Erica Wagner’s Wash is historical fiction at its most alive

The question most frequently directed at historical novelists concerns the licence to invent or fabricate. Where should the line be drawn between fact and fiction, particularly when writing about real people? 

Authors take different approaches to explaining themselves. Some provide extensive notes at the end of a book, detailing exactly where their imagined events diverge from the historical record. Others prefer to let a novel speak for itself, reasoning that there are resources enough out there if readers want to know more (this has generally been my approach). But it’s unusual for an author to write both biography and fiction about the same person, as Erica Wagner has done in her second novel, Wash.

Wagner’s hero is Washington “Wash” Roebling, the subject of her 2017 biography Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. In the foreword to that book, she recounts a conversation with the novelist Colm Tóibín, who observed that it was all very well to read Roebling’s original notebooks in the archive, “But then he put the notebook in his pocket, and you don’t know where he went.” Wash begins at that place where biography reaches its limits, allowing the author to make the imaginative leap and follow her subject, through the streets of Brooklyn, to the military camp at Gettysburg, into a brothel, or deep underground below New York’s East River. 

The story is told in glimpses, shifting back and forth in time to illuminate significant episodes in Roebling’s life. Moments that exist in his letters or memoir as no more than fleeting references are here fleshed out into scenes and relationships that contribute to a fuller, if fragmented, picture of the man. A tentatively homoerotic friendship with a fellow student that ends in tragedy is portrayed with warmth and tenderness; the young man, whose name is lost to the record, here becomes Max Andermann, and his shocking death is shown to have a lasting effect on Wash. 

Roebling’s father, John, a celebrated engineer and domestic “sadist”, in Roebling’s own words, casts a cold shadow over the novel; though he rarely appears directly, his influence on his son’s choices is keenly felt. But the supporting character who comes most vividly to life here is Roebling’s wife, Emily. Partway through, she takes on the narrative perspective much as she took on the burden of her husband’s administrative work on the Brooklyn Bridge during the years he was bedridden with illness. 

Wagner’s Emily is loyal and competent, fighting for her husband in his absence against the constant politicking that surrounds the project, but she is also emotionally conflicted. Wagner adds the nice detail of Emily reading Madame Bovary, an oblique nod to the way in which a life can be both fictional and utterly real, and a more explicit parallel to the feelings Emily is developing for one of her husband’s colleagues. “Only moments ago she had felt a kind of excitement, delight almost, at this unexpected interlude. It had frightened her and pleased her. It had been a long time, she thought, since she had felt the mixture of those two sensations, as long ago as the time just before and just after her marriage.” 

Wagner’s immersion in the historical period is everywhere evident: in the confidence and economy of the dialogue, and in the attention to detail, from the fixtures of the bridge cables to the furnishings of a brothel. So too is her affection for this man to whom she refers in her end notes as a “second self”, and also for his wife. 

It might be argued that the test of a historical novel is whether it lives for the reader independently of their familiarity with the known facts, and in this regard Wagner has succeeded admirably; she has created an imagined world that exists in the spaces where, in the words of Hilary Mantel, “the satisfactions of the official story break down”. 

Wash by Erica Wagner is published by Salt (£10.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £9.89 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Illustration courtesy of Salt Publishing