Yellow Jack
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REVIEW BY ADAM DUNN
Josh Russell's ambitious first novel centers around a fictional apprentice to the nineteenth-century patriarch of photography, Louis Daguerre, whose breakthrough in making copper and metal surfaces light-sensitive in the presence of mercury vapor made photographic reproduction possible. Mr. Russell's antihero, Claude Marchand, a boy orphaned by a brutal crime, is apprenticed to Daguerre and is fired for giving away a daguerrotype. He flees Paris for New Orleans with the tools of his master's trade, and establishes himself as something of a cross between a painter and a magician displaying his daguerrotypes, which he calls "soliotypes" to throw off suspicion. It is the summer of 1838 and New Orleans is, as usual, being decimated by the annual outbreak of yellow fever, colloquially known as the "Jack" for which the novel takes its name. This proves to be something of a windfall for Claude, who does a thriving business making funeral portraits of the dead, when he isn't robbing people with an empty pistol for startup capital. At first, Claude lays low, marking time with a mulatto woman named Millicent and an opium fiend named Peter. This debauched triangle becomes dangerously rhombic when Claude is commissioned to portray Stephanie Marmu, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. It's bad enough that Claude is compelled to ravish his (married) subject. But things really go awry with Vivian, a pubescent acquaintance of Stephanie, and a devious and promiscuous schemer capable of manipulating any man near her. Claude is jerked around New Orleans' smart set like a toy, blackmailed by but hopelessly smitten with Vivian, ridiculed by a mocking critic named Felix, and bullied by Vivan's father. Revenge is stolen from him by the rampaging fever, which slowly reduces the considerable cast. Claude evades Yellow Jack's clutches, but Daguerre has the last laugh, as constant exposure to mercury robs Claude first of his teeth, then his sanity. Mr. Russell's rich tale is at times uneven, with the narrative alternately unfolding through Claude, excerpts from Millicent's diary, and an unseen narrator's references to a modern compendium of Claude's work. But the story of Claude's downward spiral, complete with its underlying theme of an artist struggling with his paranoid obsessions in nineteenth-century America, takes a strong cue from Edgar Allan Poe, and Mr. Russell's depiction of 1840s New Orleans make Yellow Jack a dark treat. JOSH RUSSELL lives in Gainesville, FL, and teaches English at the University of Florida. Yellow Jack is his first novel. Adam Dunn writes reviews and features for Current Diversions and Speak magazine.
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