Independent Thinking

A wholly different take on the Revolutionary War.

Last Refuge of Scoundrels: A Revolutionary Novel

By Paul Lussier
Warner Books , 320 p., $26.95

by Paul Rosenberg

The vicious political battles of the 1790s — more venomous in most respects than those of the 1990s —ought to be enough to disabuse everyone of the lofty myth of our omniscient, god-like Founding Fathers. But they’re not. Lowly facts are a poor match for a good story. Knowing that, Paul Lussier recounts a very different version of the American Revolution, treating official history as its dully factual foil, and casting a Boston whore named Deborah Simpson as the driving force of the Revolution in his decidedly irreverent first novel, Last Refuge of Scoundrels.

We first meet Deborah, not yet sixteen, pilloried in the stocks in a Boston square, cursing John Hancock — a regular customer who has turned her in — as he passes in his carriage, tossing coins to the following crowd. From her perspective, it’s obvious that Revolution means much more than the War for Independence, still officially eleven years off. The novel’s 14-year-old narrator and protagonist, John Lawrence, catches a glimpse of her as he pulls himself from the muck-filled gutter he’s fallen into dodging Hancock’s carriage, and is instantly smitten.

It’s an inauspicious setting for love at first sight, so call it infatuation — on John’s part, that is. "Sod off!" are Deborah’s first words to him. But gradually she introduces him to her world, her rag-tag assemblage of working-class co-conspirators, and her vision of what Revolution would bring, a world of "fairness and good sense and no hypocrisy," she explains at their first meeting.

"Did this have anything to do with all this fuss about a Stamp Tax and the Yankee hostility toward our English king?

"She laughed. ‘Not really, but for now, it’ll do.’"

From the Stamp Act Riots to the Boston Massacre, Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, we see events unfold from John’s perspective as Deborah appears again and again, manipulating British authorities and Founding Fathers alike, one step ahead of their attempts to manipulate her. She works as a spy, a triple agent who takes utmost advantage of the all-pervasive duplicity, as both sides repeatedly need things to go seemingly against their interests to justify retaliation and mobilize support. She’s not just a spy, but a strategist, organizer and eventually a soldier as well.

Yet she also remains idiosyncratic and apart. At the Boston Tea Party — an eerie, quasi-magical event in this telling — John discovers her stealing tea, rather than dumping it into the bay — a seemingly heinous betrayal of the patriot cause. An hour-long chase reveals that her purpose has nothing to do with violating the cause. She just has her own way of celebrating it that’s less a violation than an apotheosis.

The only Founding Father who fares well in this account is George Washington — but only after a rough beginning, and only because of his half-hidden trust in and reliance on Deborah and her confederates. Indeed, the book is framed as an effort to redeem the father of our country, John’s attempt to save him from the "embalmed" personage he’d become, "so tyrannized by his own image he’d carry a self-help guide on his person as reminder of just how General George Washington should be expected to act." There’s no attempt to inflate his handful of victories to portray him as a great general. It’s his willingness to scheme and wait for the right opening, working with and learning from Deborah, that wins him praise and eventual victory at Yorktown.

There’s humor, action and bawdiness much in 18th-century style, but the sense of absurdity and detachment leans more toward the flavor (not structure) of Tristram Shandy than Tom Jones. For those who think the whole enterprise fanciful, an endnote provides brief descriptions of the historical characters John and Deborah were based on. Read this, and the Revolutionary War will never seem quite the same again. The Patriot it most definitely is not.

Paul Lussier will read Fri., April 20, noon at Penn Bookstore, 3601 Walnut St, 215-898-7595.