The Borderline between Fact and Fabrication

Afterlands is a gripping adventure story that is also a complex meditation on the relation between history and the historical novel. All historical novels raise the question of how they are related to their source material. They claim to be fiction, but they also claim a place outside fiction. A reviewer’s task in such an instance is to determine if a novel should be first beautiful or first accurate. Is it a historical novel or a historical novel? In Afterlands, Steven Heighton makes it clear: to position oneself resolutely with regard to such a problem is a mistake. Heighton has given us a literary work that is very clearly in conversation with something outside the literary and shows us how fruitful a novelistic engagement with the indeterminacies of history can be.

Let me begin with some background. Afterlands tells the story of what happened to the crew of the Polaris, which embarked from Connecticut in the summer of...