C10| Saturday/Sunday, March 14 - 15, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
T
HERE ARE FEW
hard and fast rules
in the world of rare
book and man-
uscript collecting,
though two maxims that have
stood the test of time emerge as
guiding tenets in Philadelphia
dealer Nathan Raab’s account of
his determined search for his-
torically significant documents.
The first, in the words of Zack
Jenks, a savvy book scout in the
Larry McMurtry novel “Cadillac
Jack” (1982), is that “anything
can be anywhere.” A second,
more nuanced principle, comes
from Michael Sadleir, a distin-
guished British book-hunter and
bibliographer of the early 20th
century who professed that unlike
the natural world, where “the
bird who gets up earliest catches
the most worms,” success in this
pursuit “falls to birds who know
worms when they see them.”
As things of value go, manu-
scripts occupy a special place in
the pantheon of precious objects,
distinctive especially in that by
definition they are unique, and
that context pretty much means
everything. Provenance—verifi-
able trails of prior ownership—
along with condition and scarcity
matter a great deal, too. But how
something that is demonstrably
authentic fits into the grand
scheme of things—or, more to the
point, making the case for why
someone would pay a significant
amount of money for what to
the unschooled eye might be an
inconsequential sheet of paper—
is at the heart of the discourse
offered by Mr. Raab, president of
the Raab Collection, a high-end
purveyor of historical documents
based in the City of Brotherly
Love, and Luke Barr, his collabo-
rator.
Their book, “The Hunt for
History,” feeds into the renewed
interest we of the highly digitized
21st century have taken in mate-
rial objects that “tell us some-
thing” about our cultural legacy
in ways that are both immediate
and instructive—not virtual fac-
similes, in other words, but arti-
factual touchstones with the past.
Unlike physical objects that need
to be curated, a handwritten doc-
ument has a text of some sort
that usually explains itself, either
in explicit terms, or in more
subtle ways that have to be
CHRIS ISON/PA IMAGES/GETTY IMAGESTHE UNNAMED NARRATOR
in Hilary Leichter’s delirious
and deeply humane satire
“Temporary” (Coffee House,
184 pages, $16.95)aspires to
what a director at her temp
agency calls “the steadiness.”
That refers to the prospect of
a full-time job, of course, with
vacations and benefits (ask your
parents if the terminology is
unfamiliar). But it’s also an
existential condition, a dream
of arrival, a promised land
at the end of our workplace
wanderings. And increasingly,
it is a place as distant as legend.
“When a temp dies before the
steadiness,” Ms. Leichter writes,
“it’s said that she’s doomed to
perform administrative work
for the gods in perpetuity.”
The narrator is a gig-
economy everywoman navi-
gating the Purgatory Mountain
of bizarre job placements.
Her strengths are adaptability,
anonymity and an eternally
cheerful disposition—qualities
tested when she’s sent to work
in the crew of a pirate ship,
then as a human barnacle on a
rock, and then as the personal
assistant to an assassin. The
learning curve for the dirty
work assigned to her is consid-
erable: First she’s scrubbing
coffee mugs and next she’s
being asked to lend a hand in
cold-blooded murders.
Though its roots reach back
to Kafka, the genre of the office
farce has ballooned in the past
decade or so—see such ab-
surdist fables as Helen DeWitt’s“Lightning Rods,” Helen
Phillips’s “The Beautiful Bureau-
crat” and Hiroko Oyamada’s
“The Factory.” While most
of these send-ups are dryly
sarcastic, “Temporary” has
the manic, goofing energy of a
lounge act. Its target isn’t only
corporate drudgery or amoral
profiteering but also the pre-
carious state that makes people
feel desperately lucky to even
get a shot at the terrible jobs.
Being a novelist is also an
insecure racket, and like her
endlessly accommodating temp,
Ms. Leichter works hard to
keep the audience amused.
But behind the painted-on
smile is the melancholy of
impermanence. The temp forges
no meaningful connections
because she has no individual
worth; she is fungible. “I can
feel my necessity slipping away
with every extra minute,” she
says at the end of an assign-
ment: “It’s a rich, complicated
sort of sensation, like napping,
or dying.” Even serving as a
mother to an abandoned boy
ends in rejection. “I promised
you a job, not a family,” he says
when she takes the position too
much to heart. Soon she’s alone
again, waiting for the phone
call to tell her where her next
placement will be.
Kevin Nguyen’s pensive,
downbeat debut,“New Waves”
(One World, 306 pages, $27),
takes a more realistic approach
to depicting the way we work
now, though the details are
sometimes no less ludicrous.His narrator, Lucas Nguyen,
heads customer support at
a digital messaging platform
called Phantom, whose gimmick
is to erase communications
shortly after they are written.
In theory, this should attract
whistleblowers and other noble
truth-tellers; in practice, it’s
used by foul-mouthed teens
whose missives are so offensive
that Phantom feels obliged to
betray its principles by keeping
records of the conversations inorder to flag them for harass-
ment. Suddenly Lucas is over-
seeing a team of dozens of
people who spend all their
time analyzing the dashed-off
vulgarities of high-school kids
as if they were cracking the
Enigma code.
“New Waves” follows this
arc from early tech idealism to
corporate disillusion. It centers
on Lucas’s friendship with an
African-American coding whiz
named Margo, who feels at
odds with the mostly white
dot-com culture that needs her
genius but bridles at her non-
conformity. Margo’s randomdeath in a traffic accident
leaves a vacuum that Mr.
Nguyen fills with cynicism and
sadness. Phantom sells out to
satisfy its investors. Lucas,
bereft by the loss of his friend
and her unique creative spark,
breaks into Margo’s laptop
and devotes himself to under-
standing the secretive online
identity she cultivated in
private.
Mr. Nguyen is insightful and
precise about the particular
kind of emptiness that can
infect the tech world, where
actual people have less value
than the user data they repre-
sent. Lucas struggles, not very
successfully, with the suspicion
that he is in essence no more
than a row of numbers on a
spreadsheet. But the atmo-
sphere of pointlessness,
however finely observed, derails
the storytelling. Subplots are
introduced—such as the cyber-
crime Lucas and Margo collude
on at the start of the novel—
and then simply drift away
like forgotten ideas. It isn’t
just Lucas who misses Margo;
Mr. Nguyen doesn’t seem quite
sure what to do without her.
Say what you will about our
technological dystopia, it has
been a boon for the commercial
thriller industry. Megan Angelo’s
intelligent page-turner
“Followers” (Graydon House,
380 pages, $26.99)alternates
between 2015 and 2051, the time
lines divided by an apocalyptic
health crisis related to smart-
phone usage called the Spill.The present-day story line is
about manufacturing celebrity,
as a frustrated fashion blogger
named Orla begins writing
breathless articles about her
roommate Floss, a would-be
social-media influencer. The
ploy works, Floss gains millions
of fans and soon the pair have
become meme-generating
epiphenomena on a hit reality
series. In 2051, in the wake of
the Spill, reality TV and social
media have become national-
ized, and we follow the scripted
narrative of a young woman
named Marlow, who spends
most of her waking day in front
of a camera, bombarded by the
snarky commentary of an idle,
countrywide viewership.
The throwaway suspense
plot involves a paternity secret
that links the characters in the
two time frames. But the fun of
“Followers” is the way it carries
today’s social media bread-and-
circus to possible extremes.
In the future, screen devices
have evolved into cranial chips
that send messages straight to
the mind. The U.S. government
has replaced Instagram with
“Amerigram,” both censoring
and marketing its content. And
in reaction to the mandated
oversharing, privacy has become
a luxury product of the elite.
One twist is especially clever:
Marlow finds a letter from
decades past that she guesses
holds a clue about her parentage
but is written in a language she
can’t read. That language, she
finally figures out, is cursive.The Melancholy of Impermanence
THIS WEEK
Temporary
By Hilary LeichterNew Waves
By Kevin NguyenFollowers
By Megan AngeloOffice
legend:
If a temp
dies
beforeachieving
full
employ-
ment,
she is
doomed
to
perform
adminis-
trative
work for
the gods—forever.
fleshed out and highlighted with
thorough research and inter-
pretation. This careful detective
work can enhance its value mea-
surably in the marketplace.
The Rabb Collection was estab-
lished in 1989 by Steven Raab,
a successful attorney who had
decided, with the full support of
his wife, Susan, to take a stab at
turning what to that point had
been an enthusiastic pastime into
a gainful enterprise. By the time
their son Nathan, a 1996 grad-
uate of Haverford College, came
aboard full-time in the early
2000s, the Main Line firm had
become a leading purveyor of
historically relevant documents
and, as an added inducement to
prospective supply sources in the
general population, was paying
top dollar to acquire them.
In close to two decades as
a big-game document hunter,
Nathan Raab has scored a num-
ber of impressive coups, several
of them sufficiently noteworthy
to generate national news cover-
age. While names such as Benja-
min Franklin, Abraham Lincoln,
Albert Einstein, Susan B. An-
thony, John Kennedy, Ronald
Reagan and Amelia Earhart need
no eureka moment to establishbasic value, exactly what these
people might be asserting in
the texts often requires a detailed
back-story that can reveal an
otherwise uninspiring document
to be something quite extraor-
dinary.Mr. Raab cites numerous ex-
amples along these lines, one of
which came during the years of
his apprenticeship, as a challenge
from his father to “find the best
piece” listed in the catalog of a
forthcoming New York auction.
Going through the offerings page
by page, Mr. Raab had to admit
that he was stumped, at which
point his father told him to look
carefully at a seemingly mun-
dane letter written in 1801 from
the “Headquarters” of a British
military detachment in Egypt
directing a civil engineer to take
possession of a certain “Stone”BOOKS
‘The odds are on objects.’—WILLIAM MAXWELL
The Hunt for History
By Nathan Raab
with Luke Barr
Scribner, 251 pages, $30
BYNICHOLASA.BASBANES
from the French that bore an
inscription, and ensure that it “be
deposited in some place of secu-
rity.” His father’s earnest belief—
that “this is the order to seize the
Rosetta Stone”—turned out, after
careful research, to be spot on,
and its acquisition for “a few
hundred dollars” proved to be
an unqualified bargain. Another
hunch—that Teddy Roosevelt’s
intention, stated in a signed,
typewritten letter to “speak softly
but carry a big stick” might
qualify as the first recorded use
of that resonant phrase—was
equally prescient.
Mr. Raab’s fluency in sev-
eral foreign languages—he had
worked abroad with the Associ-
ated Press for a period before
joining the family business—came
in handy when he was able to rec-
ognize the merit of some letters
being offered at a Christie’s
sale of “a major collector who’d
recently died”—a person not
identified here, but clearly a
heavy hitter. There were hun-
dreds of marquee items sold over
several sessions, so many docu-
ments that some were offered
in bulk lots with minimal catalog
description, requiring those inter-
ested to discern for themselves
what might be lurking unnoticed
inside the boxes.
In one grouping of “dozens
and dozens” of European docu-
ments, Mr. Raab identified “one
royal treasure after the next,”
foremost among them a letter
written by Louis XVI in France
to George III in England—a year
before the French king was
guillotined—proposing a secret
alliance that might have saved
his life, and that of his wife,
Marie Antoinette. Added to that
were what he surmised to be the
first written reports of the death
on St. Helena of Napoleon, and
of the autopsy that followed.
Mr. Raab was not alone in his
acumen, however; a rival bidder
pushed the hammer price to
$68,750, “the most expensive lot
sold at the Christie’s auction that
day,” but still a steal, it turned
out, in the long run. “The great-
est gem can be buried under a
mountain of rock,” he concludes,
his enthusiasm for the chase
palpable in this diverting account
of treasure hunting in the fast
lane—a welcome addition to
the genre.Mr. Basbanes writes a column,
Gently Mad, for Fine Books &
Collections magazine. His latest
book, “Cross of Snow: A Life of
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,”
will be published in June.A Textual Detective
A manuscript expert’s
discoveries illuminate
the lives of Napoleon,
Einstein, Amelia
Earhart and others.EARLY IN THEcourse of Chris
Bohjalian’s“The Red Lotus”
(Doubleday, 383 pages, $27.95),
protagonist Alexis Remnick,
a 33-year-old Manhattan ER
doctor, has cause to remember
when she first learned that
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator
of Sherlock Holmes, had been
a physician: “She wasn’t surprised. So much
of what [doctors] did...wasdetective work
based largely on deductive reasoning.”
When her boyfriend of half a year, Austin
Harper, disappears during their bicycling tour
of Vietnam and is later found dead, Alexis is
faced with a situation that might stump even
the sleuth of Baker Street. Austin and Alexis
worked in the same New York hospital. He
wanted to go to Vietnam, he said, to visit the
sites of his father’s and uncle’s wartime service.
That tour of homage sent him on the solo ride
that led to his death—judged by the authorities
to be a hit-and-run accident.
But why would even an
experienced cyclist be riding
on a remote rural road after
dark? How could his right
hand bear the mark of a
wound supposedly caused by
his road mishap but which
left no mark on his riding
glove? Austin’s parents,
whom Alexis meets for the first time after
returning to the States, are hostile to her
notion that their son met with foul play. The
condescending father asks: “Do you have issues
with mental illness?” Austin’s supervisor thinks
that there’s no point to further investigating
Austin’s death: “It’s a tragedy, but not a crime.”
“The Red Lotus” is told from the alternating
points of views of a number of well-drawn
characters. The reader thus gains access to the
thoughts of those more sympathetic to Alexis
and her doubt about Austin’s demise. These
include an FBI attaché, a Vietnamese police
officer and a New York private detective she
hires—each of whom helps her begin to discern
some answers. They soon surmise that Austin
had hidden his true reason for going to Viet-
nam; could it have had something to do with
laboratory research, involving rodents and
diseases of pandemic potential, taking place
at the hospital where Austin and Alexis
both worked?
The good and bad hunches of Alexis and
her allies propel her closer to the truth, while
her Holmesian devotion to “pattern recognition”
never ceases: “You asked questions....You
worked backwards, moving intellectually from
effect to cause.” But deductive reasoning can
take you only so far in a thriller as full of
surprises as this one. Those who relished
the sudden shocks and well-timed twists
of Mr. Bohjalian’s 2018 work, “The Flight
Attendant,” should be well-pleased by his
latest book, whose unexpected revelations
extend to the final sentence.THIS WEEK
The Red
Lotus
By Chris
BohjalianMYSTERIES
TOMNOLANThe Adventure
Of the Solitary
Cyclist
FICTION
SAMSACKS