The Great Mistake | Jonathan Lee (2021)

Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake is a masterpiece of a novel; a beautiful, enthralling, humane novel of deep sympathy which I devoured in three days.

It is the story of Andrew Haswell Green, a sort of 19th century equivalent to Robert Moses, in that he was a man that Got Things Done. But the Things that he Got Done were very different: he helped put together several notable public institutions – the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, and New York Public Library among them.

It is also the story of his murder: in broad daylight, at the age of eighty-three, in front of his house, by a black man that had mixed Green up with someone else, because he – Cornelius Williams, the murderer – had ‘fallen in love’ (became obsessed) with Bessie Davis – a black sex worker that was probably the wealthiest black woman of her time – and erroneously believed that Andrew Green was one of her clients.

It is also the story of love – what we today would call gay, or homosexual, or queer – in a time where the names we now know it by hadn’t yet come into being. Was it ever consummated? There’s no answer. What's abundantly clear, though, is that it was the emotional side that was most impactful on Green.

It is many other stories: Inspector McCluskey, the detective investigating Green’s murder. The role and place of race, because Williams was black, and so was Bessie Davies, and Green was white, all this in a time after Reconstruction and before the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s. It is the shaping of New York and of Greater New York.

These stories are told through chapters each of which leaps from Andrew Green’s life to his murder (or just before his murder, or Inspector McCluskey investigating afterward) – in short, it’s not told in strict chronological order. It’s told in the most magnificent prose: here adopting the tone of a newspaper, here becoming intimate with the reader and posing questions, here aphoristic and epigrammatic. And it is all told with moving humanity – while neither Davis nor Williams are the protagonists (though we do get Davis’s perspective at one point), the racism of the era and the fate of Williams are quietly, incisively remarked upon.

It is all so beautiful that it brings you to the edge of tears and then pushes you over, then ever so gently pulls you back. My favorite novel of the year. I want to explore the rest of Jonathan Lee’s bibliography.

The Great Mistake is book nr. 99 of the year and was read from August 15th to 17th.