Near the end of his vast new historical novel, “A Moment in the Sun,” John Sayles describes a street performer who “built an elaborate house of tiles on his little table, balancing one upon the other till the structure was almost up to his chin.” Spectators bet against “the master architect” and his precarious creation, but he keeps adding tiles and winning wagers. This performer is, of course, a stand-in for Sayles himself, who has also built an elaborate house of tiles and managed, against all odds, to keep it standing. The book opens in 1897, the year of the Klondike gold rush, and closes in 1903, the year after the Philippine-American War ended, and in between it takes the measure of America on the brink of the 20th century.  “A Moment in the Sun” is, it should be said, nearly 1,000 pages long. Sayles responds to readers’ presumed resentment against its bulk (a resentment canceled for some by the e-book) by offering reliable entertainment: with its impersonations of political figures, fraught romances and life-threatening adventures, the book is akin to the “Variety Arts” show one character attends.  Variety is further served by alternating the narrative among four culturally diverse perspectives. The Western rover Hod Brackenridge, a former farmer and fired miner, goes to the Yukon, gets cheated out of his stake, becomes a boxer in fixed fights and, on the run from the law, enlists in the Army in Colorado. Tutored by an African-American and then a Native American, goodhearted Hod is an adult Huck Finn in the territory, and a consistently pleasurable presence.  Hod’s superior officer, Niles Manigault, is another rambler and a gambler, the ne’er-do-well son of a judge in Wilmington, N.C., where Niles’s intellectual brother, Harry, is at odds with their Confederate veteran father. In the later stages of the book, the war-profiteering Niles becomes a politician while Harry moves to New York and finds his vocation making movies.  Wilmington is also home to the third group of characters — the African-­American Dr. Lunceford; his teenage daughter, Jessie; his son, Junior, an aspiring “New Negro”; and Junior’s friend Royal Scott, who loves without hope the higher-class Jessie. Inspired by newspaper propaganda (“remember the maine!”), Junior and Royal enlist to fight the Spanish in Cuba. Not long after they return home in 1898, race riots break out in Wilmington, where prominent whites like Niles’s father deprived blacks of their voting rights and legal residences.  As the novel progresses, Hod, Niles, Junior and Royal ship out to battle in the Philippines — a military intervention, in Sayles’s presentation, as legally dubious as the one in Cuba and as racist as the riots in Wilmington. In the Pacific, Sayles introduces his fourth set of characters: the Jesuit-educated and Manila-­refined Diosdado Concepcíon and the peasant farmer Bayani Pandoc, who rebel against the Spanish, fight a series of losing battles against the American occupiers and cross paths with Niles and Royal.  Sayles combines these narratives skillfully so they refresh the reader’s curiosity, have plausible literal intersections and build to a comprehensive representation of American political violence at home and abroad. The novel’s many crowd scenes provide frequent dramatic intensity. ­Sayles begins with Yukon prospectors rushing with greed and fight fans lusting for blood, segues to mass assaults in Cuba and mob violence in Wilmington, then moves on to villages of victims in the Philippines.  The director of 17 movies, including “Amigo” (set in the Philippines and scheduled for release later this year), and the author of three other novels including “Union Dues,” Sayles knows how to balance his cinematic crowds with novelistic inwardness. Yet “A Moment in the Sun” remains, like that stack of tiles, precarious and risky in its joining of different fictional styles. The book mentions both Harriet Beecher Stowe and, in a winking reference, a bicycle racer named Pynchon (Sayles once called “Gravity’s Rainbow” the “best ‘big’ book I know”).  Tom LeClair is the author of âThe Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.â
John Saylesâs novelistic reimagining of America at the turn of the last century nods to both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Pynchon.