Debut novelists often experience difficulty finding a quality publisher. One of the few quality publishers concentrating on quality first fiction is Unbridled Books, headquartered in Denver. With publication of Michael Pritchett’s debut novel, “The Melancholy Fate of Captain Lewis,” Unbridled has again introduced an extraordinary writer to the world.
Pritchett teaches fiction writing at the University of Missouri’s Kansas City campus. His fictional creation as the novel’s anchor is Bill Lewis, a high school history teacher who is obsessed with the life of his historical namesake, Meriwether Lewis, as in the Lewis and Clark Expedition across the North American continent during the first decade of the 1800s.
Bill Lewis is struggling to write a biography of Meriwether Lewis, but progress is minimal, in large part because Bill suffers from clinical depression. Furthermore, he is a devoted father worried about his son Henry, who has just entered his teenage years, suffers from an eating disorder and generally appears ready to unravel at any moment.
Bill and wife Emily, a special education teacher, are experiencing marital troubles – grounded in taking each other for granted – which also interfere with progress on the biography. While struggling to adjust to Emily’s needs, Bill cannot help idealizing other women, one of them a pregnant high school student in his class, another a married lawyer he and his wife meet on a camping trip.
To compose the novel, Pritchett not only created memorable characters, but also researched the life of Meriwether Lewis and the expedition that crowned his accomplishments before he died under mysterious circumstances in 1809 at age 35. The novel alternates between Bill Lewis’ struggles and entire chapters based on the journals kept by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and others among the 40 or so traveling with them.
In an author’s note at the end of the novel, Pritchett explains in what manner he relied on the journals. He wisely tells readers that reading the novel “is in no way a substitute for reading the journals of the expedition, or other documentation of these events. The expedition journals contain what appears to be an almost impenetrably deep mystery about a first encounter between some of the founders of the Enlightenment and Native Americans, and the natural world. If this book encourages readers to seek out and read this remarkable document, it will have served a valuable purpose.”
I know the novel will lead me back to the expedition journals. I know the novel will also stay with me for a long time, because Bill Lewis and Pritchett’s other fictional creations are so skillfully rendered.
Steve Weinberg is a biographer in Columbia, Mo.
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FICTION
The Melancholy Fate of Captain Lewis, by Michael Pritchett, $24.95
