The novel charts his affections from a boyhood incident to his close friendship with Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York and presidential candidate. He explores the loneliness behind that itch, and how even successfully reinventing oneself might not scratch what really needs to be scratched.įor Green, a good part of that loneliness, in Lee’s vision of him, was living in the closet. “He had begun to feel the first stirrings of it,” he writes of Green as a teenager, “the longing to transform himself into someone new, that special American itch for the future.” But Lee is ultimately more interested in showing how Green didn’t change despite his accomplishments. One conventional way for a novelist to recreate such an unlikely arc would be to make it soar - a young, insecure farm boy transformed into a city-building titan. At one point later in life, Green remembers the New York he found when he first arrived, “a city confined below 14th, one you could get your whole imagination around.” He ended up, among his other achievements, uniting Manhattan with its neighboring boroughs to form the city as we know it today (a move that critics at the time called the “Great Mistake”). Well into adulthood, Green remembers his father saying: “Hold the ax like a man.”Īfter moving to the city, Green began work as an apprentice in a general store, sweaty work opening bags of beans and shelving milk and eggs. The future power broker was one of 11 children, with a sometimes violent and taunting father. Lee’s imagining of Green’s childhood on a struggling Massachusetts farm has precise emotional contours. (Lee, a British-born New Yorker who recently became editorial director of the publisher Bloomsbury, wrote a previous novel, “High Dive,” about an assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher.) From there, the novel’s chapters toggle between Green’s biography and the investigation of his murder. Green is shot five times in Lee’s opening pages by Cornelius Williams, a dapper 43-year-old Black man, after the two have a brief and - to Green - confusing conversation. Or at least, his name faintly echoes rather than resounds, despite the fact that he was an integral force behind the creation of Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Public Library, among other postcard destinations in the city. One presumable motivation behind Jonathan Lee’s fourth novel, “The Great Mistake,” is that Green has not been remembered.

In the days after his death, this newspaper published an article in which it was written: “His name had been associated with some of the most creditable enterprises ever devised for the benefit of the city. Andrew Haswell Green, having reached 83 years old, was murdered outside his Park Avenue home in 1903.

Apower review