... a novel so comprehensively steeped in American literary history that it comes as something of a surprise to find that its author is a fortysomething from Surrey. It’s as if Lee...has distilled more than a century of American letters into a single book. There’s Fitzgerald ... There’s Hemingway in the muscular lyricism of the prose; Sherwood Anderson and Steinbeck in the beautifully drawn portraits of rural America; there’s the restraint of Henry James in the sinuous sentences; and then there’s a host of lesser-known writers who took for their subject turn-of-the-century New York and the riotous excesses of early capitalism: Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair ... a book of extraordinary intelligence and style, written in language at once beautiful and playfully aphoristic. It’s a novel whose protagonist—decent, dignified, wounded—will live long in the mind of those that read it, a novel that delivers wholeheartedly on Lee’s early promise.
... a seriously entertaining fictional recreation of the life and violent death of a forgotten giant in the history of New York City, Andrew Haswell Green. A sentence from page six serves notice that the novel is hugely ambitious and pleasingly odd ... This may be historical fiction, but Jonathan Lee makes his own rules ... The detective work is ingenious and provides a teasing, low-key suspense ... Among the unexpected urban delights revealed in The Great Mistake is a fine comic sex scene between a prostitute and her corpulent customer ... The Great Mistake seems to float free of its era and defy the constraints of its genre. I won’t say it’s one of a kind, only that I wish there were more novels like it.
... phenomenal ... through semi-fictional characterizations and lyrical prose, Lee creates an unforgettable study of a person and time, marrying fact and imagination, adding a vibrancy of color to the faded sepia of microfiche articles and photographs. He has an innate understanding of how 'one’s past is as much of a work of imagination as one’s future' and equally, how what we try to escape often comes to haunt us, even New York itself ... Lee’s surgically precise descriptive powers aren’t limited to the richness of Green’s life ... Lee delicately folds extrapolations from public records and other sources into evocative, poetic language that reaches out like the branches of one of the trees in Green’s beloved Central Park. ... Lee excels at underscoring such comparisons, engaging the reader on multiple levels, which is the arena of the best fiction, historical or otherwise ... The term historical fiction seems as dry as forgotten toast, but in the right hands it creates a parallel timeline that marries what we know with what could have been. Many could write a meaningful biography about Andrew Haswell Green and his achievements. But what Lee has done is far greater, by creating a novel that lives in that ineffable space where what was—at least what was on record—lives alongside what might have been, through a captivating Circe-like writing style ... There’s a special resonance in reading this book as an immigrant, because in a sense, Green was also an immigrant to New York, striving to create a space of his own, to become what he couldn’t become elsewhere. As much as Green’s achievements reveal a tremendous love for New York, so too this novel feels like a love letter to the city. It would be easy to recommend The Great Mistake for its confident, well-researched and impeccably crafted take on a singular individual who had so much to do with the creation of New York City as we know it. The parks, the museums, the library, so many aspects of shared public resources which give this city life and attempt to balance the wide rift between the excessively wealthy and the rest of us. But you should really read this book for Lee’s exquisite prose, his poetic shadings of a life and a time in which so much was possible.
Fiction can...conjure the past with the tools of the present. This is what Lee does, with a great deal of care and wit ... pure literary comfort food: yet another tale of gilded age New York, pitiless and gorgeous; yet another scrappy, self-made man thrusting his way up through the social strata; yet another peer into the brothels and seedy backrooms; yet another heart-hardened cop teetering on the edge; yet another contemplation of the fickleness of history, and the grand precarity of reputation. Paradoxically, it makes for quite the risk; it’s difficult to distinguish yourself in the bustle ... Much like its visionary hero, The Great Mistake feels quietly but intently ambitious, and similarly driven by the quest for a kind of tidy beauty. Lee’s prose is so carefully wrought it often wanders into aphorism. Even the Dickensian flourishes feel a little too neatly whimsical; the cruelties too exquisite. Green’s soul-shaking year in Trinidad is described with gauzy, vague beauty, but the fate of Green’s black assailant, Cornelius Williams, unfolds in the margins—it’s all too ugly ... Central Park...you’re too grateful for the sheer glorious fact of it. The Great Mistake is the literary equivalent of that too-cultivated wilderness. Go wander awhile.
Jonathan Lee writes engrossing novels about public tragedies and private dilemmas, fusing vivid character studies with understated humor and aphoristic turns of phrase ... a riveting whodunit, but Lee has crafted something a bit more measured ... a rich, unhurried depiction of a man whose success appears to have masked sorrow and alienation ... Lee's book is populated by entertaining minor characters ... Lee poses an intriguing question about Green's life: 'Might our private loneliness, our most crushing inner fears, push us outward, at times, into greater public good?' Yes, according to this beautifully written book.
This structure naturally lends itself to suspense, which Lee knows how to exploit ... readers are kept guessing at Williams’ motive for the shooting. Lee elevates the tidy historical mystery plot by allowing readers to understand that, despite his own marginalized status as a gay man, Green was able to rise through his privileged status as a white man in the same society that made life difficult for the Black man who shot him, the Irish woman who keeps his house and the woman of mixed race whose luxurious brothel the shooter craves ... It’s a remarkable and subtle portrait of a person forced to redirect his life’s energies, channeling them into projects that still change other people’s lives a century and a half later. Lee’s sentences and scenes are so polished and vivid, they can almost be read as separate set pieces ... But the effect of the writing is cumulative—a construction in which we come to understand that every great mistake is made up of smaller ones ... Lee has given his subject a prose memorial with a beating heart and superb mind, something worthy at last of a complicated man whose vision far exceeded his fame.
... a grand mystery ... The author takes us on quite a ride and his vivid writing never waivers. Why was Andrew Haswell Green shot and killed in the early afternoon? This mystery—and Green—will live with you for a long time. The character studies in this book are cleverly detailed, even wondrous.
There are readers one can imagine somewhat disappointed by The Great Mistake, but that’s not at all to say that the novel is disappointing; it’s just a way of delineating what this very subtle book is and isn’t. From a thumbnail sketch, it might sound built to appeal to fans of sweeping historical fiction set in New York City. But while there are plenty of detailed treats for those types, this is far from Gotham porn ... It isn’t exactly a police procedural either, though one strand of the story follows an Inspector McClusky’s attempt to solve the riddle of why Williams shot Green. That pot doesn’t boil, it simmers. The solution, when it comes, is clever enough but not a profound satisfaction. The mystery is mostly an excuse for Lee to widen his lens, bringing in not only the ambitious McClusky but Bessie Davis, a woman who might somehow be involved ... Nor, finally, is this novel’s chief aim the grand re-creation of a historical figure, a life bursting at the seams. There are almost no scenes that involve Green directly planning and executing his most lasting monuments. And he doesn’t exactly warm in Lee’s hands; the book’s accomplishment is less in making us 'see' him, like some kind of historical hologram, than in making us inhabit him...One comes away with a textured sense of this lack of texture; a vision of someone who never comes to confidently act how you might expect someone with his eventual résumé to act. Green remains throughout, to this reader, reminiscent of a nostalgic character in a William Maxwell novel.
Mr. Lee’s novel is arranged neatly and artfully ... Mr. Lee is one of those old-fashioned authors who likes to make things up. He is an excellent sketcher of character, setter of scene and weaver of research ... Mr. Lee keeps many balls in the air. He enjoys playing with truth and reality, the 'instabilities' of history, and he likes his symmetries and oppositions: appetite versus restraint; accident versus design; the exhilarating tumult of the city versus humankind’s need for 'open space' ... Too often in his performance, Mr. Lee puts design before authenticity, delightful prose before the dutiful business of convincing his reader ... None of Mr Lee’s sentences is soulless. They brim with life and music and filigree-fine craft. But they are not always quite trustworthy. And this is a shame, for the story he tells is worth telling and the manner in which he does so is engrossing ... The result is genuinely impressive, especially in its attention to period detail. But some readers will prefer their authors as vivisectors, their novels a little closer to the heart.
... remains more strictly within the limits of historical fiction as well as more frequently within the soul of its doomed protagonist, something of a daring move for a writer as skilled at dramatic illumination as Lee ... Lee’s book, in its muted speculations, voices the truths Green felt compelled to silence, though fans of Lee’s earlier works may find themselves wistful over the quieter tone. The subdued tenacity Green cultivates in realizing his vision holds the story together.
There is something Dickensian in the finished article, with its depictions of metropolitan squalor, asinine law and dogged traipsing towards prosperity ... This sort of vignette keeps The Great Mistake speedy and witty. It rarely leaves the tormented, ambitious and solitary Green, but when it does, it is to settle, with great nimbleness, on the shoulder of some walk-on part ... The instability of public record, of memory, of society, nudges Lee’s narrative towards farce. Rather than laying out the tracks it will shortly ride over, The Great Mistake cheerfully saws at the branch it is sitting on ... If the two sides of The Great Mistake fail to engage perfectly, it is the nuts and bolts of Green’s career that fall through the gaps. He was a confirmed workaholic but only the faintest abstraction of his actual work comes across. This is a rare disappointment in a book written by a lawyer whose second novel, Joy (2012), skewered the world of corporate law ... probably won’t be the only exhumation of a New York politician to be published this year, but it is likely to be the most dignified.
... a multilayered work that is part detective story, part political thriller about graft and power—figures such as Boss Tweed make appearances—and part meditation on the many forms of prejudice that pervade society, then as now ... The book feels weighed down with research, which suggests the material may not have felt as natural to him as the British locales and politics of 'High Dive.' But The Great Mistake entertains with its endless invention and its parallels to the personal and political challenges of contemporary society. Some lessons, alas, are hard to learn.
Author Jonathan Lee takes readers back in time and brings history to life. The story is told from multiple points of view, and he seamlessly weaves in bits from the past that help explain the present. My only issue is that Lee doesn’t use quotation marks or any other type of punctuation to indicate that someone is speaking, which makes the narrative somewhat difficult to follow at times. Nevertheless, descriptive text, well-rounded characters and an intriguing storyline make The Great Mistake well worth reading. I am tempted to go back and read Lee’s previous books: Who is Mr. Satoshi?, Joy and High Dive, the latter of which appeared on numerous best books of the year lists in 2016. His latest novel deserves to enjoy this level of success and hopefully will.
Writing a historical novel about a forgotten city planner in the hope of creating a moving tale of loss, hope, and accidental murder would be a prospect to scare most novelists before they got to the plot. But Jonathan Lee is not a scared novelist, and he is certainly not a scared writer. His new work The Great Mistake manages to weave all of these qualities into its dense narrative, resembling both a fully formed biopic and a deeply personal account at the same time ... Lee’s depiction of this supposedly grand but increasingly tragic character of Andrew Green drives this novel beyond the usual strictures of biographical mores; that it is written in the simultaneously unassuming but rich style Lee possesses only increases this ... The luckless, deranged nature of his death shadows over the whole story, acting as a backdrop against the guilts, doubts and also uncomfortable certainties of Green’s life, cut short in so many ways. We have only the lush writing of Jonathan Lee to make it so memorable.
Lee’s novel details the remarkable life of a man now almost forgotten and a city that would not be the same today had he not lived. It’s light on details of building projects, focusing instead on the man who created them ... Give this entrancing story of an exceptional man to novel-reading fans of Erik Larson and those who enjoy a little mystery with their historical fiction.
... lushly detailed ... Lee is frustratingly discreet, sticking to the historical record and imagining Green’s inner thoughts and feelings but refraining from describing any outer actions other than his documented public ones; this leaves Green as something of a cipher. Fortunately, the city in which he lives, that 'cathedral of possibilities,' is so vividly realized that it makes up for the lack of a compelling central character.
Lee’s two-tiered structure falters slightly under the weight of Green’s copious resume, but he sustains a captivating strangeness in his depiction of the period, such as the practice of hunting stray dogs on city streets for a bounty. By and by, a dynamic all-American character emerges, making for an audacious historical.
An exceptional work of historical fiction ... a police inspector stumbles on a clue to the shooting after visiting a bordello whose madam is linked to the case. She provides one of the book’s most colorful sections (and its only significant female character), and she and the inspector dominate the novel’s lighter moments. There also are two very different strands of suspense: in the whodunit, which hinges on an accepted haven for straight male urges, and in the biography, with its question of how a man deals with feelings that don’t fit into the conventional narrative of the time. A highly satisfying mix of mystery and character portrait, revealing the constrained heart beneath the public carapace.
