I’m not at all sure just how long I’ve had a copy of Parrot and Olivier in America hanging around my house. I think I likely picked it up at some point at a library book sale and added it to one of my large piles of unread books. (The problem here is that the impulse to purchase and the impulse to read are not the same, and so many volumes end up in some kind of book limbo while I await the second impulse, which comes sporadically and unpredictably.) After some unknown number of years in this unread book limbo, at long last, I ended up carrying this one along on a trip, and finally read it.

It’s good! Don’t let my procrastination influence you. Parrot and Olivier in America is not a beach read, though–this one requires some thought and concentration. Dense and allusive, It’s an imaginative take on Alexis de Tocqueville (or at least, his fictitious stand-in here, Olivier de Garmont, a young French aristocrat exploring America), contrasting his culture and sensibilities with the Americans he meets and with the background of his middle-aged English secretary (known as “Parrot,” and having a complex and colorful past). The novel is intelligent, perceptive, rather funny at times, absolutely bursting with ideas and, honestly, a little exhausting, as Carey (an Australian novelist living in the United States) critiques societies, manners, and morals, both past and present. The structure of the book is challenging here as well, as the story jumps backward and forward in time, and as the narration is blinkered by the perspectives and prejudices of the main characters, who start off in mutual loathing, and eventually earn each other’s respect and affection.

If you are looking for trenchant descriptions of class and cultural conflicts, historical fiction (besides a version of de Tocqueville, we have a fictitious John James Audubon here as well, and certainly some shades of Charles Dickens, as an influence over the narrative), insight about the French aristocracy, the English working class, and America in the nineteenth century, exuberant and playful language, and a bit of demanding intellectual engagement–this messy, smart, quirky, and effective novel may well be for you.

A somewhat prescient quote from the despairing Olivier on his failure to love America:

“[y]ou will follow fur traders and woodsmen as your presidents, and they will be as barbarians at the head of armies, ignorant of geography and science, the leaders of mob daily educated by a perfidious press which will make them so confident and ignorant that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals, and only theater gaudy spectacles, and the paintings made to please that vulgar class of bankers, men of no moral character, half-bourgeois and half-criminal, who will affect the tastes of an aristocracy but will compete with each other like wrestlers at a fair, wishing only to pay the highest price for the most fashionable artist. Do not laugh, sir. Listen. I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.”

The optimistic conclusion from Parrot:

“Look, it is daylight. There are no sansculottes, nor will there ever be again. There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be. Your horrid visions concerning fur traders are groundless. The great ignoramus will not be elected. The illiterate will never rule. Your bleak certainty that there can be no art in a democracy is unsupported by the truth.

You are wrong, dear sir, and the proof that you are wrong is here, in my jumbled life, for I was your servant, and became your friend. I was your employee and am now truly your progenitor, by which I mean that you were honestly MADE IN NEW YORK by a footman and a rogue.”

Who has the better argument here? Perhaps we must wait another century or two to find out.

NOVEL: Parrot and Olivier in America

AUTHOR: Peter Carey

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2010

IMAGE: book cover, Vintage