★★★★☆ Good example of Michener's work

Centennial

James A Michener

Centennial was the first book by James A. Michener I ever read. I believe I read it around when it came out, probably in 1976. Although published in 1974, Centennial was clearly written to come out at the time of the celebration of the bicentennial of the USA in 1976.

Although Michener wrote some fairly conventional fiction early in his career -- his Tales of the South Pacific was the basis of the musical South Pacific, and The Drifters is an excellent novel -- he is most famous for his historical epics. Each of these is a long carefully researched novel about the history of one particular place. (Edward Rutherfurd's Sarum: The Novel of England is a very similar sort of work. It was, I believe, inspired by Michener's works.) Centennial is about the fictional town Centennial, Colorado, and at the same time a history of the American West. I liked this quite a lot and went on to read many other Michener sagas.

There are some things about Michener's version of history that bother me. He tends to have a Whiggish view of history -- an idea that history has a discernable arc that was always meant to lead to where we are now. This contrasts with the much more plausible (in my opinion) view of Stephen Jay Gould, that history is irreducibly contingent -- that we are where we are because of a long series of consequential chance events that could have gone differently.

There is related problem with characters. If your novel extends over a period of 300 years (which is less than the typical Michener saga), no one character will span the whole thing. Michener thus tends to build his sagas around families. And the remarkable thing is that the descendants of a Native American of 1676 tend to have the same physical and personality traits as their great-to-the-eighth grandfather did. Michener is quite explicit about tying these traits back to that long-ago ancestor. I am a geneticist, and this bugs me. If we accept the usual estimate of 30 years per human generation, that 1676 great-to-the-eighth grandfather was one of 1024 ancestors of the 1976 descendant. (Or he may have been two of them, if there was some inbreeding.) There's no reason to expect 1976 kid to be more like him than any of the other 1023.

Along with this notion comes one of personality characteristics tied to race. This is racism, and there is not a shred of evidence for it. I get that Michener the novelist had a technical problem to solve. But the solution he chose creates a new problem for Michener the historian. As a result, I think Michener's sagas, entertaining and informative though they are, systematically distort real history.

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