Released in late summer 2020, Christopher Shaw's The Power Line escaped our attention until recently, but the book is an uncommon accomplishment that merits a belated review. Shaw, who lives in Bristol and has retired after 20 years of teaching creative writing at Middlebury College, preceded that career with a long stint in northern New York. His time on the other side of Lake Champlain, both as a guide and as editor of Adirondack Life, richly informs The Power Line.
The book declares itself to be a novel, and Shaw goes to some pains to support its status as fiction. He even prefaces his tale with a cautionary "Note to the Reader" that states:
The question of what constitutes truth in the printed word is of understandable concern to the careful reader, doubly so in these truth challenged times. It goes without saying that you should bring to your reading of this regional chronicle the same healthy skepticism you would bring to reading scripture, Shakespeare, or the New York Times.
Why does this matter? Because Shaw then proceeds utterly to confound his readers' grasp of the truthful and the apocryphal. The squirmy category of "historical fiction" will not do here, even though the author anchors his prose with real towns, rivers, lakes and peaks and sprinkles in real figures, from naturalist-turned-president Teddy Roosevelt to gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond.
The epistolary novel uses subtle but strategic point-of-view shifts to make the past feel present, just as a film narrator's voice-over might introduce a memory, only to fade out as viewers are immersed in the remembered experience.
“I wanted to write fiction that snapped and moved along. I wanted to write it based in the experience of the Adirondacks and the ways of the Adirondacks but about an Adirondacks that was connected outward, rather than just inward,” Shaw said.
“The Power Line” follows the adventures of Fran Germaine, an engineer and fiddle player, and his friend Lonnie Monroe. They work for Paul Smith’s Electric Company and as bootleggers for Legs Diamond, a gangster in the Prohibition era.
The first part of the novel is action-oriented, with a classic western, or perhaps gangster tone, though throughout there are serious reflections on the Adirondack landscape, and how it has changed through the decades with additional infrastructure and transforming technology.
It’s a packed novel and one of several that Shaw has planned in an Adirondack series, including a “Power Line” prequel, “The Crazy Wisdom,” a book about his longtime friendship with fellow Schenectady native Jon Cody, and “Adirondack Mind,” a collection of his essays about the Adirondacks which spans more than 15 years.
“The Power Line” is one of three books Shaw has written about the Adirondacks (a fourth is in progress). With the help of designer Pamela Fogg and editor Jennifer Kiewit, it’s the first one to get published. He has also written a number of shorter pieces about the region, which have appeared in literary journals, magazines and newspapers.
Altogether, his work, which is suffused with great intelligence but not burdened by it, has both arisen from and in turn influenced the place he loves so well, and he has helped to create the very thing he went into those woods to find 50 years ago.
The Power Line is "a joy to read," and "compresses social history (great camps, hotels, sports and guides, the erotically charged cure cottages and sanitariums); it features a gallery of historical characters: (Theodore Roosevelt, Paul Smith, Edward Livingston Trudeau, Legs Diamond, Bob Marshall, Art Pratt, Noah John Rondeau, Rockwell Kent, Jacques Suzanne); it footnotes economic history (the development of hydroelectric power, purportedly for flood control, but in reality, to supply local industries with cheap power, to the detriment of the Forest Preserve); and limns the political history of the Adirondack Park (from the origins of an environmental ethic to the sometimes violent battles over land use regulation.)" Chris Shaw shows "the rare gifts of a writer in peak form."
