FICTION

Devil's Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest. Madison Smartt Bell. Pantheon. 352 pages. $26.95.

After reading Madison Smartt Bell's new novel, one can see why Mrs. Gump named her slow-witted boy after Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Like the Haitian liberator Toussaint L'ouverture, another historical figure Bell has written about, Forrest was a self-taught military genius. Irregular tactics and hellish courage made him one of the most successful and colorful leaders of the Civil War. His casus belli was not only the noble-sounding notion of states' rights. A millionaire slave trader, he had literal skin in the game. Still, readers may have trouble disliking him. Bell has imbued this controversial hero with qualities that offset his sins.

The novel's chronology is shuffled. One moment Forrest is at Chickamauga, swinging his saber; next he is a young rube brazenly courting his genteel wife-to-be. People with an addictive fondness for the traditional beginning-middle-end will be disoriented and dissatisfied at first, but they should press on. After publishing a shelfful of books, Bell knows how to organize a nonlinear narrative without letting things get out of hand.

More problematic is the character of Henri, a Haitian who came to the United States to foment a slave uprising. But after succumbing to Forrest's magnetic appeal, he agrees to fight for the South. Later he is killed, and his ghost becomes our eyes and ears.

Like Forrest, Bell is a native Tennessean. However, for some time now he has a deep and abiding interest in Haiti. His trilogy of novels on the Haitian revolution is among the finest examples of historical fiction in recent memory. Despite Toussaint's dream of peaceful coexistence, the revolution ended with almost all of Haiti's white population expelled or slaughtered. But in Devil's Dream, Henri is a distraction, a tenuous and forced link to Bell's previous work.

When he's depicting pre-mechanized combat, Bell can do no wrong. If he had lived in the 19th century, he would have given Stendhal and Tolstoy a run for their money. Of course, Forrest's exploits were so remarkable they defy credulity. Dubbed ``the wizard of the saddle,'' he had 29 horses shot from under him (Bell turns this into a recurring gag). Before the war he was a feared duelist; in battle he personally dispatched dozens of men. If he couldn't shoot or stab them, he'd choke them to death. He was frequently wounded, but this never slowed him down. Once, he evaded capture despite carrying a bullet in his back and being completely surrounded; another time he used a penknife to disembowel one of his own officers who had shot him in the abdomen over a perceived slight.

As for his generalship, he was virtually undefeated. After Stonewall Jackson was felled by friendly fire, Forrest became the Union high command's most feared adversary. He had a preternatural ability to anticipate an opponent's strategy. Asked for his secret, he famously replied, ``I get there firstest with the mostest.'' But he was consistently held back by West Pointers such as Jefferson Davis and his chief of staff, Braxton Bragg, perhaps in part because of Forrest's lack of schooling. Bell nails the lower class dialogue. In a funny scene, Forrest dictates an ultimatum to a rebel major who simultaneously translates it into presentable English.

Bell is smitten with his protagonist, so much so that he largely absolves him of responsibility for the blackest mark on his career: the 1864 slaughter of surrendering Negro troops at Fort Pillow. As for the slave trading, we get a few peeks at a vocation that was looked down upon even by Southerners. And yet everything seemed to depend on this ``peculiar institution.'' As Forrest's wife says, ``The whole country runs on slavery . . . Even the cloth from the Yankee mills. Slaves picked the cotton for the curtain we hang to shut out the sight of them.'' But Forrest had children with a slave, another complicated family tableau that displays the unavoidable interconnectedness of race.

Bell doesn't follow his hero's postwar adventures, such as helping to form the Ku Klux Klan. But for all the pain he caused, Forrest was larger than life. Shelby Foote was right when he said the Civil War produced only two geniuses: Abraham Lincoln and the man William Tecumseh Sherman called ``the Devil.''

Ariel Gonzalez teaches English at Miami Dade College.

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