Benjamin Franklin as a serial killer? Contemporary historians, some of them authors of bestselling books, as plagiarists? Book publishers fighting to sign bestselling authors to big contracts? A real-life television journalist turning such material into a novel?
Yep. Jim Lehrer, anchor of the Public Broadcasting System’s “News Hour,” has just written his 15th novel, and, like so many of the others, it is a doozy.
Like many historical novels researched with care, “The Franklin Affair” is pleasant to read because it teaches painlessly about the past. Does reliable evidence exist that Franklin, who lived from 1706-1790, murdered anybody? No, not in real life, not in Lehrer’s novel. But does Lehrer create a set of circumstances that make the plot plausible for most of the book’s 200- plus fast-paced pages? Yes.
The protagonist, besides Franklin, is contemporary historian R. Taylor. (He uses the initial only because he dislikes his birth name, Reginald Raymond Taylor.) Taylor, already a Franklin expert based on research for Wally Rush, the just-deceased elderly king of Franklin historians, starts looking into the potential murder because of a document Rush has studied. Is the document authentic or a masterful fake? How does a responsible historian who has idolized a Founding Father proceed when confronted with such a monstrous possibility?
While the murder plot unfolds, with twists and turns that come close to causing bewilderment, Taylor sits on a committee of renowned historians passing judgment on a colleague accused of serious plagiarism. That story line is ripped from the headlines, as the late Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin (among others) have been accused and found guilty of plagiarism in the early years of the 21st century. In Lehrer’s account, however, the accused historian fights back, threatening to expose the committee members judging her as plagiarists themselves. Is R. Taylor a plagiarist? Are the other eminent members of the committee? Was Wally Rush a fraud as a Franklin scholar? Could that be why he decided to commit suicide in his declining years?
The nature of truth is always difficult for biographers to determine. That difficulty is multiplied exponentially when the subject of the biography is dead. How can a biographer pretend to delineate actions he never viewed, judge the character of a woman or a man he never met, interpret thoughts from another era, an era with values divergent from the present day? It is presumptuous to say we “know” anybody inside and out with 100 percent accuracy. Sometimes our parents, our spouses, our children, our friends bewilder us. So how can any biographer claim to capture the essence of his subject?
Biographers as protagonists are rare in American fiction. Perhaps the best novel about biography is “Dubin’s Lives,” by Bernard Malamud. Lehrer has not achieved that level of quality. But he knows what he is talking about.
The novel falters in spots, especially when Lehrer portrays the state of current book publishing through Harry Dickinson, an editor who is looking for the next big seller about the Founding Fathers. Some of the scenes featuring Dickinson are instructive about the competition among publishers. But he is so omnipresent at crucial moments that Lehrer strains believability.
That is more than a nitpick. It is not, however, fatal to the novel. Lehrer’s novels are almost always worth reading. “The Franklin Affair” certainly is.
Steve Weinberg is a biographer in Columbia, Mo.
The Franklin Affair
By Jim Lehrer
Random House, 208 pages, $23.95
