HENRY ADAMS, RE-EDUCATED

By John Skow

Intellectualization, the capacity to turn any belly noise or bird's chirp into sane, ordered paragraphs, flowed like a pretty stream through the meadow of Henry Adams' life. So it may still seem to disenchanted literature students who find their way to graduation blocked by The Education of Henry Adams and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. The problem is not that Adams prattled but that reasonable, melancholy conclusions about 19th century civilization issued forth at an unvarying gush.

The notion of placing such a figure at the center of a murder story in the Paris of 1892 must have seemed both absurd and superb when writer Eric Zencey hatched it, and in his novel Panama (Farrar Straus Giroux; 375 pages; $24), that's exactly the way it turns out. Zencey, a professor of history at Goddard College in Vermont, presents an Adams pastiche that might have been recognizable to the original: a small, acute, conflicted man who emits pedantry when made nervous. He cannot praise except in negatives: on the rococo facade of the Paris Opera House "the winged figures and rearing horses ... seemed to him, if not beautiful, then at least not totally disharmonious." Asked by the aged U.S. Senator Donald Cameron whether he is in love with Cameron's pretty young wife Lizzie, with whom he has conducted a heated correspondence, Adams can say nothing aloud, and to himself says only "Yes, and of course no."

Adams-according-to-Zencey sees himself accurately as a kind of de-clawed cat in the matter of Lizzie Cameron, but when he meets the beautiful Miriam Talbott, a young art student, and accompanies her to Chartres, it seems that a more robust interest may develop. He persuades himself that she resembles his dead wife Clover, who committed suicide seven years before.

But when he tries to pursue his fascination back in Paris, Miriam is at first reported to have been murdered, and then to have disappeared into the coils of a vast financial and political scandal. This involves the murder of the Baron Jacques de Reinach, an officer of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocaanique, whose Panama Canal project had failed in a miasma of debt and thousands of yellow fever deaths. Fully half of the French Chamber of Deputies had accepted bribes in the form of checks, which they had foolishly signed. They became known to delighted journalists as "chequards."

This messy business is never fully explained, but the commotion gives author Zencey room for a fond sketch portrait of a man he clearly admires. Adams bustles about crime scenes pretending to courage he doesn't really feel, an animated footnote annotating in Greek and Latin. He marvels at fingerprinting, then just coming into use in Paris, and at "instantaneous" communication by pneumatic tubes. For a time he suspects that one of the villains is his friend John Hay, later to be a U.S. Secretary of State. A gendarme confronts him at an awkward moment: "Oh, dear, Monsieur Adams. This doesn't look good ... Alone with a dead body. Again. Your appetite for mayhem appears insatiable ... It will go more easily with you if you just tell the truth." The suspense here is not unbearable since we know that the real Adams was not guillotined. But in teasing Adams' respectable shade just a bit, the author has provided some of the year's most cheerful literary fun.