The recipe for Ellen Bryson’s debut novel, “The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno,” goes like this: Take a fascinating epoch in the history of a fascinating city; add a cast of wildly unusual characters; fold in some political intrigue; sprinkle with secrets. Unfortunately, this novel remains just that: a recipe. The story itself never quite comes alive.
The novel’s eponymous narrator is one of the attractions in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, a multistory assemblage of exotic objects, tableaux, and acts located in Manhattan in the period around the Civil War. His account, which begins just after Lincoln’s assassination, opens on a note of insular self-congratulation. “The truth was, even I still found the place impressive after living here for nearly a decade. I’d been one of Phineas Taylor Barnum’s Human Curiosities (viewed thrice daily under the moniker Bartholomew Fortuno, the World’s Thinnest Man) since 1855, and, all in all, I could not complain about the way my life had unfolded . . . Barnum’s Museum was the pinnacle of our trade — and I made a good living off the gifts nature had given me.”
