Thomas Mallon Henry and Clara.
Ticknor & Fields, 358 pages, $22.95
reviewed by Brooke Allen
“A work of inference, speculation, and outright invention”: this is the way Thomas Mallon describes his new book, Henry and Clara. If one had to shoehorn it into a genre, “historical fiction” would make the easiest fit, but Henry and Clara is not strictly speaking a historical novel, or even a novel at all. It is inspired by the existence of two actual people, Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone, the affianced couple who sat with the Lincolns in their box at Ford’s Theatre the night the President was assassinated. But while the bare events of their lives, truthfully reported, provide a “scaffold” for Mallon’s tale, the emotions, motivations, and contribution to history that the author assigns his characters are all his own inventions. They add up to a work which is neither history nor fiction but an imaginative alteration of events, a provocative might-have-been.
The story begins with Henry and Clara’s parents, also real characters. Pauline Rathbone, left a widow after the death of Henry’s father, a mayor of Albany, fears a future of loneliness and, worse than that, political obscurity; accordingly, and without considering their disparate hopes and ambitions, she sets her cap for a middle-aged Albany judge named Ira Harris, also recently widowed. Ira and Pauline marry and bring their numerous children, including eleven-year-old Henry and thirteen-year-old Clara, into one family.
Thus begins the lifelong love affair
