Success is a glory, a phenomenon, a sly intoxication. It is also a haunting, a probable curse. For how is one to dream beyond the answered dream? How might one recalibrate the very idea of ambition? Write again with urgency? Success is binding and so, too, is historical fiction. All those facts to get right. All those anachronisms to guard against. All that information. Writers of historical novels must be endlessly curious, and fierce. They must engage the reader on every page and win the battle against asphyxiating doubt. If Elizabeth Gilbert, known until now for her mega-memoir “Eat Pray Love,” was ever haunted by any of these questions, her raucously ingenious new novel, “The Signature of All Things,” has shoved any doubt in the closet and bolted the door. “Signature” is not just an historical novel that spans two centuries and many geographies. It’s a 500-page novel of ideas — a book about universal biological theory, the study of moss, the cultivation of quinine, the painting of orchids and the people who do these things with passion.
In other hands, this Bible-sized book would feel dense. I found unshackled joy on every page.
Consider, for example, Gilbert’s Henry Whittaker, born poor in England, in 1760. Henry will go on to become a powerful man — tough-minded, intellectually avaricious, richer than any in his adopted home of Philadelphia. He will build an estate on the west bank of the Schuylkill River — 350 acres, percolating greenhouses, a carriage house, outrageous demonstrations of money. He will also have a daughter named Alma, who is this book’s real star.
But before we get Alma, we get Henry as a young lad desperate to win at nearly any cost. Here he is, traveling the high seas with Captain Cook:
Henry went turtling, and ate dolphins. He was eaten by black ants. He sailed on. He saw tiny Indians with giant shells in their ears. He saw a storm in the tropics turn the skies a sickly green color — the only thing that had ever visibly frightened the older sailors. He saw the burning mountains called volcanoes. They sailed farther north. It got cold again. He ate rats again. They landed on the west coast of the continent of North America. He ate reindeer.
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Everything about Henry is outsized. His doings, his wanderings and his ambitions have all been infused with more than a hint of mythology and fable. It’s the man’s largesse that keeps us turning the pages. By the time Alma has grown into a character old enough to entertain us, Gilbert has hooked us in.
So has that piece of land on the western bank of the Schuylkill River — a slice of geography drawn from actual Philadelphia topography and an estate clearly patterned after William Hamilton’s Woodlands. Hamilton was, in real life, a famed botanist. His estate became, in time, a rural cemetery, a place I often walk ahead of my teaching hour at the University of Pennsylvania. Gilbert, I can assure you, has gotten this piece of land just right. She has made that land live, left it enchanted.
But let’s not lose sight of the star of “Signature” — which is to say Alma, Henry’s daughter, who, over the course of her long life, will grow into a man-sized, rooster-haired non-beauty with a mind more spectacular than the sky. She will gain a self-abnegating beauty of a sister. She will make a single girlfriend, fall in love with an orchid portraitist, want as women do, lose as women do, and travel to Tahiti as few lone women do. She will find solace in mosses and in her work toward a unifying scientific theory. Alma is a super-sized protagonist. She wants to know everything about almost everything. She wants, and we love her through the wanting.
The countless moving parts in Gilbert’s novel seam together, whole. It feels effortless, though it could not have been. It’s tempting to think that this excerpt, which appears toward the end of the book, belongs not just to Alma, but to Gilbert herself as she worked toward the end of this novel of brave and lovely ideas.
All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming one thing. Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again … of being most spectacularly alive. Not merely alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity — a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.
She would awaken, catch her breath, and immediately begin writing again.
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Beth Kephart is the author of 16 books, including “Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir.”
“The Signature of All Things”
By Elizabeth Gilbert, Viking, 501 pages, $28.95