Seidman’s account begins in the remote American west in the late 1860’s. Muybridge is an ambitious photographer taking his bulky mobile photo studio over the vast American wilderness. He meets and begins a torrid relationship with feminist dancer Holly Hughes, a sexual dynamo who revolutionizes Eadweard’s life and world view. They fall in love and head west together to San Francisco. There Holly scandalizes polite society while Eadweard becomes ensconced with railroad tycoon and technology enthusiast Leland Stanford. Stanford, as well as being Eadweard’s chief patron, is Holly’s main antagonist and target of her righteous fury.
The story follows a course of cultural crusades, hard won victories of invention and romantic jealousies that all lead to a shocking murder. Seidman’s plot is fascinating and the liberties he takes with history compress the culture of post-civil war America into a blur of artistic invention and adventurous discovery. Yet the book suffers from the author’s obsessive and redundant detail in his characters’ sexual encounters.
When one has a fulsome and rambunctious story, so clearly bridling to be told, slowing to focus on the sensate details of sex, seemingly every few pages, for a dominant portion of the book, though it might be intended to deepen sympathy and heighten visceral involvement, slows the story to a clumsy undisciplined crawl. I found myself rolling my eyes every time the story seemed on the verge of yet another torrid encounter and the prose could be seen gathering its energy to plunge again into descriptions of breasts, penis, thighs and pungent juices. I do not object in the slightest to prominent sexuality in fiction but this novel lingers until the passionate becomes lurid, and the titillating, turgid. At the expense of what is otherwise a fascinating subject and a terrific yarn of Guilded Age Americana.
