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While many have been asked, “What famous figure from history would you invite to dinner?” author Peter Boody takes it a step further. In his new novel “Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me,” he poses the question: What if that historic figure not only came to dinner but stayed?
In this book, Mr. Boody breathes life into Thomas Jefferson, rounding him out as a man who steps from Monticello into the future, more than 200 years later.
“I liked the idea of showing someone from history around modern life,” he said.
Welcome to 2010, where a ghost can Google himself.
“Our history is still with us,” reflected Mr. Boody. “The idea of seeing your loved ones around every corner through your life is a very real phenomenon, even if they’re no longer here. We live our lives surrounded.”
In the novel, the characters are all surrounded in one way or another. The protagonist, Jack, for example, is surrounded by his lost wife and son. But he is also involved in a very corporeal love triangle—the ghost of Thomas Jefferson and Jack are both in love with the beautiful, young Rachel. And both Jack and Thomas are using the living, breathing Rachel to get closer to the ghosts of their past.
Mr. Boody said he was inspired by Annette Gordon-Reed’s book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.”
“It brought Jefferson’s complexity to life for me. I was compelled by the idea of what he might be if he had to come back and been on the dependent side,” Mr. Boody said. “What would happen to people with great wealth and power if they didn’t have it? How would they handle things if they had to live like the rest of us?”
In the course of posing these dramatic questions, the author presents a Jefferson who is both blown away and bothered by the newest technology and how it both connects and distances us. Mr. Boody also answers burning questions, such as: “Is Jefferson a boxer or briefs sort of guy?” and “What would he watch on YouTube?”
Certainly the future is a challenging place for a controlling personality with no formal identification. And, with no money and no power, Jefferson is forced to rely on Jack and Rachel—not only as his astral tour guides but for secular survival.
It is no coincidence that Thomas Jefferson arrives in the future just as the first African-American president is about to be elected. The theme which filters through the narrative is that nothing is black and white, not even the black-or-white issue.
“There is a ghostly aura around the book,” said Mr. Boody, “Namely the race and slavery question. As a young man Jefferson spoke against slavery yet became more conservative about protecting the South’s power as he got older. That was the great irony about Jefferson.”
True to history, Jefferson continues to struggle with those issues in his fictional, modern-day incarnation.
The novel raises some intriguing questions: Can your heroes withstand being made human? And would we still admire our favorite dinner guest from history if he or she faced modern media scrutiny?
To answer that himself, Mr. Boody responded, “The more human we find them to be, the greater we find them as heroes. To be full of fault and yet to achieve great things is all the more remarkable. Suddenly they’re not gods, they’re real people.”
In the book, Mr. Boody takes Jefferson off his marble throne and puts him into a cab to Harlem.
“The man was brilliant but also a little bit of a Pollyanna and goofball,” he said.
What binds all of Mr. Boody’s characters together is the great desire to be reunited with family, he said, adding, “Jefferson is in pain because he’s all alone in the modern world. He changes because he realizes how cold he was about certain affairs of the heart and how manipulative and calculating he was and now has a chance to rectify things.”
Ultimately, realizations about love are what bring Jefferson, Rachel and Jack to fulfill their own personal destinies. In the end, it turns out that their humanity, as much as their heroics, is what defines them.
Peter Boody is a former longtime editor at The Press. His book “Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me” is available as a Kindle-readable e-book on Amazon.com.
on Dec 14, 2010