Sheldon Greene

  From a distance, it looks like any other valley. A long green bowl, flanked by hills, stitched with paths that do not show up on official maps. In Sheldon Greene’s novels, such valleys are never just scenery. They are arguments. In Tamar , the Binyan valley holds a mixed Jewish and Native American community in the nineteenth-century American West. It is cultivated and remembered. Orchards are tended, water is diverted, homes are built and rebuilt. Festivals return with the seasons. The dead are buried in the valley’s hills, in places everyone in the community can locate by feel. For Tamar and her people, the valley is not “land” in the abstract. It is the place where their history has taken root. In After the Parch , the Glade is a forested bowl tucked inside a future California Republic damaged by drought, epidemic and political fracture. Forty families live there as deliberate outlaws, living around an old mine and growing food according to rules they have worked out for t...

  It starts with a sore elbow and a polite handshake. Nudelman’s bursitis has been getting worse for months. The cortisone shots hurt, the relief is temporary, and even turning over in bed has become an exercise in gritted teeth. He complains about it to his rabbi because that is what people do when they run out of things to tell their doctor. Rabbi Newman listens, winces in sympathy, and pats him lightly on the shoulder as they part in the foyer. Nothing special. No shofar blasts, no chant, just a friendly touch at the end of a conversation. Later that evening, watching television, Nudelman realizes the burning is gone. The ache that had colonized his days has disappeared so cleanly it feels as if it belonged to someone else. He stands up, flexes his arm, knocks over a vase in his excitement, and does the modern thing a man does when something inexplicable happens. He picks up the phone. “It is you,” he insists when the rabbi answers, already half apologizing for sounding su...

Most Americans learn the Revolution as a story set in a narrow strip of land from Boston to Yorktown. The familiar images are Boston Harbor, Lexington Green, Independence Hall, Washington at Valley Forge and Cornwallis’s surrender in Virginia. Sugar islands, Jewish merchants, slave revolts and French arsenals in the Caribbean seldom appear on that stage. In Pursuit of Happiness , Sheldon Greene keeps all the famous events in view. Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and the Christmas Eve attack on the Hessians are part of the mental landscape of his characters. So are the early actions of the Marines and the French king’s crucial arms assistance. What he does differently is to shift the main camera south, onto a Caribbean island where sugar and slavery are the everyday reality. From that angle, the war for American independence looks less like a clean origin myth and more like one episode in a much wider and more compromised struggle. Sheldon Greene sets Pursuit of Happiness in...

Sheldon Greene’s career, at first glance, looks like a split screen. On one side is a life in law and policy: much of it in public interest law; impact litigation for the rural poor, drafting statutes, work on national energy and immigration policy, founding roles in major institutions. On the other side is a shelf of Sheldon Greene novels that travel from Caribbean sugar islands to a near future California Republic, from nineteenth century railheads to a Jewish boarding school in a failing steel town. A body of work that critics have begun to treat as literature on justice and identity and as fiction inspired by legal careers . Seen more closely, the split disappears. Greene’s fiction and his legal work are twin approaches to the same set of questions: Who belongs where. What justice might look like. How people keep their dignity when history and institutions are against them. His novels are not position papers. They are page turning stories that invite readers to inhabit mor...