Rummage through a used-book store and you might encounter two forbidding volumes with the anodyne title “North America.” In his autobiography, the author of those books, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), said that this work was not worth the time needed to peruse them. “I can recommend no one to read it now in order that he may be instructed or amused,” he said.

Trollope, who produced nearly 50 novels plus more than three dozen short stories and five travel books before he died 141 years ago, is not a writer for our time. His books are long, the plots convoluted and slow to develop, and in the end, after hundreds of pages, nothing much happens — in short, a form, a pace and a style thoroughly at odds with an age of impatience and short burps on social media.

Being contrary and, in addition, impatient with the present — that was the case even when I was young — I have read dozens of Trollope books, often one or more each summer. But as the winter solstice approached, I reached for the copy of “North America” that I bought years ago and never dared read. It turns out that maybe some observations about this country written by a British author specializing in books where nothing happens are an antidote to a period in human history where too much is happening.  

Here are some very brief excerpts from Trollope’s reflections on his visit to the United States during the Civil War period, offered in the hope that they provide perspective on what Trollope would have called “The Way We Live Now” (which actually is the title of his masterpiece, written in 1875): 

The South is seceding from the North because the two are not homogeneous. They have different instincts, different appetites, different morals, and a different culture.

This is Trollope’s analysis of the breakup of the Union that led to the Civil War. In our time, when the term “civil war” is tossed about like a salad, it is clear that Americans are divided because they have different instincts, different appetites, different morals, and a different culture. A 2020 YouGov survey found that 38% of members of both parties would be upset if their child married a member of the opposing party.

When men have political ends to gain they regard their opponents as adversaries, and then that old rule of war is brought to bear. Deceit or valor — either may be used against a foe. Would it were not so!

Would that were not so, indeed! But this is a period when opponents are adversaries, much more so than a generation or two ago. Long past is the time when Republicans and Democrats joined each other at lunch in the Members’ Dining Room, where their biggest lie was that the white bean soup with shards of smoked ham was palatable, or when they played a game of pickup basketball in the House gym, once so congenial a spot that Rep. George H.W. Bush of Texas (House member, 1967-1971) kept a locker there well into his years as president two decades later. 

But it’s not only lawmakers. A Pew Research Center poll released in August 2022 showed that majorities of each party considered members of the opposite party as closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent. These represent steep inclines since 2016. The question one hears everywhere in the United States is: How can (insert name of opponents) think that way?

For four years (the president) has this sway, and at the end of four years he becomes so powerless that it is not worth the while of any demagogue in a fourth-rate town to occupy his voice with that president’s name.

That was the case until three years ago. Nobody heard much from Lyndon Johnson when he left the White House, and surely little from Richard M. Nixon apart from his David Frost interview and a few largely ignored books. Jimmy Carter did what NFL coaches Paul Brown and Chuck Noll told players they released: Time to get on with your life’s work. In the case of the 39th president, his life’s work was serving the poor and being a watchdog for democracy. 

Donald Trump has changed all that; he is arguably more visible than the current president and, according to recent polls, has higher ratings.

A past president in the United States is of less consideration than a past mayor in an English borough. Whatever evil he may have done during his office, when out of office he is not worth the powder which would be expended in an attack.

This doesn’t apply to Trump. 

That self-asserting, obtrusive independence which so often wounds us is, if viewed aright, but an outward sign of those good things which a new country has produced for its people.

Trollope wrote when America was less than a century old. The “good things” that America produced were not merely for its own people. There were, to be sure, terrible elements of the country’s beginnings: its legacy of enslavement and its treatment of Indigenous people — so deadly that, according to Ned Blackhawk’s astonishing “The Rediscovery of America,” published earlier this year, the total population of North America fell by nearly half in the period between the landing of Christopher Columbus and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

But that very Declaration of Independence was in essence a mission statement. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall 60 years ago. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, Black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I can recommend no one to read (“North America”) now in order that he may be instructed or amused.

Not so, as we have seen. But if you want instruction and amusement, Trollope’s other books are well worth the time and effort. Try “The Way We Live Now” and “The American Senator.” Two of his series, the Palliser novels and the Chronicles of Barsetshire, run to six volumes each. That will keep you busy. And that will keep you distracted, at the holidays and beyond.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.