THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 77
his hearing by age twelve from an un
known cause.
Reverse chronologies might work
well in fictions like Christopher No
lan’s “Memento” or Harold Pinter’s “Be
trayal,” where they are serving grander
themes of the fragility of memory and
the failures of fidelity, but they are an
unsatisfying solution to the problem
of how to structure a biography. Mor
ris gestures toward a better one, by tit
ling each section with a discipline in
which Edison distinguished himself:
each backwardmarching decade is
matched to botany, defense, chemis
try, magnetism, light, sound, telegra
phy, or natural philosophy. Tracing
someone’s intellectual interests across
a lifetime can be more meaningful than
dragging the subject and the reader
ever onward through calendrical time.
But a backward biography, while cer
tainly an invention, is, as Edison might
have pointed out, neither practical nor
profitable.
Even if you make your peace with
this reverse narration—which, to be
honest, I did, partly because Edison
feels so much like a time traveller—
“Edison” is still a frustrating book. It
contains little new material, good prose
but far too much of it, and no novel
argument or fresh angle to motivate
such an exhaustive return to an already
storied life. If anything, Morris offers
the same strange apologia for “Edison”
that he did for “Dutch.” “Nobody
around him understood him,” Morris
said of Reagan. “Every person I inter
viewed, almost without exception, even
tually would say, ‘You know, I could
never really figure him out.’ ” In the
same vein, Morris once compared Ed
ison to electricity itself, an invisible
force seen only when it acts on the
world around it. “What he was in per
son is harder, maybe impossible to say,”
Morris concluded, “because he put so
much of himself into his work.”
And yet figuring people out is the
fundamental task of the biographer.
Every person is elusive in one way or
another, sometimes even unto herself,
but it is possible to confront those inner
mysteries in a biography without re
sorting to fabrications or gimmicks.
It’s a lesson Morris could have learned
from Edison: sometimes, what’s called
for isn’t invention but perfection.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Crisis of Conscience, by Tom Mueller (Riverhead). This tren
chant examination of whistleblowing is based on inter
views with more than two hundred people who have ex
posed wrongdoing in areas such as national security, finance,
and health care. Whistleblowers emerge as “prickly and
doctrinaire”—under ordinary circumstances, stubborn to a
fault—but this is what enables them to place conscience
above institutional pressures, often at great personal cost,
legal protections notwithstanding. The book went to press
before a whistleblower’s complaint triggered a Presidential
impeachment inquiry, but Mueller notes that, under the cur
rent Administration, the federal government has seen a surge
in leaks and whistleblowing, which, amid our present trou
bles, he sees as both a “symptom and a potential cure.”The Collector of Leftover Souls, by Eliane Brum, translated
from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Graywolf ).
A Brazilian journalist, aiming to transcend reductive ste
reotypes of her country—“Carnival and soccer. Favelas, butts,
and violence”—writes about what she calls “everyday insur
rections.” In poetic, immersive essays, Brum assembles a
chorus of “many Brazilian tongues”: forestdwelling mid
wives, elderlycarehome residents, a terminal cancer pa
tient, farflung Amazon populations. In a São Paulo favela,
she investigates not violence and death but “the delicate
things that made life possible,” challenging herself to main
tain an “eye of astonishment” while chronicling inequality.The Shadow King, by Maaza Mengiste (Norton). Flitting
across decades and perspectives, this capacious novel cen
ters on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935, in which
Mussolini’s forces overran an underequipped Ethiopian
Army and Emperor Haile Selassie was forced into exile.
(The Italian occupation lasted until 1941.) The novel’s cast
includes Fifi, a prostitute risking her life to spy on an Ital
ian general; Ettore, a Jewish Italian soldier who uses his
camera to record atrocities in which he is complicit; and
Hirut, an orphaned servant who becomes a rebel sniper, “a
girl standing on a mountain, gazing at her fallen enemies
with the gun in her hand.” Mengiste adopts the register of
myth to shape an epic of nationhood and resistance.Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
While visiting his childhood home, in Kolkata, the protag
onist of this novel, a rarebook dealer living in New York,
hears a Bengali tale about a gun merchant who angers a
snake goddess. Struck by parallels between the story and a
thesis he once wrote, he sets out on an exploration that leads
from a shrinking island in the Sundarbans to Venice. Every
step introduces him to a new character and a new connec
tion, and the tangle of coincidences reveals the devastating
effects of climate change on animal behavior, and also the
trauma of human migration. Blending a mysterynovel plot
with something more folkloric, Ghosh surveys an increas
ingly ravaged world.