There's a strange irony in how a man's influence can be felt everywhere in a city, but the man himself is mostly unknown. Andrew Haswell Green was considered “the Father of Greater New York”. He was a city planner responsible for some of the city's most notable landmarks and institutions including Central Park, the New York Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This businessman and lawyer created a tremendous legacy, but when he was 83 years old he became the victim of a strange murder case which occurred in 1903. The mystery surrounding the inner life of this figure is the subject of Jonathan Lee's new novel “The Great Mistake” and Green comes to feel like a chimera the author is chasing in order to understand him – even when Green seems not to know himself. The story is framed around the peculiar circumstances of his death and gradually we come to discover the motive behind it, but the real enigma is Green's inexpressible desire which accompanies him throughout his life and never finds fulfilment. In this way, Lee captures a tender sense of loneliness and these grand spaces for the public good which Green created are underlined by a solemn yearning for human connection.
Green comes from humble beginnings and we follow the story of his life as he works his way up in the world. But he comes to ruefully look back at the trajectory of his ascent when asked to recount it to people around him: “People liked all that Dickensian nonsense.” Though Dickens earnestly wanted his readers to pity his characters, Green repels such sentimental notions though we come to sympathize with how his father rejected him, the gruelling ordeal of his apprenticeship and the intimacy which always seemed to elude him. Whenever he becomes emotionally and physically close to other men in his life, the connection is severed with a warning. Wrapped in this is a desire which the narrative itself never names but is felt everywhere. Lee embeds in his prose a sensuality which is intense even if it isn't explicit: “Their shadows touched on the ground.” As such the author describes an intangible wanting which mirrors the state of Green's consciousness. His queerness is not labelled because Green wouldn't have described himself that way but it is coded in descriptions of his relationship with his mentor Samuel who is “his most beloved friend”.
What's interesting is that although being gay has come to be understood as a badge which should be defiantly worn to insist upon social acceptance, there are other dynamics which admit the nature of being a homosexual without naming it. I found it touching the way this novel portrays Green's relationship with his brother where a misunderstanding divides them but it shows how his brother accepts Green in a way he didn't expect. Though tacit forms of approval come with their own hazards, this shows how the real issue perhaps comes from Green's unwillingness to admit or accept his own desires and state of being. Trauma certainly leads to suppression, but Lee suggests early in the novel that Green is almost fated never to live the life he really desires: “At times what he felt, late at night, during these years, was a kind of helpless nostalgia, an emotion that he knew he had not yet earned. But it wasn't nostalgia for times he had already lived through. It was nostalgia for versions of himself he hadn't yet been.”
As a counterpoint to Green's character is the enigmatic figure of Bessie Davis who is haplessly linked to the murder case. She's a fascinating person who perhaps deserves a novel herself, but though her profession demands intimacy it comes with no affection. As such her fulfilment is not found with others: “She had never felt lonely when alone. It was simply not a sensation she had ever in her life experienced. But the loneliness she felt in the presence of other people? That indeed was a force.” In both these characters we get a sense of personalities who must uncomfortably navigate a society which doesn't accept them or allow them to succeed by being fully themselves. As such they must carve and build physical spaces which permit possibilities that they themselves can never entirely realise. There's a chilling moment towards the end of the novel when Green enters a subterranean space of the city and finds there a comfort which he never felt on the surface. I enjoyed how this poignant novel elegantly describes the tension between our inner and outer reality which can make us strangers even to ourselves.
You can read a preview of the novel here: https://www.jellybooks.com/cloud_reader/previews/the-great-mistake_9781783786244/L3Leb
