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Slave Revises the American Revolution
M.T. Anderson’s extraordinary novel “Octavian Nothing” (from the NYTimes Book Review)
In 1975, from a canoe floating in the Concord River, the young M. T. Anderson and his parents watched a bicentennial re-enactment of the confrontation between rebels and redcoats at the Old North Bridge. Years later he wondered what it would have been like to be alive on that day when the final outcome of the Revolutionary War was still unclear. The result of those musings was, Anderson joked, “a 900-page two-volume historical epic for teens, written in a kind of unintelligible 18th-century Johnsonian Augustan prose by an obsessive neurotic who rarely leaves his house or even gets dressed.” The first volume of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing went on to win extraordinary praise and a National Book Award for juvenile literature.
That book, Volume 1 (“The Pox Party”), tells the story of an experiment by a group of American philosophers upon a black youth named Octavian in order to discover whether Africans are a separate species from white people. A skilled violinist and an able translator of Greek and Roman classics, Octavian is a petted…
