great historical fiction such as “Ragtime,” which takes advantage of what we know about, say, Emma Goldman, but also fits her into a narrative that would be lively even without the associations we bring to her, Harry Houdini, Booker T. Washington, J.P. Morgan and others.

There’s some of that in “Harlem Rhapsody,” the new novel from Victoria Christopher Murray, half of the creative team that wrote bestselling “The Personal Librarian.” That novel embellished the facts about Morgan (again!) and the woman who curated his library — which is now a must-visit museum in New York City.

“Harlem Rhapsody” is set a few years later than “Personal Librarian” and about 80 blocks northwest, in Harlem. The real-life folks who populate it include W.E.B. Du Bois, the writer and activist; Nella Larsen, author of “Passing” (which became an excellent movie a few years ago); and teenager Langston Hughes, who reaches Harlem in the early 1920s with a bunch of terrific poems already to his name.

You don’t need to know anything about those giants of the Harlem Renaissance to appreciate “Rhapsody.” But if you’re at least aware of them, their frequent appearances supply a combination of familiarity and freshness, like if you encounter an armchair you own in someone else’s house, where the furniture that surrounds it makes it feel much different than in your own home.

The character occupying the central armchair in “Rhapsody” also is an actual historical person although she’s less well-known: Jessie Redmon Fauset, who arrives in New York as the book opens. It’s 1919 and she has been hired as literary editor of Du Bois' magazine, The Crisis. It’s a job that affords her contact with lots of the era’s writing stars, as well as way too much contact with randy, boundary-disrespecting Du Bois.

Although family members warn her, Fauset embarks on an affair with the married Du Bois. She knows what she’s doing, she tells her mom. He loves only her, she tells her mom. It won’t interfere with work, she tells her mom. You get the picture and you already can guess, probably, that mom is right to worry.

There’s a sense throughout “Harlem Rhapsody” that Murray is an excellent researcher, capturing the mores of the 1920s and respectfully filling in the behavior of the characters, real and fictitious as, for instance, women (well, white women) earn the right to vote. But you’d like a historical novel to wear its research lightly, for it to provide a backbone to a story that stands on its own, and that doesn’t happen in “Rhapsody.”

Too often Murray seems to have transcribed a detail of history from her notecards directly to the pages, without the irregularities or inconsistencies that would give it life. And the on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again relationship with Du Bois is annoying because Fauset sticks with it long after any person as sensible as Fauset would have kicked Mr. NAACP to the CURB.

You can see what she’s trying to do as Murray writes of “the gift of Harlem — the dress, the music, the language. It isn’t possible to live here and not begin to breathe and bleed this place." But you’ll wish a little more of that breath and blood made it on the page.

Harlem Rhapsody

By: Victoria Christopher Murray.

Publisher: Berkley, 385 pages, $29.