The Night Inspector

William Bartholomew was a soldier in the Civil War until he was shot in the face. Now a few years past the end of the war, Billy is living in New York, wearing a mask to cover his ruined face and making a dubious living trading on futures and stocks. He meets a man who intrigues him, a failed writer working the night shift as a customs inspector and they become friends. His other friends include a Black prostitute whom he loves, a Chinese woman who makes her money taking in washing, and a man who served with him in the Union Army. When his lover asks him to help her in a daring plan to rescue children from the South, Billy gathers his friends and a few others and comes up with a plan.

This is mostly a story of what daily life was like show more in post-Civil War New York, from the relative comforts and financial insecurity of a family clinging to the middle class to those scraping by with nothing at all in shocking circumstances. Frederick Busch tells a nineteenth century tale, seen through modern eyes but told in the voice of the nineteenth century. It's a difficult juggling act, but Busch manages to make it work. Here's a novel that reads like it could have been written 150 years ago, but which sees women, immigrants, the formerly enslaved and those making their livings as they can as full human beings and which looks unflinchingly at how they are preyed upon by the wealthy and white dominant class. But this isn't a lecture, but an action-packed and heart-breaking story of an morally-complex man making his way in the world and how his past, both his childhood and his experiences in the war, inform his present. show less

One of the best novels I have read, Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector, is smart and dark not unlike much of Busch's ouevre, and begins with a scene of a man being fit for a mask without a mouth. Is there a better metaphor for the ways in which writing fiction doesn’t always let us do the things we want to do? Melville -- both as a character in Busch's novel and in real life, on his own -- is, to me, one of the most philosophical fiction writers (and this is a good thing). For him everything evolves from a pre-existing idea, sometimes programmatically, but then the foundation for the idea begins to crack. It’s an exhilarating process when encountered and I recommend it to readers who enjoy novels of ideas.

I read this book several years ago, before I started reviewing everything I read. With all the TV ads recently for the new film, AMERICAN SNIPER, I've been thinking again about this Fred Busch novel, THE NIGHT INSPECTOR. Because its central character is a disfigured Civil War veteran, and yes, he was a sniper. Herman Melville, a writer much admired by Busch, is also an important character in this dark tale set in New York City. If you want to read about snipers, and what it does to a person - physically, mentally and emotionally - then read this book by one of the masters of American fiction. Highly recommended.

An intense, tightly-written novel about a maimed Civil War veteran, William Bartholomew, and his search for humanity and redemption in Victorian New York City. This book is dark, tragic, and almost overwhelmingly sad. it is a slog through the ugliest parts of man. Not for the faint of heart, but an interesting and challenging read. Frederick Busch writes in a way that skips from Civil War battlefield to the streets of NYC in the blink of an eye- it can be disconcerting & confusing at times, moving from present to memory and back again without taking a breath. I found this exciting in the beginning but by the end of the book it had become tiresome, and I found myself skimming.

I really wanted to like this book. The premise is interesting: a sniper from the Civil War returns to civilian life, so horribly scarred that he must wear a mask or a veil. I was hoping that the messages of loss, disfigurement, and self-hatred would resolve themselves in some way in this character.

Unfortunately, the book is overwritten: it could have had more impact at 1/5th of its size. The agonizingly slow pace detracts from the story, and the plot is rather limp given the strong starting point.

William Bartholomew is a Civil War veteran, who spent the war as a sharpshooter assassinating Confederates until he himself is horribly injured and maimed in battle. The war wounds damaged his face and force him to wear a mask with a face painted upon it. In this very stream of consciousness book, Bartholomew walks the streets of New York at night remembering atrocities from the war in nauseating detail. In between we see incidents of his daily life in which he's become wealthy through investments yet chooses to live in the Five Points slum interacting with a Chinese laundress and a Creole prostitute, Jessie. He befriends the author Herman Melville whose star has faded and is now working as a customs inspector. With Melville, a freed show more black man named Adam, and a fellow veteran-cum-journalist Sam, Bartholomew hatches a plan to help Jessie rescue black children who are still being held in bondage despite the abolition of slavery. Jessie double crosses Bartholomew and leads to a tragic ending with the deaths of all the children. I have to admit that this book was difficult to follow due to it moving back and forth in time, complicated language, and disturbing imagery, but despite not catching all the plot in the first read, it was definitely well-written. Now if I can only bear to read it again. show less

The story is set in New York City a decade after the Civil War, and Busch's narrator is a sniper - the one captured in a painting by Whistler - whose face was left marred when another sniper shot him - and is now a successful commodities trader. Wearing a mask in public to hide his wounds, he befriends Herman Melville, who toiled in a patronage position as Night Inspector of New York harbor. There are sexual threads interwoven: the narrator's uncle supporting his dead brother's family is a would-be child molestor, instead forcing himself on the narrator's mother until the narrator dispatches him in a darkly symbolic manner. Showing an Army friend, now a newspaper columnist, the dark side of NYC, via child prostitution, bringing the city show more to awful light, the narrator, in love with a mulatto prostitute, agrees to help her in a scheme to liberate black children held in bondage. The ending doesn't quite work, but its weakness doesn't undo the powerful story telling. show less