Fiction
Date Published: May 1, 2025
Publisher: Manhattan Book Group
This book's background is the prophetic but overlooked decade of American history, 1846 to 1856, from the Mexican War to the presidential election of James Buchanan. The decade was a foreshadowing of our national cataclysm. Underlying every social aspect was the nation's fatal flaw, slavery, that perverted the Constitution on which the Enlightenment ideals of a "United States" were based. And on every day, similarities to the distortions of the present decade are obvious.
I chose a Southern ethos, finding an unexpected woman to suffer and survive the decade; and three brothers, each of whom carves a unique path through it, one as a fugitive unjustly accused of murder and slave-stealing, one as an enigmatic operative across the jagged spectrum of antebellum party politics, and the eldest who inherits his family's storied tobacco plantation as its lands burn out.
The story is told chronologically, the fiction adhering to the history. Should a question arise as to which is which, any event of historical significance - no matter how bizarre or implausible -- did indeed happen.
The novel echoes ethnic truths as they were at the time. I write of intimacies as well as horrors found in historical records. Both public and private relations were often infused with their own destruction -- as were the expanding "United States" in that decade, and I fear in this one.
DANGEROUS TIMES
is a novel of historical fiction! It tells of the years 1846 to 1851 in the 30
states that made up our nation. It’s an overlooked time, called “antebellum” or
“before the war,” our Civil War which justifiably gets most of the attention from
scholars, historians, literary writers, critics, -- and inevitably: film
studios.
It was a hell …
of a war.
But my interest was: how and why it happened,
because when I started work on this book, the United States was beginning a
long progress of crises. They were leading to where we are now: the threatened
loss of our political, legal, and societal institutions, and our standing in
the world, among other disasters. In wondering how far these crises are going
to go, I became increasingly curious about what had happened in mid-Nineteenth
Century America that had driven the nation to the self-destructive extreme of
civil war.
As a result, my
research started with diving into the fractious years during which the “United”
States began its slide toward that violent division. I start the book with a
popular-turned-bitter foreign war, followed by the inexorable fraying of
politics, economy, and culture.
Sound familiar?
In 1846, it was a war with Mexico; now it’s Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – take
your pick. Time and time again, behaviors, convictions, decisions, and passions
of those antebellum years are the alarm-bell-tollings that are reverberating
today. Therefore, to me – and I hope to you as you’re sitting there – these
antebellum times are suddenly of vital interest!
You may well ask:
If those years are so important, why be distracted by some fiction of it, by
stories that push the real history into the background? As a reader, why not
just get the facts?
I’m so glad you
asked! Full disclosure: I’m not an historian or a scholar. And any number of
agents and publishers will tell you: I ain’t literary. I’m a storyteller. As to
which is best for the telling, fact or fiction? It’s an endless debate, one
that I always win with myself because “fact” seems to me to be a restricted
perspective. To me, when chronicling events, the footnote-bound, meticulous
scholar has to overlook a lot of the heart-beating, breathing, emotive, sensate
life of any whole historical moment. And what in the world does the historian
do about: imagination?
The great historical fiction writer Andrea
Barrett suggests that “…research creates the bones of the story, and
imagination provides the breath and the blood.” As a storyteller, I’ll go with
that any day!
Toni Morrison –
who wrote some pretty astonishing historical fiction – has a fine riff on this:
“The crucial distinction is not the difference between fact and fiction,
but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist
without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”
I’m one who
believes that telling a fictional story allows a fuller truth to be revealed
than by pure history. Don’t get me wrong: to write each one of the six books
I’ve published, I read history voraciously. But that’s only the beginning.
And with me, the process releases “The Big
Surprise”! When I read enough history, characters start coming off the pages
and are simply there. I cannot suppress them – not that I’d want to! When I
begin to tell the story, I don’t always know what they’ll do, where they’ll go.
Certainly, as we go along, history leads us; but by allowing imagination to
have its way with us, I have to hope that history will tolerate, within its
dogged boundaries of time, endless possibility.
Let me introduce
you to some of the characters in DANGEROUS TIMES who wandered, charged or leapt
off those pages of history. There’s a young woman, Elizabeth Musten, who’s
already shattered basic foundational rules and is facing a lifetime of
punishment; and the three Fairfield brothers, each of whom will splinter many
more conventions as their worlds sink under their feet. There’s a freedman,
Daniel, whose father owned his mother; and a slave, Jubile, who barely escapes
having his big toes cut-off so he can’t run away again. Be assured that they
and others struggle through war, peace, sex, violence, romance, money, revenge,
evil and good – among other thrilling enjoyments!
I’ll read you a scene that’s about
something more -- well, dangerous: Politics! It’s the spring of 1850. One of
those brothers, Will Fairfield, is trained in the law but disdainful of its
practice. Instead, he’s driven to become a vital wunderkind to the Whigs, the political party ascendent in
Washington at the time. He’s done pretty well so far….
About the Author
After a questionable academic career at Stanford (I mean, how practical is a double major in Drama and Far Eastern Theology?), Kinsolving fled to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to play Richard II. He then attended The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art for polish. Returning to New York, he appeared as an actor under-, off- and on Broadway, as well as a saloon singer in foul Greenwich Village nightclubs. For creative diversion during these years, he acted and/or directed back in Oregon, at the Stratford (CT) Shakespeare Theater, Harvard, Dartmouth, Café La Mama, then went out and won the Best Actor of the Year award from the San Francisco Chronicle for performing at the Berkeley Rep.
Ineluctably transitioning to a second career, Kinsolving wrote a play with 84 speaking roles, was awarded a Ford Foundation Playwriting Grant, and had the play produced by the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival. This led to the first of some 54 films on which he worked for every major studio (and several distinctly minor ones) in Los Angeles, London and Rome (ask him about Zeffirelli sometime) as screenwriter and script doctor. Suspecting that such a life was leading to the utter corruption of his soul (not to dare mention his body), he retreated to Carmel to write the first of five novels (a NY Times best-seller, a couple of Literary Guild Main Selections, he adds humbly, but only if asked).
While serving on the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of the Arts, he regressed happily to nightclub and fundraising performances, accompanied by the likes of Peter Duchin and Emmanuel Ax, singing at the Algonquin Hotel’s late lamented Oak Room and for one of the late Brooke Astor’s better birthday parties among many other less name-dropping venues.
Last year, he directed a musical for which he wrote the book and lyrics in the nave of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral about Johann Sebastian Bach and his family. Bach provided all the music, and proved to be very easy to work with. THAT WEEK WITH THE BACHS had the best voices in the Bay Area, including the ineffable Frederica von Stade.
He began work on the historical novel DANGEROUS TIMES between the diversions above. He knew the history, but even so, was startled by how constant the similarities are in that destructive time to what’s going on in this one.
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