Spindle City

 Spindle City by Jotham Burello

Joseph Bartlett never really wanted to be a mill owner. His rise to the position was accidental, the result of a

fire started when a paid spy dropped a kerosene lamp while attempting to steal a set of crooked books kept by his ne'er-do-well brother-in-law. It's an event that could be looked at two ways. On the one hand, perhaps it suggests that ownership was Bartlett's fate. On another, it is indicative of the skeletons that every mill owner had in their closet, skeletons invisible to all but the workers they exploited and the rare labor activists trying to help them. 

Joseph Bartlett seems to think it is the latter, which is why he, alone among Fall River, MA, owners, cozies up to labor activists trying to procure better working conditions for mill workers. But Joseph never can quite atone for his role in the fire. In the opening pages of the book, his wife dies. And then his eldest son is caught sexually abusing a mill worker. The family, it is clear, is in decline -- just like the New England textile industry itself.

This event also follows its perpetrator, Hollister, who is sent away to a New Hampshire military academy and who seems like he will at least make good in the army -- only to fall victim to a mustard gas attack that, at the end of the book, leaves him a shell of a man. 

In the end, all of the characters in the book -- including Fall River itself -- seem to fall victim to forces well beyond their control, be in the machinations of war, economics, or class. Maybe that's the real story of the book, the struggle for individuals to define their own lives in the face of apparently insurmountable obstacles.  

Set in Fall River, MA, in the early part of the 20th century, this novel tells the story of the waning days of the New England textile industry -- and the families who grew fabulously wealthy from it. The former is the result of cheaper labor, and closer proximity to cotton, in the south. The latter is a bit more complicated.

The meta-saga is told through the lens of the Bartlett family and its patriarch, Joseph.