I finished reading it a couple of months ago and have been stymied as to how to describe it other than, well, as one of the best works of literary fiction to come out of Canada in years. I know that's a big claim, but there it is.




George Fetherling's recent novel Walt Whitman's Secret is a surprise of a book. Written in an authentic-sounding 19th century voice for much of the time, the narrative is uniquely paced for a contemporary effort. The work is subtle, complex, and sometimes deceptively passive.  It builds slow, and it breaks, when it breaks, with an avalanche-like effect.

Walt Whitman's last days are not the centre of this novel, but they are the reader's inroad to the narrative, his past, his loves and obsessions, as well as the characters who inhabit his last days and those who inhabit his memory. Whitman is befriended and aided by a young couple, Horace Traubel and his wife Anne. Horace acts as a kind of informal secretary, organizing and promoting Whitman's poetry as his life winds down. Anne is something else.  

Historically, the Traubels did live and know Whitman, and Fetherling makes use of the exhaustive works by Traubel on the subject, but he chooses not to be hampered by them. This is fiction, not biography. Fetherling's narrative is organized around a fictional letter/memoir from Horace to the Canadian Flora MacDonald (spiritualist and Whitman devotee) and is punctuated by more immediate, omniscient asides that take us out of Traubel's often claustrophobic first person reminiscences.

What Traubel lacks in charisma, however, Fetherling more than makes up for in the subtlety of his prose.  This is a novel that manipulates tone and mood to perfection.  And Traubel ends up telling us more than he intends.   



Subversive, brilliant, this is a novel that should top the award lists. At any rate, it's an engrossing read!