Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

"But the final realization of life is that there isn't time. There isn't time. It is slipping from us with every smile."

The Great Mistake is a beautifully written novel about a fascinating man - which is why it makes me a little sad that we didn't get to know who Andrew H. Green really was. We learnt a lot about him, don't get me wrong, I just feel like we skipped so many important parts of his life for seemingly no reason. This book had the potential to be a grand book, containing all the richness of Green's life (and as someone who was literally called the Father of Greater New York and was responsible for some of the most iconic places in NYC, his story had a lot to offer) - but then it just fell short of its potential. How did Green get to where he was? How did he achieve so much in one simple lifetime? How was his relationship with all his nieces and nephews and the rest of his family?

And I also know that it's tricky for writers to put fictionalized thoughts of a real person down on paper, but I also felt that Green's sexuality was not explored at all. Sure, it was hinted at, and sure, maybe Green himself was not as concerned with the topic as maybe I would have been (you know, just chill, AM I GAY?? thoughts), but I feel like he should have... thought about it a bit more. Just a tad it more.

All in all, it was a great read and I'd totally recommend it to people who like fictionalized tales of famous people. (Though if I had to choose between this and The Magician by Colm Tóibín, I'd choose the second in a heartbeat.)

Thank you for NetGalley for providing me with a copy in exchange of an honest review.

Unfortunately the quality of the ARC was atrocious and I simply couldn't deal with it unless I wanted to really damage my dear eyesight. I really tried but I couldn't go on.

Many thanks to Netgalley for this missed opportunity

The Very Heart of it

A lyrical, melancholic reflection focussing on the life of Andrew Haswell Green. To the outside world in the late 1800s he was the man who created Central Park, and who united the five boroughs into Greater New York, the so-called ‘Great Mistake’. When he was gunned down by a Black American in 1903, all sorts of speculation was aroused about his past and the sort of life he lived. Hints appeared in press obituaries, ‘a confirmed bachelor’. McCluskey, a drug-addicted policeman is assigned to the investigation. What could be the cause of the killing?

The author tells the inside story: a fifteen year old boy sent to New York to work in a store by his father, a failing farmer, anxious to avoid the taint of scandal; his meeting with the privileged Samuel Tilden, friend for life; his sojourn on Trinidad, gossip and rumour; success at the bar, his unconsummated and melancholy relationship with Samuel. And here is the heart of the novel, the man inside, not the public man. The creation of Central Park, of Greater New York, of attempted and actual assassination, all these are subordinate to the love which, in its time, could not be admitted.

A quality novel, its murder mystery something of a red herring, its exploration of a man’s inner identity elusive, but moving; a longing, unspoken, frustrated.

I hadn't heard of Andrew Green and he seems to have accomplished a lot in his life. He wasn't allowed much of a private life so dedicated his time to extensive public service: he transformed New York into a better place for all. Green is shamed and scapegoated in his personal life a number of times and I felt grief on his behalf. He is never allowed to be himself and all his public triumphs have to make up for his private sadnesses.

I realise this book has received a lot of acclaim but I just didn't get it. Was it about Haswell Green's achievements? Secret relationship? Death? If it was all of these things then it jumped around too much for me to feel like it was a cohesive story. I spent the last third of this book completely puzzled by the point of it all.

This book was clever and suspenseful from the first page. A real delight. It’s quite rare to have something like this – so clean, well-crafted, but also moving – that I didn’t want it to end.

New York has so many stories to tell, and this is a very important one. The early chapters detailing Andrew Haswell Green's life were particularly compelling, but I enjoyed the whole book and felt it brought that particular period in New York's history vividly to life.

I didn't finish this one. The writing was fine but I just wasn't draw into the story or main character enough to want to complete it. This possibly wasn't helped by the non-linear structure. Early on I knew about the end of Andrew Green's life and I knew about the start of his life - finding out what happened in the middle simply wasn't compelling enough.

Any time I threatened to get invested in the young Andrew's story, the book would flip back to much later in his life, and momentum was lost.

I'm sure there's an audience for this book, but I didn't quite have the patience for it right now.

This is a deeply atmospheric book that fictionalises the interiority of Andrew Hardwell Green, whom I had never heard of till I read this book. I've definitely heard of, and visited ,the institutions he left behind- the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYPL and what the book describes as his magnificent obsession- Central Park. The narrative moves between the aftermath and investigation of his murder, and traces his life and childhood to that point. Green had a fairly Dickensian start to life, and the writer brings out his feelings of not belonging, possibly because he was gay, in a time when that would have been a crime. Green made his fortune when he went to work as a manager at a sugar plantation in Trinidad, and when he came back, studied law and worked as a lawyer. He was close friends and worked with Samuel Tilden, a future Presidential candidate. Around this time ( the late 19th century), was when politicians wanted New York to be a great city, that could be compared to London and Paris, and policies were constituted to make that happen. Green was on a body in charge of that, and under his leadership, the city changed. The book isn't a nonfiction narrative of how he went about it, but about the feelings of isolation, and his firm beliefs in public open spaces, and access to knowledge, art, and education that drove him. As a character, however, Green felt at an emotional distance and I couldn't really warm to him. There's some excellent writing in the book- I didn't know, for instance, that Central Park was completely man- made, New York's evolution from a city where wild dogs could be shot to a better connected place, and a particularly beautiful passage where Green and Tilden descend to where the foundations of Brooklyn Bridge are being laid. What prevents this from being a 5 star read, for me, is the scant attention the writer pays to Green's year long stint at Trinidad- sugar plantations were absolutely horrific places and the conditions of slaves there must have been inhuman. The second and more egregious lacuna is the writer glossing over Central Park being built over Seneca Village, a thriving, majority-Black neighborhood where many Black residents owned houses. All of them lost their houses, and none were compensated fairly. The book emphasises Green's feelings of alienation and longing for wide open spaces to breathe, both literally and metaphorically, so I wonder how he reconciled literally taking that away from hundreds of already marginalised people, without even adequate compensation. This was a major problem I had with the book, Green's emotional turmoil over all the other major events of his life are so well depicted, the acknowledgement of this suffering inflicted on the few for the greater good should not have been elided. Specially when gentrification is a problem that has never gone away, across all major cities.

This is an excellent novel, which uses the life of Andrew Haswell Green, the driving force behind Central Park and many other key parts of New York, to say so much about the development of New York and USA in the 19th century and today, as well as about the loneliness and bathos of power and death. Starting with Haswell Green's murder, the novel constantly switches perspective as it traces his childhood and later success and his struggle with his assumed homosexuality. There is some excellent writing here, such as the following sentence, which beautifully captures the wistfulness of its central character: "The floor, under her attention, gave up a lifeless gleam that Andrew found less amicable, sometimes, than the dirt she had erased". The Great Mistake deserves all the praise it has received.

If you asked people who Andrew Haswell Green I would suggest the majority wouldn't know who or what he achieved and yet without Green the city of New York would have a totally different landscape. Green was know as the 'Father of Greater New York', he is responsible for the creation of Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Bronx zoo and the list goes on.

I hadn't come across Green until I read this fascinating, beautifully crafted novel The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee, it seems history has forgotten Green, there are no great monuments or buildings named after him, although there is a stone seat in Central Park tucked away from the most popular walks. Jonathan Lee has brought Green back to life strangely through his death, Green at the age of 83 was murdered on his doorstep, The Great Mistake takes us through a fictionalised version of what took place, Green's movements, the police investigation interlaced with this is Green's past life, we see his humble origins, his drive, his loneliness possibly due to his sexuality (it had to be hidden as he knew his public role would crumble), his near lifelong friendship with Samuel J Tilden and his work to form a worthy modern city. This is a novel which looks at what a public life can do to a man who tried to hide his private life away from the public gaze. It immerses you in a long past age and yet Green is alive and living in the novel due to the wonderful prose, descriptions and narrative which engage with the reader and leave you wanting more.

Thanks to Granta and Netgalley for supplying an early copy for me to review.

I enjoyed this - it is written in quite a unique style - by a British novelist living in New York. Essentially, it focuses on the life of Andrew Haswell Green - the man who 'invented' Central Park. The novel starts with Green's death, which turns out to be a case of mistaken identity, and then the novel goes back over his life, and brings it up to the present with a resolution as to what happened to Green, and why.

Within the book, there are themes which modern day readers will find interesting - for example, the implicit, underground nature of homosexuality at the time, in the 1800s. Even though I appreciated the story for what it is, and the fact it is largely based on real life, there is something here which didn't quite 'work' for me. I think this is because I had read glowing reviews before I read it - and I don't think it necessarily lives up to these.

I am giving this 4* - quality fiction but based on fact. I did hover between 3*/4* but I am feeling generous today!

The Great Mistake is a novel based on the life and death of Andrew Haswell Green, the “Father of Greater New York”, who was responsible for public infrastructure projects including Central Park and the New York Public Library.

The novel begins with the day of his death in 1903, shot in a case of apparent mistaken identity. It then goes back to the beginning of his life and tells his story in (mostly) chronological order, in a wry, understated voice.

There’s another strand of the story which follows the aftermath of the murder, in particular the detective charged with investigating the case, and the woman who the murderer cites as the reason for his crime.

In this telling, Green grows up in poverty on a farm in Massachusetts under a stern and unloving father, a man who takes his own disappointments out on his son. The suggestion is that it is Green’s sexuality which underlies his cruelty. Even at a young age, despite his strength and dexterity, his father senses that he is not a man in the sense he would want him to be.

Green goes to New York to work as an apprentice in the mercantile trade, continuing an impoverished existence. There he meets Samuel Tilden, the wealthy lawyer who will go on to be his patron and will run unsuccessfully for the presidency. There is an immediate attraction between them but Tilden vacillates between affection and the desire to conform to social expectations. Eventually, Green leaves to work on a plantation in Trinidad where he earns enough money to return to New York and take his place in society.

This more equal status leads Tilden to renew his interest and recruit him to his law firm. Throughout their life together, they take on a number of public projects. After Tilden’s death, Green continues his work developing the city, living a reclusive life with his housekeeper.

The key theme of The Great Mistake is the division between private and public life, the roles that Green feels he has to play, the secrets he must keep. His shame comes from society but also the early, formative experiences of his childhood. This theme also plays out in the story of the detective and his investigation, which takes him into the underbelly of the city. More pertinently, it plays into the story of the city itself. Even Central Park, which appears to represent untamed nature in the heart of the city, is an artificial creation, carefully crafted to mimic wilderness.

I did feel the story lost focus a bit towards the end (ironically, the years of Green’s fame are the least interesting part of the story) and the story of the detective was less interesting than the rest. His justification for pursuing the motive of the murder is that juries don’t like to convict without one, but given that the murderer was apprehended at the scene this seems a stretch.

The Great Mistake is beautifully written, portraying Green’s struggles and unique perspectives with great sensitivity. It sheds light on the mystery of cities, how they are shaped both by random interactions and decisions, large and small, by individuals, sometimes acting together, sometimes going against the consensus. The portrayal of Green as powerful and driven, but also lonely and socially anxious, is a moving one that will stay with me.

Excellent historical novel based on the life of Andrew Haswell Green, the “father of New York”. Told in two timelines - the events following his murder and his life from a penniless apprentice to becoming the great designer of Central Park and a whole host of significant buildings.

The central characters are fascinating and complex, and the flitting between timelines (and gradually exposing more of the lives and challenges of Green and his close friend) keeps the narrative fresh whilst adding depth to both past and present.

Fully recommended.

Historical fiction at its best.Jonathan Lee brings us into the minds of the characters the era New York,His writing is so beautiful I was totally drawn into the story the era.Will be recommending and gifting this special novel.#netgalley#grantabooks

This captivating novel focuses on the life of Andrew Haswell Green, the man who is considered "the Father of Greater New York." The story begins with his death, murdered outside his front door by a distressed individual named Cornelius Williams. The book then splits into two narratives. The first takes a look at highlights from Green's life. We learn about his humble beginnings, working on the meagre family farm. In his teens, he is sent to New York to become an apprentice in a general store, in the hopes of setting him on the path to earn a respectable living ("His family feared he might one day succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet"). There he falls under the spell of the two real loves of his life - books, and his great friend Samuel Tilden. The second plot strand takes a look at the investigation into Green's death, led by the capable Inspector McClusky, who tries his best to understand the motive behind the murder.

The Great Mistake is billed as historical fiction, but it's all based on events in the life of a real person, so a 'reimagining' might be a more accurate description. I had never heard of Green before reading the book, and I was amazed to learn about the enormous impact he had on New York City, being responsible for the creation of Central Park and New York Public Library, among many other significant projects. The story also captures Green's profound loneliness and I found this quite moving. He was obviously gay, though never able to publicly acknowledge the fact, and his repressed sexuality only served to drive him further into himself. His close friendship with Tilden seemed to be a single source of comfort, and though it appears his deeper feelings were reciprocated, they both held back from pursuing a relationship. Lee also paints a vivid picture of a bustling and booming New York, a melting pot of multiple cultures, still scrabbling to forge its true identity. I didn't find the police investigation quite as riveting as other reviewers, but that's probably down to my own personal preference. The Great Mistake is an immersive, poignant tale, and a fitting tribute to the life of a man who deserves to remembered.

Favourite Quotes:
"He loved this city. He hated it. It was a cathedral of possibilities, it would never settle down, it might remember him or it might forget him, there was a sense of no control..."

"He likes the way the slightest impressions are magnified at this early hour: the distant crack of a cratemaker’s hammer; the flat beauty of a flake of downtrodden tobacco; the vendor pulling a cart out of the shack on the other side of the street, ears all aquiver with the effort. This is an area of hatters and druggists, of print shops and bookstores, of hackney coachmen waiting on corners praying for rain."

"Eighty-three years old. A lifetime of being a bachelor. This extended life of aloneness might have an effect on a man’s character, might it not? Independence might have rusted into obstinacy."

"You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged."

"And was it so bad, really, to be plagued by regret? Might our private loneliness, our most crushing inner fears, push us outward, at times, into greater public good? The building of bridges, of open spaces, of consolidated places where others might feel less alone? Is such an idea too ridiculous to form the foundation of action, or inaction?"

This book is a historical novel about the life and death of the real-life 19th century lawyer, civic leader and city-planner Andrew Haswell Green the so-called “Father of Greater New York” who developed (among other things) Central Park, the Bronx Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His final major act was drawing up the plans for including Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island in a greater New York – the criticism of which at the time gave this book its title.

The book opens with Haswell’s murder – at the age of 83 - in 1903, shot in a seeming case of mistaken identity.

Haswell we are told in the novel, as a young man, stung by criticism that he did not read enough, started reading but “developed a habit of reading five pages from the opening of a book, and then five pages from the end, going back and forth like this for some time until he could picture the raw sprawl of story in the middle.” – and this serves as a deliberate nod to the structure of the novel.

Effectively we have two or perhaps three main sets of chapters

One strand tells Green’s story – starting with his Massachusetts upbringing on the family farm, with a distant father who rather scorned his efforts around the farm and later, alarmed by a close briefly quasi-physical friendship that Andrew forms with another boy, sends him to New York to work for a pittance with a local merchant. There Andrew’s only real positive experience is an unlikely friendship he strikes up with the up and coming lawyer Sam Tilden (later the controversial loser in a disputed Presidential election) – but in an echo of his previous experience, Sam withdraws from the relationship due to not entirely unfounded rumours about the closeness of their relationship – and the devastated Andrew spends a year on a Trinidad plantation. The money he gains there and the time for reflection enables him to re-establish himself not just in Sam’s friendship but in his sponsorship – and it is the start of his own successful career, one sketched out only at intervals (for example in a public meeting where he first takes over the Central Park project).

The second set of chapters looks at the events of his death and the subsequent investigation into his death – a number of chapters written from the viewpoint of a Police Detective addicted to the medicinal use of cocaine, and who quickly focuses his attention on the murderer’s claim that Green was conspiring against him with a black courtesan, brothel owner and landlord (the real life Hannah Elias).

The detective says at one point “The manner of death could be the clue from which the heart of a life could be reached” – and his own attempts to unravel both Green’s life and the motivations for his death serve as a clear analogy for the author’s own interest in writing the book (an interest the novel implies in a brief breaking-the-fourth-wall moment by coming across a Central Park bench which acts as a modest memorial to the Park’s visionary founder.

This is, as the above may imply, a novel with a three-way interaction between Green’s own story, the dialogue and action in the novel and the way in which the novel is constructed.

Just as some other examples: Green himself observing happenings at a public meeting remarks “There are always at least two histories happening, the inner and the outer, the private and the public”; the chapters are each named after the original names of the entrance gates in Central Park, which are taken “not from great men of the City, as almost everyone else suggested, but from the pursuits of the ordinary people, so trapped in their own unfulfilled desires” – so here not only do the gates themselves serve as different entry points to Green’s life, but the chapters themselves link to the pursuits picked (Scholars, Artists) and perhaps most of all this is the story of a so-called great-man trapped in his own unfulfilled desires.

For Green we are told is a “person who, in his last twenty years, had campaigned tirelessly against the idea of isolation [in setting up public parks, public libraries, in breaking down boundaries and natural barriers between different parts of his vision of a Greater New York] while remaining himself isolated”

There is an element of artifice in this – but even that is symbolic as the novel reminds us how Central Park is a man-made, artifice, “imagined and realized through years of careful fraudulence” and how this showed that Green himself “admired, presumably, the careful construction of a suitable human story”

So a lot to admire in this very carefully constructed novel.

What did not quite work for me. Well here I will try to switch my review to the same level of analogy as used in the book. Pre COVID I would work in mid-town New York around once a month – but I have never visited Central Park. Why? Well because in the UK I live within a 5 minute walk of miles of entirely natural hills and countryside. A City Park – while an appealing idea for some relaxation if in New York - seems like an uneasy compromise to me. And perhaps at times this novel with its mix of a rather straight detective sub-story, US urban history with the meta-literary fiction seemed to be an uneasy compromise also, while still very enjoyable.

3.5 stars

I think I wanted to like this more than I did, but I still really did like it.

First of all: Jonathan Lee's writing is absolutely exquisite. I could run through a whole laundry list of adjectives, here: beautiful, evocative, moving, earnest, endearing. Reading The Great Mistake, you get the sense that Lee is genuinely enjoying playing with language, stretching and shaping it to his own ends. If I were rating this novel on the basis of its writing alone, it would without a doubt get a 5 stars. One reason the writing works so well is because it almost effortlessly endears you to the novel's main character, Andrew. You get such an intimate sense of his longing and his loneliness, his persistent sense of inadequacy and alienation. I've never felt so sympathetic towards a character so quickly.

Plot is where this novel falls short. The plot of The Great Mistake feels a bit janky, like an object with all its screws a little loose. The object still presents well, but when you hold it, you can't help but feel like it's about to come apart in your hands. Despite the beautiful writing, this novel was missing a strong, more streamlined plot. It has two timeliness, one following Andrew's past, and one following the present investigation of his murder (the first line of the book is literally: "The last attempt on the life of Andrew Haswell Green took place on Park Avenue in 1903"). I was much more invested in the former plotline than the latter; the whole murder mystery aspect of it all didn't really feel like it belonged to the novel, and as a plotline it felt shoddy, with characters I didn't much care about doing things I also didn't much care about.

Despite the weakness of its plot, though, the writing in this novel is so strong that it almost makes up for that plot's inadequacies. Almost being the operative word, here, since the writing never fully picks up the slack from the plot. Still, though, an excellent novel.

Thanks so much to Granta for providing me with an e-ARC of this in exchange for an honest review!

A lovely historical novel exploring the birth of New York. A beautiful look at the life of Andrew Haswell Green through various people’s eyes, with a bit of murder mystery thrown in for good measure. A great read.