Wash by Erica Wagner review, vivid portrait of a monumental American
Article excerpt
Erica Wagner's novel *Wash* brings Washington Augustus Roebling, the chief engineer behind the Brooklyn Bridge, vividly to life. When the bridge opened to the public on May 24, 1883, it was the world's longest suspension bridge, a feat of engineering that nearly killed Roebling himself through decompression sickness, forcing him to direct construction from his sickbed while his wife relayed instructions. Wagner's multifaceted portrait captures not just the monumental achievement but the man behind it: his ambition, his suffering, his marriage tested by catastrophe. The novel weaves together ambition, illness, and American aspiration into something more complex than a simple engineering triumph.
The life of the Brooklyn Bridge’s chief engineer inspires this multifaceted novel
Washington Augustus Roebling, or “Wash”, was the chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge, which, when opened to the public on 24 May 1883, was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was quite an achievement, but he didn’t do it alone. On the one hand there was his father, the austere and tyrannical John Roebling, who had designed and begun the bridge before his untimely death in 1869. On the other there was his wife, the accomplished and capable Emily, who, as well as providing moral and secretarial support, took on ever more responsibility for the project after Washington’s own health began to fail mysteriously.
Wash is something of a companion piece to Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner’s 2017 biography of Roebling. Spurning what she calls in her afterword “the clock’s time”, she has instead structured the narrative in accordance with “the soul’s time”; that is, by jumping backwards and forwards in time and place in a series of short chapters emphasising those individual moments, choices and encounters that together made this remarkable man who he was. It is a bold and engaging, if somewhat disorienting approach, giving this slender novel a vividness and intensity that might be smoothed over in a more traditional narrative arc.
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