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Historian Otis Pease once remarked that the story of nineteenth-century America could be encompassed in the lives of the two sets of James brothers–William and Henry in the East, Frank and Jesse in the West. The James Boys goes further by making all four of them the fruit of the same family tree and showing how it shakes out.
In 1876, the No. 4 Missouri Pacific Express pulls out of Kansas City for Saint Louis. Among those on board is Henry James, the erudite and esteemed novelist and brother of the brilliant philosopher William James. Trying his hand at travel writing, Henry is beset, as ever, by hypochondria–in the form, this case, of dire digestive woes.
Suddenly, the train is stopped and robbed–and not by just any bandits but by the legendary James Gang. Taken hostage by the brigands, Henry realizes to his unspeakable horror that Jesse and Frank are in fact “Rob” and “Wilky,” his long-lost brothers, who had disappeared during the Civil War and been presumed dead for more than a decade.
From there the ride only gets wilder, careening through underbrush and ivory towers, throwing together America’s greatest intellectuals and most notorious outlaws in a saga of six-guns and sherry that is peopled by a fascinating roster of passengers, both historical and imagined. Most prominent among them are Elena Hite, a feisty young feminist deeply aroused by the down-and-dirty charisma of the criminal Jesse; Alice Gibbens, the eminently sensible schoolteacher engaged to the sexually inexperienced William, who tempts him to stay put rather than joining Henry out West; and William Pinkerton, the renowned detective hot on all of their trails–especially Elena’s.
Based on and incorporating actual events, The James Boys is a through-the-looking-glass romp that boldly blends both sides of the American character–the brilliant and the barbaric–in one unforgettable family and one seriously entertaining story.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 17, 2008 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781588366771
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781588366771
- File size: 509 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 28, 2008
Former Basic Books editor Liebmann-Smith, who cocreated Comedy Central's The Tick
, takes “what's in a name?” to amusing extremes in his debut novel. Novelist Henry James and Harvard psychologist William James really did have two younger brothers, neither of whom amounted to much. That situation changes drastically in Liebmann-Smith's goofball historical conceit, part The Bostonians
and part Blazing Saddles
. In 1876, Henry James travels by train on a New York Tribune
–commissioned journalistic tour. When the train is suddenly ambushed by a group of bandits led by Frank and Jesse James, the latter exclaims, on encountering the novelist: “Holy shit.... It's Harry!” The jokes and historical squiblets go off like six-guns in the 200-plus pages that follow, with Frank and Jesse James starring as the wayward brethren of the illustrious New England Jameses (which, in real life, they most certainly were not). Liebmann-Smith includes enough plot, to keep this single-joke, creatively imagined biography chugging along. -
April 15, 2008
Liebmann-Smith is an accomplished comedy writer with numerous scripts, magazine articles, and book collaborations to his credit; in his first novel, he posits the hilariously outrageous conceit that Frank and Jesse James were the younger brothers of Boston's William and Henry James. The tale starts in 1876 with a James gang train robbery, which reunites Henry with the younger brothers he had thought were dead, and ends with Henry's death in 1916. Never in the history of the American West has an outlaw gang so botched their banditry, as detailed in a bullet-by-bullet retelling of the 1876 Northfield Bank raid. Written chiefly from Henry's point of view, this story apes James's literary stylean unfortunate decision that turns what could have been an interesting story into an almost unreadable mass of ten-page character portraits and overblown literary jargon that will leave most readers either baffled or fumbling for their dictionary. Absquatulated, indeed! A lot of cleverness and a lot of biography went into this novel, but Liebmann-Smith mishandled the tale as badly as Frank and Jesse bungled Northfield. Recommended for literary masochists only. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/1/08.]Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L.Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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