BookLife by publishers weekly

An “Editor’s Pick”

“A Marvelous yarn imagining Karl Marx at the California Gold Rush”

“This wildly entertaining debut imagines a most unexpected adventure with a light, witty touch.

“In 1849, revolutionary socialist Karl Marx, who yearned for nothing more than to see the world’s workers unite against their oppressors, gets caught up in the California Gold Rush while still composing The Communist Manifesto. The real Marx never visited the U.S., but Carlson relishes putting a somewhat bumbling caricature of the philosopher and economist in contact with a diverse American cast and then letting Marx, who hopes to find enough of the yellow metal to erase his debts, dish his observations in his letters to his wife, Jenny, and to Friedrich Engels. The raucous Americans he meets, he notes, believe “they are the Israelites taking the promised land by force of arms.” As the previously sleepy port town booms, bursting at its seams with characters from every walk of life, Marx’s arrival proves inauspicious: he is chucked into the bay.

“Carlson blends picaresque fun—the camp Marx stays in is known as “Chucklehead Diggings”—with vital historical detail, pleasing period language, and sharp insights into commerce, humanity, and California: “There is no class system,” Marx observes of Chucklehead, “all men are equally debased by their greed.” Characters range from ridiculous to sad to outright repulsive as the story rises and falls, from the feckless Prussian agents following Marx to the often shifty miners, sailors, and bandits that Carlson juxtaposes against the Miwok tribespeople, whose communal living inspires Marx. Everyone in this human carnival is fighting to survive in an unforgiving environment, though Marx’s efforts to enlighten Chuckleheaders get little traction.

“Carlson’s diverse characters are richly built, with foibles, in-depth backgrounds, and competing motivations, often while facing difficult choices. Especially engaging is Sixto, the mixed-race narrator, raised at a mission but sold young to a man named El Loco; this Marx may often be a comic figure, but early on he secures Sixto’s freedom while concerning himself, touchingly, with everyone’s.”

Comparable Titles: John Barth, T.C. Boyle.

FROM KIRKUS REVIEWS

A Starred Review

“A thoughtful and funny historical romp featuring a fascinatingly sympathetic Marx”

Carlson’s novel chronicles the unlikely adventures of Karl Marx in the American West. As the story opens, famed political philosopher Karl Marx is aboard a ship on his way to the New World. He’s fleeing a crowd of creditors, and he’s hoping for more in America than just an escape: “If the reports about the gold in California are only half true,” he writes in a letter to his wife, “I am confident I will be coming home to you and the girls as a new man, able to pay our debts and erase the shame of poverty.”

Marx’s landfall is less pleasant than he had hoped; he gets mocked, tossed overboard, and stuck in deep river mud, and he’s being followed by Prussian agents of King Frederick William IV who are intent upon rifling through his papers in search of his notorious Manifesto and amusingly relay the great man’s misadventures (“We have seen nearly every day,” they breathlessly report, “how Marx drinks the local rotgut whiskey to the point of extreme gesloshment”).

Marx is befriended by a teenager named Sixto, another renegade running from his past, and the two commence a series of escapades against the backdrop of 1849 California and the madness of the Gold Rush. “It seemed like half the human race was hellbent on striking it rich,” thinks Sixto, not yet aware of the crushing irony of this observation in the company of the author of The Communist Manifesto.

As Carlson expertly guides his narrative to the possibility of a socialist republic in Gold Rush California, he misses no opportunities for sly humor or surprisingly touching scenes between Marx and young Sixto.

The book’s irresistible comedy is reinforced by all of the letters Carlson includes from the people who are disappointed in poor, harried Marx, including his partner, Engels, and his wife, Jenny (“Don’t bother to defend the indefensible,” she writes to him. “Our marriage is, as you might put it, a dialectical wreck”).