Wash by Erica Wagner -- the man behind the Brooklyn Bridge

New York -- emphasis on the New -- is a city that discards the old, but there are two outsized exceptions: the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. The skyscraper may dominate the cityscape, but the bridge takes over the mindscape. Where would Woody Allen's Manhattan be without the Brooklyn Bridge? And if the Empire State Building rose to be the world's tallest, the Brooklyn Bridge became the world's longest when it was finished to an explosion of fireworks in 1883. It crossed the broad East River to join Manhattan and Brooklyn, then two cities so distinct they might have been two continents. And, of course, the Brooklyn Bridge is so lasting because its engineers went further, investing a prodigious architectural feat with a soaring spirituality that makes the bridge America's Chartres. The story of the bridge and its building by those fearless engineers, John Roebling and his son Washington, has been told and retold, most memorably by David McCullough in his 1972 classic, The Great Bridge, but never more poignantly than in Erica Wagner's soulful new novel Wash. She draws on her 2017 biography of Washington Roebling to retell his tale, but this time from the inside, as only fiction can do. In the US, the biography was titled Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. The novel, tellingly, is just Wash. According to Wagner's afterword, she's been involved with Roebling for 40 years now, making him, she says, her "second self". It shows in all the subtle, evocative touches that make this tale from long ago such a lived experience today. In the very first paragraph, she swiftly evokes a 10-year-old with all the delicacy of a painting by Vermeer. The boy is "small for his age", she writes. "He had soft little hands, and big round green eyes which seemed older than the rest of him, a shock of pale hair, ill-fitting clothes which had been well-made but for someone else, that was clear enough." That was clear enough. Yes, it was, to all who saw the boy in person, and to all who read about him now. And so the book goes, closely observed, achingly felt, moment by moment, like still lives that aren't still. We follow Wash from his early years in Trenton, New Jersey, where his father worked in a mill; to his studies in engineering school in Troy, New York; to his service in Washington DC in the civil war, where he met his remarkable wife Emily; to Brooklyn for the building of the bridge; and to Wiesbaden, Germany, to investigate an early example of a gas-powered motor, with the idea of developing it. So the novel does go, but not in sequence. It flits from time to time -- 1870, then 1856, then 1872 -- plunging into the psychological depths of the characters at critical moments, never succumbing to the biographer's and-then, and-then approach. "The soul's time", Wagner calls it in her afterword, "not the clock's time". A more conventional account would have let Wash's marriage, which lies at the heart of the story, unfold chapter by chapter, from his wooing of Emily to saddling her with the responsibilities of chief engineer after he descended too deep into the riverbed in the bridge's construction and fell victim to a permanently debilitating case of the bends. Instead, Wagner illuminates that complicated marriage far more poignantly with flashes of light from these spots of time, all of them artfully selected and tenderly recounted. The effect, ultimately, is to create the past the way memory does, but with far more clarity. Readers enter her fiction almost physically, as it is so solid and majestic, rather like the great bridge itself. Wash by Erica Wagner Salt £10.99, 272 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X