CANR
WORK TITLE: The Caricaturist
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://normanlock.com/
CITY: Aberdeen
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CANR 307
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born April 16, 1950; married; wife’s name Helen; children: Meredith, Nicholas.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer of novels, short fiction, stage, radio, screen plays, and video-art installations.
AWARDS:Aga Kahn Prize, Paris Review, 1979; New Jersey Council on the Arts fellowship, 1997, 2013; Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship, 2009; Literary Fiction Prize, Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, 2010; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 2011.
WRITINGS
Also author of the play The House of Correction; of the novella Escher’s Journal; and of the poetry collections Cirque du Calder and In the Time of Rat. Wrote dramas for German radio, and a film for The American Film Institute.
SIDELIGHTS
Norman Lock is an accomplished poet, novelist, and playwright, known for “The American Novel” series that combine historical and fictional characters. Some of his most widely reviewed works are his short-story collections. Trio was written in 2005, and it was followed by Grim Tales in 2011. The collection Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions was also released that year. Published in 2013, Love among the Particles & Other Stories is a collection of sixteen tales that feature supernatural elements and a metafictional bent. Discussing his writing in an online Slice interview with Celia Johnson, Lock remarked: “Accident aside, if what happens within the unconscious can be said to be accidental—I like to write fictions (of whatever length) in series, with a common atmosphere, idiom, intention, and metaphysical concern. As they accumulate around a motive, they develop a gravity all their own, attracting—by their ‘strong force’—particles of consciousness (words, images, ideas) until a saturation point is reached and a book has been made.” The author also revealed: “None of my themes are original with me, but they are common to a literature concerned with questions of impermanence, the instability of time, the fragility of the self and violence done to it by ambition or desire. If anything can be said to be mine, it is the deliberate exposure of anxiety and fear in light of those threats to the self, of my desire to conceal myself within my sentences, and my guilt for ignoring the literature of protest and social amelioration in favor of intellectual fantasy and the pursuit of high-Modernist style.”
The tales in Love among the Particles & Other Stories feature a series of hypotheticals. One story follows Edward Hyde, the lighter side of Jekyll and Hyde. One tale follows a train brakeman; his train will not stop, and it seems to have entered an infinite twilight zone. Another train, filled with happy passengers, mysteriously appears alongside his and then disappears. In an outlandish and imaginative adventure, Huckleberry Finn and Jim raft up the Mississippi River before alighting in Ohio and speaking with Mata Hari. The trio converses with the Wright Brothers about their progress as they attempt to perfect the airplane. Another tale begins as a mummy is invited to speak on a radio show and discuss his origins in ancient Egypt. “The Broken Man’s Complaint” presents a middle-aged man who is transformed into atoms, but he remains aware of his identity. He flows through other bodies, reads minds, and even travels the Internet as a segment of data. In several stories, Lock appears as a named character, commenting on and participating in the strange and disorienting plot lines.
Commenting on the collection, Lock told Johnson: “ Love among the Particles … manifests this ‘atmospheric’ uniformity less, because its stories were written during a fifteen-year period. … While its collected fictions are indeed unified by a common language and a persistent harrying of themes, they do not become a novel—or novella-in-stories (or prose poems), like many of my past book-length projects.” Lock addressed the collection further in an article posted on Upcoming4.me, asserting: “You might as well ask why I fell in love with my wife of forty-one years as why I came to write the stories of Love among the Particles. Not only is the instigation for both imaginative feats (and leaps of faith) hidden in an increasingly remote past of my lengthening personal history, but the causes of an impulse as complex as love or art must be elusive, subtle, and altered in time by self-examination.”
Several reviewers praised Lock’s thoughtful approach, with a Kirkus Reviews critic calling Love among the Particles & Other Stories “a strange and engaging collection.” The critic concluded: “For all their convolutions of space and time, these stories are remarkably easy to follow and savor.” Nathan Weatherford, writing on the Full Stop Web site, was also impressed, stating that the book “has a wonderful sense of literary and historical irreverence.” According to Weatherford: “It’s instantly striking, mainly because Lock has been only too happy to insert himself into many other stories in the collection as a character who can speak for himself. By rendering himself an amanuensis to this unnamed collection of particles, Lock executes an intricate trick: he uses his own estimable creative prowess in service of a story that actively renounces any authorial ability on his part.” Weatherford added: “I can’t think of a more fitting conundrum than that to encapsulate the tension between reality and fantasy that Lock so joyfully manipulates throughout Love among the Particles—it’s a heady ride that I recommend taking.” Deanna Hoffmann declared on the Akashic Books Web site: “Lock has created a masterpiece containing everything I could want from a great read. Deeply thought provoking, filled to the brim with wit, and imaginative beyond belief, Love among the Particles is a book for all who have ever dreamed and long to do so again.”
The Boy in His Winter is an imaginative recreation of the lives of Huckleberry Finn and his friend Jim. The two depart Hannibal, Missouri, in 1835 on a raft. They travel through the nineteenth century, meeting Tom Sawyer (who has joined the Confederate army), witness the carnage of the Civil War and the broken promises of Reconstruction, lament the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and watch as Native American tribes are decimated. In the twentieth century, they reach Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where they encounter automobiles and motion pictures. Without aging, they continue their journey through the twentieth century until 1960, when Jim leaves the raft and reenters the world, where he is eventually murdered. Meanwhile, Huck, who is still thirteen years old, nearly reaches New Orleans before he is blown into real time by Hurricane Katrina. He reinvents himself as one Albert Barthelemy and, in the company of smugglers and a black man named James, travels through Europe. As a grown man, “Huck” marries a black woman, Jameson, who has written an illustrated children’s book featuring a boy named Albert and titled The Boy in His Winter. The journey continues to the year 2070 when the aged Huck settles down to narrate the tale of his tumultuous life.
Reviewers seemed to agree that Lock’s accomplished prose is an important source of the appeal of the novel. A Publishers Weekly reviewer, for example, commented that “Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy—and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself.” Marcus Pactor, writing in the Green Mountains Review, noted that “graceful precision has long been a hallmark of Lock’s writing,” adding that the novel is “full of patiently developed, fascinating observations.” Jane Ciabattari, calling the novel “brilliant” on National Public Radio, enthused that it “shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” Ciabattari concluded by calling the novel “a glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love, a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously evolving world ‘when it strikes fire against the mind’s flint,’ and by profoundly moving novels like this.”
In an interview in Slice, Celia Johnson asked the author about the “catalyst” for The Boy in His Winter. Lock responded: “My wife, Helen, and I live in retirement, near Raritan Bay. In October, 2012, we were caught by Hurricane Sandy, which devastated coastal towns on either side of the bay. As I lay in bed during a nine-day power outage, I thought again of Huck and Jim and what I might make of them—this time, in a novel. Sandy inevitably brought to mind Katrina, and in a flash of inspiration (striking me while in the supine position favored by my muse), I saw Twain’s two Mississippi River travelers blown by hurricane from their raft and the timelessness of American literary history onto dry land and into historical time—the twenty-first century, south of New Orleans.”
American Meteor is a coming-of-age story set during the era of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century. As a boy, Stephen Moran, the novel’s narrator, leaves his neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City and crosses the country on the Union Pacific railroad as the point when the Transcontinental Railroad links the two halves of the continent. During his journey he sees the battlefields of the Civil War and loses an eye fighting for the Union, earning a medal from General Ulysses S. Grant. He becomes friends with poet Walt Whitman, who makes several appearances in the novel; wins a job as a bugler on the funeral train carrying Abe Lincoln; takes a job for hateful Union Pacific railroad magnate Thomas Durant; becomes an apprentice with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson; and accompanies General George Custer as his personal photographer—all experiences that enable him to understand the dark underbelly of Manifest Destiny. Finally, Stephen’s journey ends at the Battle of Little Big Horn, when he encounters Chief Crazy Horse, and for the rest of his life his dreams are haunted.
Reviewers were unanimous in their admiration for American Meteor. A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that “Moran’s tall tale is a perfect fit for Lock’s storytelling.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that “this novel memorably encompasses grand themes and notions of transcendence without ever losing sight of the grit and moral horrors present in the period.” Booklist writer John Mort observed that Lock tells the tale with “rueful grace” and that he “writes beautifully, with many subtle, complex insights.” Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, in a review in Library Journal, wrote that Lock “successfully blends beautiful language reminiscent of 19th-century prose with cynicism and bald, ugly truth.” In a review on the Monkey Bicycle Literary Things Web site, Robert Long Foreman concluded that “ American Meteor is a fascinating, prophetic contribution to recent historical fiction, and Lock is plainly an author well worth our attention.” Finally, Ted Lehmann, writing on his Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms Web site, remarked of narrator Stephen Moran that “Lock creates a memorable character who sees it all while providing a shimmering eulogy for the loss of one America in order to create another.” Lehmann concluded that Stephan’s “often trenchant, humorous, and insightful commentary on the westward migration and its relationship to American Exceptionalism make up the core of this thought provoking and intriguing book.”
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A Fugitive in Walden Woods is Lock’s fourth stand-alone book of “The American Novels” series that focuses on Henry David Thoreau. The fictional Samuel Long is an escaped slave from Virginia who through the Underground Railroad makes his way to Massachusetts. He is taken in by Ralph Waldo Emerson who gives him the task of watching over an absent-minded and curmudgeonly Thoreau. Long also participates in discussions of philosophy and human dignity with Thoreau, Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Lloyd Garrison. Long reminisces on Thoreau and the role white abolitionists played in his life. Lock seamlessly combines actual 19th-century language from the luminaries with his original dialogue. In Booklist, Bill Kelly remarked how Long’s “experiences of brutality offer profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history.” A Publishers Weekly critic commented on Lock’s prose “marvelously captures Long’s searing insights and rich observations, [and] Lock’s imaginative novel is a stunning meditation on idealism and the cost of humanity.”
The fifth book, The Wreckage of Eden, follows the correspondence between poet Emily Dickinson and fictional U.S. Army chaplain Robert Winter. Winter tells Dickinson of his ideals and his loss of faith when he becomes disillusioned by the violence of the Civil War. Winter served in the Mexican War and the Mormon Rebellion, and befriended Abraham Lincoln and Samuel Clemens. “Lock does a fine job of making Winter feel like a man of his time,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer, adding “Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict.” About Dickinson, Bill Kelly in Booklist said: “Lock skillfully hints at the exuberant and tempestuous mind that will produce hundreds of poems.” In an interview with Chelsea Ennen at Publishers Weekly, Lock explained how he contrasted Dickinson and Winter’s characters: “So it was a debate between the absolute certainty of art, which Emily embodies, and the character buffeted constantly by happenstance, contingency, and moral questioning, which is Robert.”
In Feast Day of Cannibals, fictional Shelby Ross works for the volatile Herman Melville in the New York Custom House in 1882. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. Ross recounts Melville’s failed dreams, like Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick, and his meetings with a dying Ulysses S. Grant. He also mentions his friendship with effete co-worker Martin Felch, that coarse John Gibbs threatens to expose as an unnatural relationship. In Publishers Weekly, a writer noted: “This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past.” A Kirkus Review critic remarked: “It takes a little while to build up speed, but this novel memorably provides a window into old New York and its narrator’s conflicted mind.”
The seventh book in “The American Novels” series, American Follies, sees fictional Ellen Finch, a stenographer, working for Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton during their suffragette movement in 1883. After Ellen’s baby is stolen, she gets help in finding him from P.T. Barnum who discovers that the Ku Klux Klan is responsible, as they claim the father is a black man passing as white. A Publishers Weekly writer praised the imaginative exploration of the era’s tension, adding: “Lock captures the tone and language of the 19th century … though the bizarre happenings are disorienting.” The novel “carves out a distinctive space—one part novel of ideas, one part madcap adventure,” according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
Featuring a metaphysical journey, Tooth of the Covenant goes back in time to right a historical wrong. Nathanial Hawthorne is writing the eponymous book in which he sends is alter ego, Isaac Page, back to the Salem witch trials of 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first woman to be executed as a witch, from stern judge John Hawthorne, Nathanial’s great-great-grandfather. However the plan backfires, as when Page puts on a pair of John’s spectacles, he transforms from an enlightened rationalist into a cruel puritan. Writing in Foreword Interviews, Meg Nola commented that “The historical details are immersive and meticulous, and Hawthorne’s eloquent narration is both repentant and wry.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer said: “The novel’s somber exploration of American cruelty and religious intolerance is balanced by its nimble prose, [and] sly wit.”
Voices in the Dead House, the ninth book in the series, takes place after the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862. In Washington, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott nurse the sick and wounded. Lock contrasts the egocentric yet compassionate Whitman with the intellectual and independent Alcott. The two encounter Abraham Lincoln, battlefield photographer Mathew Brady, and reformer Dorothea Dix. The book is “a stunning historical novel that brings history and literature together to share a singular perspective on the Civil War,” according to Kristine Morris in Foreword Interviews. “Lock also maintains distinctive narrative styles for each of his two narrators,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who added: “A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2015, John Mort, review of American Meteor, p. 78; April 15, 2017, Bill Kelly, review of A Fugitive in Walden Woods, p. 30; May 15, 2018, Bill Kelly, review of The Wreckage of Eden, p. 29.
Foreword Interviews, July-August 2021, Meg Nola, review of Tooth of the Covenant, p. 52; July-August 2022, Kristine Morris, review of Voices in the Dead House, p. 51.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2013, review of Love among the Particles & Other Stories; April 15, 2015, review of American Meteor; April 1, 2018, review of The Wreckage of Eden; May 15, 2019, review of Feast Day of the Cannibals; May 1, 2020, review of American Follies; May 1, 2022, review of Voices in the Dead House.
Library Journal, June 1, 2015, Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, review of American Meteor, p. 91.
Publishers Weekly, February 10, 2014, review of The Boy in His Winter, p. 67; December 1, 2014, review of American Meteor, p. 1; April 17, 2017, review of A Fugitive in Walden Woods, p. 38; April 9, 2018, Chelsea Ennen, “Rethinking Past Wars: PW Talks with Norman Lock,” p.51; May 20, 2019, review of Feast Day of the Cannibals, p. 54; May 18, 2020, review of American Follies, p. 34; May 10, 2021, review of Tooth of the Covenant, p. 40.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 2010, John Madera, review of Shadowplay, p. 145.
ONLINE
Akashic Books Web site, http://www.akashicbooks.com/ (April 25, 2013), Deanna Hoffmann, review of Love among the Particles & Other Stories.
Believer, http://www.believermag.com/ (October 1, 2008), Blake Butler, review of Grim Tales.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (March 1, 2011), Paul Charles Griffin, review of Grim Tales.
Fantastic Fiction, http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ (February 9, 2016), brief author biography.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (July 16, 2013), Nathan Weatherford, review of Love among the Particles & Other Stories.
Green Mountains Review, http://greenmountainsreview.com/ (February 20, 2015), Marcus Pactor, review of The Boy in His Winter.
Monkey Bicycle Literary Things, http://monkeybicycle.net/ (June 18, 2015), Robert Long Foreman, review of American Meteor.
National Endowment for the Arts, https://www.arts.gov/ (February 9, 2016), brief author biography.
National Public Radio Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (May 15, 2014), Jane Ciabattari, “Huck and Jim Ride the River of Time in Boy in His Winter.”
Norman Lock Home Page, http://www.normanlock.com/ (February 9, 2016).
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 19, 2014), Tobias Carroll, author interview.
Slice, http://www.slicemagazine.org/ (May 19, 2013), Celia Johnson, author interview; (May 12, 2014), author interview and excerpt from The Boy in His Winter.
Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms, http://tedlehmann.blogspot.com/ (June 13, 2015), Ted Lehmann, review of American Meteor.
Upcoming4.me, http://upcoming4.me/ (May 17, 2013), Norman Lock, “Story behind Love among the Particles.”*
Norman Lock
Norman Lock has written novels and short fiction as well as stage, radio and screen plays. He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, and the Literary Fiction Prize, given by The Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to Love Among the Particles, he is the author of the novels Shadowplay, The King of Sweden, and The Long Rowing Unto Morning, the short-fiction collections A History of the Imagination, Grim Tales, Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions, Trio, and Émigrés / Joseph Cornell's Operas, the novellas Land of the Snow Men and Escher's Journal, and the book-length poems In the Time of Rat and Cirque du Calder. His acclaimed Absurdist drama The House of Correction has been produced widely in the U.S., Germany, and at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival and, currently, in Istanbul. Radio plays broadcast by WDR, Germany, include Women in Hiding, The Shining Man, The Primate House, Let's Make Money, and Mounting Panic. Selected radio plays are published as Two Plays for Radio; stage plays, as Three Plays by Norman Lock.
Genres: Historical
New and upcoming books
July 2024
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The Caricaturist
(American Novels, book 11)
Series
American Novels
1. The Boy in His Winter (2014)
2. American Meteor (2015)
3. The Port-Wine Stain (2016)
4. A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017)
5. The Wreckage of Eden (2018)
6. Feast Day of the Cannibals (2019)
7. American Follies (2020)
8. Tooth of the Covenant (2021)
9. Voices in the Dead House (2022)
10. The Ice Harp (2023)
11. The Caricaturist (2024)
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Novels
A History of the Imagination (2004)
The Long Rowing Unto Morning (2007)
The King of Sweden (2009)
Shadowplay (2009)
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Collections
Trio (2007)
Grim Tales (2011)
Pieces For Small Orchestra & Other Fictions (2011)
Love Among the Particles (2013)
In the Time of Rat (poems) (2013)
Triple No. 4 (2017) (with John Olson and Angela Woodward)
Dutch Stories (2022)
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Novellas and Short Stories
Escher's Journal (2012)
Missing Persons (2013)
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Plays hide
Three Plays (2011)
The House of Correction (2018)
NORMAN LOCK has written novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage plays, dramas for German radio, a film for The American Film Institute, and scenarios for video-art installations. His plays have been produced in the U.S., Germany, at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, and in Turkey. His work has been translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, Greek, and Japanese.
He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, the Literary Fiction Prize, given by The Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Norman Lock on Literature, History, and his American Novels Cycle: A Series Published by Bellevue Literary Press
on Norman Lock, The Boy in His Winter, American Meteor, The Port-Wine Stain, A Fugitive in Walden Woods, The Wreckage of Eden, Feast Day of the Cannibals, American Follies, Tooth of the Covenant, Voices in the Dead House, The Ice Harp, The Caricaturist
We are a nation given over to consumption. The predilection for novelty is everywhere present, not excepting in our art and our literature. For much of my writing life, I believed that the works of the past belonged there. Romantic novels by Hawthorne and Melville or naturalistic ones by Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were to be endured in pursuit of a degree (even if sometimes secretly enjoyed). Once having been examined on past literary achievements, I hurriedly put them behind me in favor of fiction produced by Modernists and Postmodernists. I tended to judge art and literature by its novelty and its stylistic beauties (never mind their worth).
Late in my career, I have taken up the thread dropped forty years ago and am attending to the stories of the American past—that is, of course, how it has come to be known (how it is always coming to be known by successive generations of readers) by its literature. Through my American novels, I hope to understand, a little, the present American era by what came before and shaped its thought, beliefs, prejudices, virtues, vices, and emotional undertow. I want to believe that I am serving a purpose higher than aesthetics, which also has its place in my writing. I love to fashion beautiful sentences, but I hope that they are expressive of the state of my feelings about the world around me and of the truth, as I grasp it, of that elusive world, acknowledging that it is only an approximation.
The literature of the past conferred on readers and writers a larger view. It seems to me that this amplitude of time and space encouraged a corresponding amplitude of theme and purpose. In general, nineteenth-century literature was not small nor did it consider ethical, political, social issues outside the jurisdiction of fiction. It is precisely this old-fashioned grandeur of thought, moral intent, spaciousness, and comprehensiveness—in its breathtaking view of a continent being made and remade—that I hope to emulate in my American novels. Such an ambition is certainly presumptuous, but, with his or her every sentence composed with the intention that it be read, the writer presumes.
*The books of Norman Lock’s The American Novels series include The Boy in His Winter (2014), American Meteor (2015), The Port-Wine Stain (2016), A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017), The Wreckage of Eden (2018), Feast Day of the Cannibals (2019), American Follies (2020), Tooth of the Covenant (2021), Voices in the Dead House (2022), The Ice Harp (2023), and The Caricaturist (2024).
BLP Conversations: Norman Lock & Constantin Severin
on Norman Lock, Love Among the Particles, The Boy in His Winter, American Meteor, The Port-Wine Stain, A Fugitive in Walden Woods, The Wreckage of Eden, Feast Day of the Cannibals, American Follies, Tooth of the Covenant, Voices in the Dead House, The Ice Harp, The Caricaturist, The Poetic Species
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
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In this conversation, Norman Lock, author of, most recently, the American Novels series, and Romanian visual artist Constantin Severin, founder of the Archetypal Expressionism movement, explore ecstatic visions, healing the world through metaphoric language, and the ways their work seeks to “quote” the past for the purpose of enriching the present.
Constantin Severin: Can we start with the beginning?
Norman Lock: The beginning is as good a place as any to tell the story of oneself.
CS: Did your childhood in any way cause you to choose the writer’s path?
NL: Experience has taught me that the path—moment by moment—chooses me. It may be otherwise for others, but what has become of my life—and what, with every motion of the heart and mind, is in the act of becoming—seems to be within the control of circumstances. I do not mean that the universe has been arranged to do me good or mischief, although, for all I know, it might have been. I like to keep an open mind when it comes to the largest things—call them deities or singularities (if the word is not an absolute), as you wish. I like to believe that the smallest things intervene in my life—with or without intention: whether I call them quarks, a nervous synapse, an unruly gland, or a gnat, which I might—by chance or destiny—snuffle up my nose.
Like most people, who are raised within the conventions of the culture, faith, and system of belief in which they find themselves at birth, I began as a pragmatist, whose universe extended not much farther than my fingertips, accompanied by a vague sensation of the world beyond, intelligible by superstition and rumor. Like most others, I underwent a weakening of faith—more in emulation of angst-ridden characters of fiction and posturing friends than in earnest. Skepticism remains a habit of mind and a proof of one’s intelligence (or worse, of sophistication) long after its usefulness to the formation of the sovereign mind. I am only now, in my sixty-fifth year, examining my disbelief in light of my experience. A person who insists—if to no one but himself—that he is obedient to impulses seemingly not his own and that he writes at the behest of a voice that issues from his unconsciousness or from some entity in deep space—a person such as I have become is less likely to scoff at the improbable.
CS: When did you decide to become a writer and why?
NL: I did decide to become a writer—a decision seemingly in contradiction to my previous reply. Or perhaps not, because my mind must have been prepared for a decision, which it seemed to make all on its own, by those circumstances I mentioned earlier.
My decision to become a writer would have been a most unlikely one, if it weren’t for the example of my mother, who was constantly reading novels when I was a boy. No one else in the working-class neighborhood where I grew up read books, at least there was no evidence for such a “brainy” pursuit. I read the books that my mother had read, and it was in the historical fiction of Kenneth Roberts, whose novels are decidedly American, that I grasped the possibility of writing. In time, I did become a writer—first of poetry, then of plays, then stories—but by then, my literary experience had shaped my imagination in ways that were European and South American in their expression. I spent thirty years and more wanting to write like Henri Michaux, Kenneth Koch, Max Jacob, Luis Cernuda, Jean Follain, Russell Edson, Joe Orton, Max Frisch, Mrożek, Ionesco, Boris Vian, Cortázar, Dürrenmatt, Calvino, Borges, Landolfi, Kafka, Buzzati, Bruno Schulz, and Beckett. I had forsworn the literature of my own country and language in favor of intellectual fantasy and a stylized fabulism. I wanted to do in prose what Klee and Miró did on canvas and paper, what Cornell did on his little stages, or what Tinguely did with his “good machines.” I wanted to be, in other words, an avant-garde plastic artist—a metaphysician of the retinal arts.
CS: As a visual artist, I consider myself, “with every motion of the heart and mind,” a follower of Klee, as well. I also admire most of your favorite writers. In fact, before beginning our conversation, I felt confident that the Romanian playwright Ionesco, who lived many years in Paris, would be on your list; you are known as an author of absurdist plays, as well as a novelist.
I had also supposed that a hidden engine of your literary creation is your childhood.
History also plays a major role in your fiction. What is your approach to our absurd contemporary history, to the moral horrors of our time, and the constant crisis in which we seem to be living?
NL: Up until four years ago, when, by a seeming accident, I began to write my American Novels series, my approach to composition in whatever form was a glancing one. By this, I mean that each work was assembled from the debris of the age, whose themes, for me, were desire and anxiety, together with a longing to escape. My work tended toward the fabulist tradition, which is not a mainstream American one, in which I could invent fables and parables—for the page or the stage—whose meanings were indirect, as in the Absurdist writings of Ionesco, Kafka, or Donald Barthelme.
I was in flight from realism and reality, having come to believe, with Michel Butor and others, that, in a postmodern age, an artist is relieved of the necessity of quoting reality, in that reality is unknowable, uncertain, and undefinable. I had renounced my youthful feeling of obligation toward the world outside myself for an interior one, where natural laws were suspended in favor of play and the interrogation of the self. To be truthful, I borrowed the form of certain Postwar Eastern European plays and stories to my own purposes, ignoring their grave subtext, which many times was political. I adapted the form of political drama required by the artist in a totalitarian society for my own highly personal storytelling.
It would be wrong to judge this work of mine as frivolous: There was more at stake than whimsy and the pleasure of aesthetic invention; my emotional life, my uneasiness, insisted on it. The dangerous writings produced behind the Iron Curtain gave shape to my own anxiety and fear. But always I felt the guilt of someone who has renounced the world because he feels himself powerless to affect it. The guilt and sorrow that are everywhere present in my writings justified it—or so I told myself. The best of it is collected in A History of the Imagination (2004) and Love Among the Particles (2013).
In those two books, history—cultural, scientific, and literary—is the cloak and subject, although the histories are skewed, imaginative recreations of a past, which may or may not have happened as it has been recorded. There was guilt, anxiety, and moral outrage against injustice, but they were “glancing” and indirectly expressed. My first American Novel, The Boy in His Winter (2014), began as another such metaphysical conceit—a playfully metaphysical rendering of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like so much else of my fiction, my novel concerned itself with ideas—especially about time. But what I thought would be a time-travel novel became larger as, little by little, Jim, the maltreated black slave, who is “colonized” by Huck, became a major preoccupation of my novel. The past and the present seeped into it in a very real way, and I began to develop the theme of intolerance, which, in the four succeeding books, has become a significant element of the writing. The four novels that followed The Boy in His Winter—American Meteor (2015), The Port-Wine Stain (2016), A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017), and the recently completed The Wreckage of Eden (2018)—are historical fictions, but not at all like those written by Kenneth Roberts, whose novels incited in me, fifty years ago, the wish to write. By using an unreliable narrator reporting on his interactions with major literary figures of nineteenth-century America, I hope to expose both the moral horror and criminal injustices of the age and to speak to their persistence in our own.
As you would guess, my reading has radically altered—shifting abruptly from the fiction of European fabulists and South American magic realists to that of the nineteenth-century American authors, with whom I am engaged in a conversation—the intent of which is to locate in the past the sickness of the present.
CS: I agree that the roots of what we might call “the sickness of the world” lie in our past and that to examine them could be a step toward healing. The literary and the artistic global community share two language paradigms: the figurative and the abstract. In my opinion, we need to be aware of a third, which preceded them: the archetypical language still used by some writers and artists to express the essence of things, located in an atemporal dimension that Brâncuși, for one, asserted in his art. I’ve noticed that the language of your fiction is often an archetypical one, invoking a collective memory. Your use of essential creators of nineteenth-century American fiction, such as Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman, seems to confirm your own artistic purpose, which is to blow the dust from the past in order to see more clearly its shape—a shape that is inescapably that of your contemporaries.
NL: I like the notion, Constantin, of a third language available to writers and artists. Certainly, Brâncuși’s forms are an elegant refinement of beings and objects in the visible world; further abstraction would have pushed them into a non-objective universe where indirection and ellipsis make narrative less legible or even undesirable. My impulse differs from Brâncuși’s, Miró’s, Motherwell’s, Ellsworth Kelley’s—or Kafka’s, Jean Follain’s, or Russell Edson’s. Mine, like theirs, is a metaphoric language, which attempts—moment by moment—to enlarge the world, to enrich the present or the particular, and to claim extracurricular subject matter for itself. I am, however, a storyteller with an interest in ideas—including moral ones—and would not care to refine my work into mere syntax. Symbolic language is akin to superstition, which, in our enlightenment, we call “supposition.” It is a way to describe the world of uncertainty, where a provisional knowledge is acquired before the possibility of its verification.
I’ve discovered a spiritual refreshment in your paintings, Constantin, in which an ecstatic vision of the world of objects and people is everywhere in evidence through the use of archetypes. The works of “Archetypal Expressionism,” the movement you founded in 2001, in Bukovina, offer the viewer an experience of transfiguration, comparable to the Rapture. You move with assurance from the voluptuousness of Matisse in the “Text and Time” series, to an ecstatic Fauvism in the “Monasteries” paintings, to the Post-Impressionism of the “Children of Gauguin” series. While your work is evocative of the past, you infuse it with the mysteriousness of the archetype and—in the “Text and Time” paintings—visual quotations from the iconography of art history, cultural celebrity, and sacred emblems. I take great pleasure in the “Hierarchy of Light” series, whose radiant source you seem to have derived from the illuminated manuscript, the ecclesiastical vestment, and the religious icons of the Greek Orthodox faith. In their allusiveness and in their figurative language of suffering and transfiguration, I believe these paintings to be in the tradition of sacred art, made contemporary by the application of certain “decorative” principles. In the “Text and Time” paintings, I find an impulse equivalent to mine: the quotation of the past for the purpose of enriching the present. A work such as “Text and Time, 80,” could be a stained-glass window for a postmodernist house of worship.
Severin painting
My work, past and present, has been an attempt—at the level of the sentence—at myth-making, which is to push narrative art toward a condition of maximum meaningfulness, using a stylized and figurative language—your “third” language. I mean for it to be beautiful, although such an ambition is inconsistent with the art brut that seems to be still in favor. The novels I’ve read by Aharon Appelfeld—a countryman of yours—have always moved me in their English translations; they seem written in that “third” language. Since having begun the American Novels, I also intend that my fiction should have a moral and ethical point, albeit a subtle and tentative one. My narrators are many times possessed of the prejudices of their age because they inhabit it inescapably; the broader point of view, which, for us, is retrospective, is, for them, akin to an “event horizon” on the edge of a black hole of ignorance.
What I hope to accomplish in the American Novels is to write stories that resemble myths without sacrificing historical authenticity and usefulness—to replace the lies and delusions that continue to influence our view of the political, societal, and environmental world.
CS: In another interview, you stated, “I write with an ideal reader in mind.” You acknowledged Erika Goldman, your publisher and the editorial director of Bellevue Literary Press, as one of those ideal readers. Are you also interested in connecting to a larger audience and, if so, do you have a writing strategy to accomplish it?
NL: Erika and Carol Edwards, one of the press’s copyeditors, are my partners in an imaginary conversation, which I have with them as I write the novels that Bellevue Literary Press has been kind to publish, just as you, Constantin, are my partner in this conversation, which we have been having, by email, between Romania and America. When I write a novel, I think of Erika and Carol. I hear their imagined voices approving, reproving, or questioning the choices I make as—one by one—they accrue into a finished work. I cannot imagine a “faceless” reader.
As a writer I hope, with each new book, to reach a larger audience. Writers and artists are ambitious and presumptuous: It requires self-regard to presume to speak one’s mind and heart to others . . . to impose ideas and thoughts on them. It requires ambition to spend countless hours in isolation, working on a book or an art object. Ambition is what sustains us and—for those of us who are shy—gives us the courage to confront an unseen audience.
After the writing of The Boy in His Winter, I knew that I had found important work to do and, in acknowledging its importance to me, at least, I have been increasingly eager to find the largest possible audience for a literary fiction built on history’s ashes. I am a moralist. Much of my work during nearly half a century of wanting to write and, having found a voice and purpose, of writing has been shadowed by self-doubt and moral outrage. I suspect these same feelings are shared by most writers and artists, regardless of their work’s form and substance.
I must labor—and can hear Erika’s and Carol’s admonitions in my head—to suppress an evangelical tendency that might inflame my dramas and fiction into something less than art. The use of an unreliable and insecure narrator to undermine my self-righteousness is one strategy of making my novels acceptable to the reader—to the ideal reader who is prepared to be shown the moral horrors and injustices we spoke of earlier. Another strategy is to do what storytellers have always done: to “spin a good yarn” . . . to tell a story that will captivate—by humor, absurdity, hyperbole, elegance, lyricism, and exactitude—as well as provoke readers.
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted twice for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
Constantin Severin is a Romanian writer and visual artist, founder and proponent of Archetypal Expressionism, a highly regarded global art movement, which he founded in Bukovina, in 2001, as well as co-founder of 3rd Paradigm International Artists Group. A graduate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, he has published ten books of poetry, essays and fiction. One of his poems was included in the 2014 World Literature Today anthology, After the Wall Fell: Dispatches from Central Europe (1989–2014), aimed at popularizing post-Wende Central European literature on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Severin’s conceptual art and artworks have appeared in Artdaily, World Literature Today, It’s Liquid, Levure littéraire, Empireuma, Contemporanul, Vatra, Arkitera, Glare Magazine, Cuadernos del Ateneo, Dance, Media Japan, and other international art and literary magazines.
Lock, Norman THE CARICATURIST Bellevue Literary Press (Fiction None) $17.99 7, 2 ISBN: 978-1-954276-27-7
An illustrator seeks his fortune on the eve of the Spanish-American War.
Though it opens in 1897, Lock's new novel feels very relevant in 2024. The narrator, Oliver Fischer, is 20 when the book begins. He's studying art, to the frustration of his wealthy, bigoted father, who urges him to take up a career in banking instead. Much of Oliver's time is spent discussing politics and thinking about the nature of art. Painter Thomas Eakins--one of Oliver's instructors--instructs him to read Stephen Crane's article "An Experiment in Misery," an account of living hand to mouth. It's at this point that Oliver's life begins to draw closer to Crane's, with the two men eventually crossing paths in Key West. The story of a young man's discovery of what is and is not important to him is well handled here, and Lock offers reminders of the more unseemly aspects of this society, from Oliver's father's bigotry to a racist attack on a Chinese restaurant. The novel's description of the unlikely alliances at work in the anti-imperialist movement are intriguing--but it's Oliver's voice and the lyricism of his observations that make this novel especially strong. Here's Oliver exploring a collection of swallowed jacks in the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum: "Their number testified to the popularity of the schoolyard game and to the appetite of children for the inedible." Oliver is a wry narrator; he observes that, as tension between the United States and Spain escalates, "the temperature of the nation's war fever could be told by the number of exclamation marks" in newspaper headlines. In the end, it's a book haunted by Crane's literary work and his legacy--to say nothing of the man himself.
A resonant story of art, rebellion, and politics.
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"Lock, Norman: THE CARICATURIST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bd804820. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock, Norman THE ICE HARP Bellevue Literary Press (Fiction None) $17.99 7, 4 ISBN: 9781954276178
An aging Ralph Waldo Emerson grapples with an ethical dilemma.
Over the last decade, the stylistic range and subtle connections on display in Lock's American Novels cycle have afforded many pleasures. This latest installment focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, opening two and a half years before his death. He's showing the effects of dementia--which, unsettlingly, include a moment in which he doesn't recognize a passage from one of his own works. Emerson also converses with other people, living and dead, with whom he crossed paths. "I hope Garrison doesn't take it into his head to visit me. His opinions are fiery, and I dread being scorched," he thinks at one point. In his introduction, Lock writes that this book "can be thought of as a play for voices"--and an early passage in which Emerson ponders the word spoon suggests, perhaps, a slight influence of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape in the mix. Eventually, Emerson must try to focus on the present moment; he meets James Stokes, a Black soldier who deserted after defending himself from a racist attack and killing another soldier in self-defense. As in A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017), Lock explores the gulf between some transcendentalists' idealism and their reticence to take a stronger moral stance on racism and slavery--and Emerson occasionally muses on Samuel Long, the protagonist of that earlier novel, strengthening the connection between the two books. There's a profound sadness here, as Emerson muses on his losses, noting that "our bereavements bring us no nearer to God." And his awareness of his own condition is heartbreaking to ponder: "Soon the universe inside me will slip out like a yolk from an eggshell."
An elegiac, powerful book about a thinker's limitations.
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"Lock, Norman: THE ICE HARP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747342267/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1bdcf199. Accessed 26 June 2024.
The Ice Harp. By Norman Lock. July 2023.240p. Bellevue, paper, $17.99 (9781954276178); e-book (9781954276185).
Lock's latest in his luminous American Novels series shines a light on the Sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, as he suffers from dementia. The story takes on added poignancy as Lock shares in his foreword that his own mother died during the late stages of dementia while Lock worked on the manuscript. The structure plays wonderfully to Lock's signature strengths, his facility with words and sheer love of language. The aged Emerson's speech and thoughts are littered with malapropisms, spoonerisms, and puns that are clever and often profound. Emerson has imaginary conversations with the spectral forms of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and John Brown, peppered with "witty circumlocutions," as he ambles around town, inadvertently causing mischief. Lock also inserts nursery rhymes, powerfully evoking the stages of life as Emerson's illness progresses. This polyphonic approach provides countless memorable turns of phrase, and it is the rare paragraph that does not inspire underlining as Lock explores memory, mortality, and the passage of time, infusing this elegiac ode with deeper meaning. Lock captures this masterfully by quoting Emerson himself, "As the Sage of Concord said regretfully and, at the same time, wonderingly, 'Strange that the kind heavens should keep us on earth after they have destroyed our connection with things'."--Bill Kelly
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
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Kelly, Bill. "The Ice Harp." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 18, 15 May 2023, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A751443125/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2527afbc. Accessed 26 June 2024.
The Ice Harp
Norman Lock, Bellevue Literary Press
(JUL 4) Softcover $17.99 (240pp)
978-1-954276-17-8
In Norman Lock's historical novel The Ice Harp, Ralph Waldo Emerson struggles with encroaching dementia and the incontrovertible realities of aging.
In 1879, Emerson is seventy-six and troubled. Once heralded as the Sage of Concord, the brilliant essayist, philosopher, and poet clings to his remaining knowledge, though his memory and thoughts are often addled and disordered. He also has frequent visions--visits from ghostly friends. He engages in reflective conversations with the late Henry David Thoreau, abolitionist John Brown, and fellow transcendentalist Margaret Fuller.
Emerson's wife, Lidian, worries about her husband's "fuddled" behavior, and that he'll soon be eating "breakfast in the asylum." But when Emerson meets James Stokes, a former slave and a fugitive soldier, he is confronted with a more immediate dilemma. After being provoked by racial slurs, Stokes killed a white man; he is trying to escape likely execution. As Emerson recalls his own anti-slavery exhortations, he contemplates the paradox of Black emancipation in post-Civil War America.
This compelling narrative is heightened by intricate historical details and its distinct New England setting. Oilcloth on a kitchen table is "gashed from cutting pie dough into strips." Emerson's neighbor, Louisa May Alcott, keeps first aid supplies in a ladies' hatbox, while in Thoreau's Walden Woods, the famed pond is like a "bowl brimming with silver." And without pathos, the book conveys Emerson's fearful frustrations regarding his mental state. Amid the pensive turmoil of his thoughts are instances of wry eloquence; he notes how memory "is the thread on which the beads of a human life are strung," and worries his thread has snapped.
A fascinating and haunting novel, The Ice Harp chronicles the vulnerable mortality of an American genius.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Foreword Magazine, Inc.
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Nola, Meg. "The Ice Harp." Foreword Interviews, vol. 26, no. 4, July-Aug. 2023, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795724588/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6401dce3. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock, Norman VOICES IN THE DEAD HOUSE Bellevue Literary Press (Fiction None) $16.99 7, 5 ISBN: 978-1-954276-01-7
Lock's latest novel reckons honestly with the legacies of two beloved writers.
Lock's American Novels cycle of books has, since its inception, covered a wide amount of stylistic ground, from the surreal to the philosophical. While a few of the supporting characters in this book overlap with some of Lock's earlier works, the bulk of it focuses on a few months in the lives of Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott, during a period when both were helping wounded Civil War soldiers convalesce. Through the writers' proximity to the effects of war, Lock depicts both as grappling with their feelings on racial equality and the legacy of slavery in the United States. Each has a distinctive approach, with Alcott wondering whether her commitment to abolition is enough and the famously contradictory Whitman's transcendentalist reveries occasionally interrupted by his use of bluntly racist language. What makes the novel, particularly its Whitman-centric first half, so gripping is the way in which Lock depicts Whitman's inner conflict--sometimes offensive, sometimes empathic, and sometimes wounded when he's called out for his hypocrisy. The legacy of John Brown looms over both Alcott and Whitman, offering an example of someone who turned his ideals into unambiguous actions. Lock also maintains distinctive narrative styles for each of his two narrators, with Alcott's section memorably beginning with her calling Whitman "a shameless ass" and Whitman himself prone to more poetic reveries, as when he ponders the human cost of war: "I think there is a grand regiment of the dead, which is enlisting men and boys, white and black, from every corner of the nation."
A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.
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"Lock, Norman: VOICES IN THE DEAD HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A701896641/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=44cd7bd3. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Voices in the Dead House
Norman Lock, Bellevue Literary Press (JUL 5) Softcover $16.99 (288pp) 978-1-954276-01-7
The horror and devastation of the Civil War are witnessed by two icons of American literature in Norman Lock's novel Voices in the Dead House.
After the 1862 defeat of the Union Army, Washington is overwhelmed by a flood of wounded and dying men. Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott, confronted by this hellish scene, are determined to be of service. Although the two did not know each other--Whitman volunteered at Armory Square Hospital as a sanctioned visitor and wound dresser; Alcott was a nurse at Union Hospital--the book depicts them as aware of each other's presence. Alcott, cognizant of the good and the ill of Whitman's poetry and his reputation, declares herself unimpressed by either.
To capture the writers' voices, the book leans on their own preserved words. Alcott's recollections of time she spent with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are reminders of saner, happier days. On paper, she is an intense, independent abolitionist and suffragist with a discerning intellect, spry wit, and humor. And Whitman's writings reveal him as both compassionate and egocentric. But he loves men, and he has the ability to see beyond the constraints of religion and find what's spiritual in each human being. Still, though he's a staunch supporter of democracy, his conflicted views on abolition are surprising.
The book's cameo appearances by luminaries including President Abraham Lincoln (seen sitting up half the night wrapped in his old shawl) are moving and humane, contrasting with the harsh realities of the postwar period. They help to make Voices in the Dead House a stunning historical novel that brings history and literature together to share a singular perspective on the Civil War.
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Morris, Kristine. "Voices in the Dead House." Foreword Interviews, vol. 25, no. 4, July-Aug. 2022, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747824456/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e6fc2996. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Voices in the Dead House. By Norman Lock. July 2022.288p. Bellevue, paper, $16.99 (9781954276017).
Lock continues his consistently strong American Novels series, following Tooth of the Covenant, 2021), with a twin tale of two literary luminaries. The first of what is essentially two novellas introduces Walt Whitman as he tends to the Civil War wounded in a Washington, DC, hospital. Whitman provides sweets and spirits to sooth the souls of the afflicted, but his ministrations are viewed with a jaundiced eye by administrators concerned with rumors of immorality surrounding the "odious" Leaves of Grass author. Part two features the spirited, young Louisa May Alcott working nearby as a nurse whose "heart must be a cashbox until the Alcott family is no longer in arrears," taking copious notes that will later become her Hospital Sketches. Lock's deep knowledge of the time period is evident throughout, his research impeccable, his prose iridescent. Several other notable figures make cameo appearances, including President Lincoln, photographer Mathew Brady, and artist John James Audubon. It is the latter two with whom Lock must surely rank, similarly bringing to vibrant life his subjects, while adding his signature, carefully chosen colorful flourishes. --Bill Kelly
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Kelly, Bill. "Voices in the Dead House." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 21, 1 July 2022, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A713750886/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cd2f94a0. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock, Norman TOOTH OF THE COVENANT Bellevue Literary Press (Fiction None) $16.99 7, 6 ISBN: 978-1-942658-83-2
Lock’s new novel sends Nathaniel Hawthorne on a metafictional, metaphysical journey.
In the latest book in his American Novels cycle, Lock explores one especially fraught familial connection situated in the country’s past. Nathaniel Hawthorne was the descendent of John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. Aside from a framing sequence featuring Hawthorne, much of this novel consists of Tooth of the Covenant, a book he's writing in which Isaac Page, his fictional alter ego, journeys back in time to confront his infamous ancestor and avert the tragedy of the trials. It’s a multilayered sort of metafiction, one whose casual narrative complexity—uncanny dreams also play a part here—echoes Lock’s work in A History of the Imagination (2004) and The Boy in His Winter (2014). Initially, Page's misadventures in 1692 suggest a 19th-century version of numerous time-travel narratives in which someone out of their proper time wrestles with a new status quo. Lock also adds a few winks at the reader, as when Page waxes ecstatic about Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Rather than confronting Hathorne, however, Page grows distracted by the society around him and the prospect of romance. Gradually, he moves from being a progressive, liberating figure to one beset by ominous visions and prone to retrograde, offensive statements—and who ultimately ponders reconciling with, rather than rebuking, Hathorne. In showing Page’s gradual shift, Lock illustrates the ease with which some idealists can become reactionaries—and chronicles an uneasy metaphysical struggle in author and character alike.
A distinctive and ambitious foray into literary history.
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"Lock, Norman: TOOTH OF THE COVENANT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A659924970/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=28d693f7. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Tooth of the Covenant
Norman Lock. Bellevue Literary, $16.99 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-942658-83-2
Lock (American Follies) probes familial legacy, storytelling, and the tension between individuals and their eras in the cogent, metafictional eighth installment of his American Novel series. In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne sits in his Massachusetts farmhouse blaming his greatgreat-grandfather John Hathorne, a Salem witch trials magisrrare who refused to repent his condemnations, for his own lifelong shame and melancholy. In Hawthorne's eponymous manuscript, which makes up the bulk of Lock's work, Hawthorne dispatches Isaac Page, a fictional alter ego, to foil and wreak vengeance on Hathorne and enact a consoling literary fantasy. Isaac uses a mysterious pair of John Hathorne's spectacles to travel back to 1692 Salem. There, distracted from his mission by eye pain and dreams of Satanic rites, Isaac gradually transforms from an enlightened rationalist to a cruel, intemperare puritan. Even before he impulsively dons the spectacles and sees the world precisely as his infamous forebear did, Page grows more like Harhorne than Hawthorne. The novel's somber exploration of American cruelty and religious intolerance is balanced by its nimble prose, sly wit, and engaging glimpses of a literary figure. Lock's latest ambitious look at America's history will delight fans of the series and earn new converts. (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"Tooth of the Covenant." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 19, 10 May 2021, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A662131986/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=48f5f3c4. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Tooth of the Covenant
Norman Lock, Bellevue Literary Press (JUL 6) Softcover $16.99 (288pp) 978-1-942658-83-2
In Norman Lock's splendid historical novel Tooth of the Covenant, Nathaniel Hawthorne is troubled by his ancestor's dark legacy as a harsh, heartless judge.
In 1851, Hawthorne enjoys the positive reception of his most recent work, The Scarlet Letter. But he still feels guilt because of his great-great-grandfather's involvement in the Salem Witch Trials; that pains him like a "needle in my heart." Hoping for a literary catharsis, he creates a character, Isaac Page, to represent himself in a phantasmagorical story.
Isaac, along with a pair of antique spectacles (which belonged to the judge) and a coin from the present year (as a talisman that can return him home), journeys to Salem circa 1692. There, he finds work as a carpenter and confirms that "a pack of 'afflicted' girls" is making accusations of witchcraft. Though Isaac's purpose is to stop the local reign of terror, he often finds himself overwhelmed by his alternative environment. He suffers from headaches, nausea, and homesickness, none of which is helped by the era's greasy "suet puddings" and fried eels.
As the weeks pass and the trials continue, the spectacles begin to warp Isaac's perspective. Like the judge, Isaac becomes judgmental and intolerant, until the discovery of the "future" coin from 1851 brings him under suspicion of being the devil himself.
Lock masters the interplay between nineteenth-century Hawthorne and his fictional surrogate, Isaac, as he travels through Puritan New England. The historical details are immersive and meticulous, and Hawthorne's eloquent narration is both repentant and wry. Following this harrowing mission, Isaac and Hawthorne promise to never be "melancholy" again, and to write only "tales of sunny piazzas in Rome."
A flourish of literary time travel, Tooth of the Covenant creates parallel universes that challenge history's fixed scope.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Foreword Magazine, Inc.
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Nola, Meg. "Tooth of the Covenant." Foreword Interviews, vol. 24, no. 4, July-Aug. 2021, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747406857/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=51fb787e. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock, Norman AMERICAN FOLLIES Bellevue Literary Press (Fiction None) $16.99 7, 7 ISBN: 978-1-942658-48-1
Lock’s novel blends history and delirium in a thrilling, unnerving portrait of 19th-century America.
The books in Lock’s American Novels cycle—of which this is the seventh—have ranged from the wryly philosophical (A Fugitive in Walden Woods, 2017) to the metafictional (The Boy in His Winter, 2014). This book, which shares a few characters with Feast Day of the Cannibals (2019), both stands on its own and carves out a distinctive space—one part novel of ideas, one part madcap adventure. In an author’s note at the end, Lock calls this novel’s subject “America for the disenfranchised and powerless.” And so the story follows one Ellen Finch, who goes to work for Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1883. Ellen is pregnant when this new position begins, and halfway through the novel, she gives birth—at which point her newborn son vanishes. With the aid of P.T. Barnum, Ellen and her allies determine that the Ku Klux Klan is the responsible party, at which point the novel takes on a more stylized tone—one which echoes the occasional forays into fever-dream imagery in the book’s first half. While Lock’s focus is largely on 19th-century politics, there are a few moments that recall the current political scene—including one of a group of Klansmen shouting, “Build a wall! Build a wall to keep them out!” Lock juxtaposes critiques of racism and sexism with snappy dialogue: "In Mr. Barnum’s opinion, twelve clowns should be sufficient to fluster a Grand Cyclops and turn a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan...upside down” is perhaps the most ornate example.
Lock continues to experiment and push against narrative conventions.
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"Lock, Norman: AMERICAN FOLLIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622503289/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4cfcaace. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Norman Lock. Bellevue, $16.99 trade paper
(288p) ISBN 978-1-942658-48-1
Lock's raucous, fantastical seventh entry in his American Novel series (after Feast Day of the Cannibals) involves Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on a search for a baby kidnapped by the KKK. Pregnant stenographer Ellen Finch, 27, secures a job as stenographer for the famous suffragists in 1883, when they are at work on their third volume of History of Woman Suffrage. Ellen endures Elizabeth and Susan's one-upmanship and name calling ("Primp!" "Prude!" "Poseur!" "Prig!" "Humbug!" "Stickleback!") and meets other notable figures such as Jacob Riis, Herman Melville, and performers from P.T. Barnum's circus. Four months after the birth of Ellen's son, Martin, he is taken by a member of the KKK, who claims the father is a black man passing as white and plans to kill him. Ellen, Elizabeth, and Susan borrow Barnum's train to rush south on a surreal journey, complete with Stanton and Anthony dressed up as Klan members and later in blackface, and getting help from a jailer's wife and a former slave in their desperate attempts to rescue the child. Lock captures the tone and language of the 19th century ("I composed a telegram with the laudatory terseness preferred by God for His pronouncements"), though the bizarre happenings are disorienting. This imaginative exploration of late-19thcentury America's cultural tensions is an amusing burlesque. (July)
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"American Follies." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 20, 18 May 2020, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A625410796/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c00c7d7e. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock, Norman FEAST DAY OF THE CANNIBALS Bellevue Literary Press (Adult Fiction) $16.99 7, 16 ISBN: 978-1-942658-46-7
The latest book in Lock's American Novels series is narrated by a colleague of Herman Melville's, who tells a story that quietly moves toward gothic territory.
About halfway through Lock's novel, narrator Shelby Ross is conversing with his friend and co-worker Martin when Martin invokes Moby-Dick. This isn't a random reference: The year is 1882, and both men work with Herman Melville in the customs office. Yet Shelby has no idea what Martin is talking about--a telling reminder that Melville had, at this point in his life, fallen into literary obscurity. Shelby has similarly seen better days, economically speaking, but finds warmth in his interactions with both Martin and Melville. The novel is structured around Shelby's telling the story of this period of his life to Washington Roebling, who engineered the Brooklyn Bridge. As Shelby recounts his story--which also includes his rivalry with Gibbs, another co-worker, who has a propensity for insults, sadism, and violence--it gradually becomes apparent that ominous events are on the horizon for all involved. Gradually, the central qualities of several of the characters--Martin's enthusiasm, Shelby's reticence, and Gibbs' propensity for chaos--are destined for a collision of some sort. In the novel's second half, Lock subtly suggests that Shelby is, if not unreliable, then not quite as aware of himself as he should be. And while Moby-Dick is often referenced by the characters, it's Billy Budd, a later work of Melville's, that's alluded to thematically, as Lock addresses questions of desire and repression, both personal and societal. What begins quietly takes a turn for the emotionally wrenching.
It takes a little while to build up speed, but this novel memorably provides a window into old New York and its narrator's conflicted mind.
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"Lock, Norman: FEAST DAY OF THE CANNIBALS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A585227134/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=68c23fcd. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Feast Day of the Cannibals
Norman Lock. Bellevue Literary, $16.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-942658-46-7
Lock flexes a powerful historical imagination in his bleak, transfixing sixth entry in the American Novel series (following The Wreckage of Eden). Shelby Ross recounts his life to childhood friend Washington Roebling, the bedridden chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, as the two look out on the nearly complete project in 1882. Shelby, a 39-year-old former business owner, lost his fortune in an economic collapse. He is hired to work as an appraiser under a dispirited and volatile Herman Melville (whose novels are forgotten and whose marriage is under intense strain) at the New York Custom House. Shelby makes an enemy of John Gibbs, a coarse and mean weigher, but forms a fast, putatively platonic attachment with the effete and timid 20-year-old Martin Finch. Gibbs suspects there's more than friendship going on between the two men and vacillates between soliciting Shelby himself and attempting to humiliate him, including tricking him into visiting a transvestite brothel where Shelby is assaulted. The second half of the novel jumps forward two years as Shelby explains again in Roebling's room the nightmarish events that led to his recent incarceration. This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past and is another impressive entry in Lock's dissection of America's past. (July)
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"Feast Day of the Cannibals." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 20, 20 May 2019, pp. 54+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587765448/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d9ac8435. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Feast Day of the Cannibals.
By Norman Lock.
July 2019. 240p. Bellevue, paper, $16.99 (9781942658467); e-book, $16.99 (9781942658474).
Shelby Ross had fancied himself a playboy, gallivanting through the high society of 1880s New York City until the fortune his father made during the Civil War was lost in the post-war depression. Shelby found himself settling for a lowly position as a U.S. customs house appraiser and reporting to another man of failed dreams, Herman Melville. Lock's latest entry in his superb American Novels series (following The Wreckage of Eden, 2018) again features his remarkable eye for historical detail and fine-tuned felicity with the language of the period. At times, the sparkling prose is nearly indistinguishable from that of the authors Lock so clearly admires, Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. Shelby narrates the story-within-a story to his friend Washington Roebling, engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge--a narrative device that allows Lock to weave Melville and Ross into various interactions with luminaries of the day, including Ulysses Grant and Samuel Clemens. The mellifluous language, literary allusions, and some subtle Moby-Dick parallels, such as Melville using a harpoon to kill rats in the hulls of ships, will delight fans of classic American literature.--Bill Kelly
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Kelly, Bill. "Feast Day of the Cannibals." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 19-20, 1 June 2019, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593431513/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ab80733c. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock, Norman THE WRECKAGE OF EDEN Bellevue Literary Press (Adult Fiction) $16.99 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-942658-38-2
A man with a long connection to Emily Dickinson loses his faith in the midst of battle.
Narrator Robert Winter is a chaplain in the United States Army in the mid-19th century--giving him a firsthand view of the fracturing of society leading to the Civil War. The novel is structured as Robert's correspondence with Dickinson, whose ideals and aesthetics serve as a contrast to his own loss of faith. Lock does a fine job of making Winter feel like a man of his time: Though he's progressive by the standards of a white man of his day, his blind spots are pointed out by some, including a young Samuel Clemens. As he moves from conflict to conflict, Robert's own mind becomes more tortured. "There is no way to tell of it in words," he writes, regarding war, before offering up a grotesque metaphor. The novel is enlivened by signs that Robert is, while not an unreliable narrator, possibly a selective one. Several major life events happen to him in passing between two of the book's sections, and his own (chronologically) first encounter with Dickinson isn't revealed on the page until a good distance into the book--which, in turn, prompts the reader to re-evaluate some of the pair's earlier interactions. Although this is the story of Robert's growing loss of faith, he shows a propensity for using Jesus' life as a metaphor for his own. As with each installment of Lock's The American Novels series (A Fugitive in Walden Woods, 2017, etc.), this work stands on its own entirely well, though readers of his prior books will find connections both thematic and literal.
Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way.
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"Lock, Norman: THE WRECKAGE OF EDEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A532700592/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5eb1356e. Accessed 26 June 2024.
The Wreckage of Eden
Norman Lock. Bellevue (Consortium, dist.), $16.99 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1942658-38-2
In the fifth installment of his American Novels series, Lock (A Fugitive in Walden Woods) imagines the relationship between a fictional U.S. Army chaplain and Emily Dickinson. Chaplain Robert Winter, by his own admission, was rarely alone with Emily. He met her as she was sitting outside and studying botany in Amherst, Mass., and was immediately struck by the young woman's wit, insight, and intelligence. Though Robert's feelings quickly turn romantic, Emily rejects his advances and continues her life of isolation and poetry. Robert, meanwhile, goes on to serve as a chaplain in the Mexican War and the Mormon Rebellion, his faith crumbling as he witnesses unthinkable atrocities. After the war he marries and has a child, then briefly befriends Abraham Lincoln. But no matter how far he travels, his mind is never far from Amherst and Emily. Lock's prose is ethereal but never overwrought (of war, he writes: "gray earth, gray skies, gray bread, gray smoke, gray snow, a hacking cough, musket fire, a fearsome noise like a twig's snapping, which might have been caused by a bushwhacker or a femur shattered by a minie ball"). The lively passages of Emily's letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery from the previous novel. Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock's thought-provoking series continues to impress. (June)
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"The Wreckage of Eden." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 14, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A533555583/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6af5bc76. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock continues his American Novels series with The Wreckage of Eden (Bellevue Library, June), about the relationship between an Army chaplain and Emily Dickinson during the Mexican-American War and John Brown's 1859 slave rebellion.
How would you describe your American Novels series?
As an ongoing examination of certain qualities in the American character which persist from the 19th century, when the nation was acquiring its mandates of Manifest Destiny and violent acquisition. I use the device of imagining the primary documentarians of the time to present my ideas about these qualities that make Americans what they are--for better or for worse.
This novel deals with issues of racism and social injustice. Was that always your intention?
Yes, certainly. It's not my intent solely to recreate the past, but to comment on it. When I set out to write, I have no preconceived notions other than the figures, the characters I'll be invoking, but each time I find myself returning to themes of race, social inequality, and injustice. I suppose that's simply a reflection of the present.
How did you imagine the relationship between fictional chaplain Robert Winter and Emily Dickinson?
I thought of their voices as contrary. Emily Dickinson really didn't engage in the world beyond the larger, metaphysical sense of the world. Robert was at the heart of the most desperate adventures this nation had during that century. He was the one who questioned himself; she never questioned herself. So it was a debate between the absolute certainty of art, which Emily embodies, and the character buffeted constantly by happenstance, contingency, and moral questioning, which is Robert.
Why did you choose to set the novel partially during the Mexican-American War?
These wars, such as the Mexican-American war, the Mormon Rebellion, the Border Wars--outside of history majors, these are forgotten and unknown major conflicts, every bit as important to the time and to the nation that we became as the wars of the last century. It's certainly not anything novel for me to observe that we can't understand the present unless we understand the past.
Is there anything specific you hope readers will take away from this series?
One of the things that motivated my interest was my daughter's attitude. She's a marine biologist and knows nothing of American history. Her attitude is that "I'm not interested in dead people," and I think that's a mistake. I have a feeling that if this holds true for the millennial generation, it probably holds true for many of my own generation. It is very important to understand how the national ethos, the collective unconsciousness which every nation possesses, was formed.
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Ennen, Chelsea. "Rethinking Past Wars: PW TALKS WITH NORMAN LOCK." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 15, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A535099934/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7daf7da. Accessed 26 June 2024.
The Wreckage of Eden.
By Norman Lock.
June 2018. 288p. Bellevue, paper, $16.99 (9781942658382).
The fifth in Lock's consistently excellent American Novel series (A Fugitive in Walden Woods, 2017) follows army chaplain Robert Winter as he navigates the tumultuous mid-nineteenth century while serving in the Mexican War and, later, at the Mormon Rebellion. He has witnessed man's inhumanity to man, and his faith is challenged, but he retains in his heart a tenderness for a young, spirited woman back in Amherst, Emily Dickinson. Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue. Emily describes her seemingly chaotic verse, "Ecstasy is ungrammatical, and never more so than in our faithless age." History buffs will relish Robert's adventures as his path intersects those of such notable figures as a young Samuel Clemens, aspiring politician Abraham Lincoln, actor John Wilkes Booth, and abolitionist John Brown. Although Emily does not return Robert's affections, Lock skillfully hints at the exuberant and tempestuous mind that will produce hundreds of poems, most of which were not published until after her death.--Bill Kelly
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Kelly, Bill. "The Wreckage of Eden." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 18, 15 May 2018, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A541400835/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8b6e73fe. Accessed 26 June 2024.
A Fugitive in Walden Woods. By Norman Lock. June 2017. 240p. Bellevue, paper, $16.99 (9781942658221).
Former slave Samuel Long, having gained his freedom by chopping off his hand and cauterizing the wound in hot tar, travels the Underground Railroad to Massachusetts, where he is taken in by Ralph Waldo Emerson and employed as a minder for an eccentric recluse named Henry David Thoreau. This fourth book in the American Novels series, following The Port-Wine Stain (2016), again demonstrates Lock's uncanny ability to inhabit historical figures and meticulously capture the vernacular of the time like a transcendental ventriloquist. Samuel's days are spent accompanying Thoreau, who is rendered authentically as an absent-minded genius, exasperating contrarian, misanthropic curmudgeon, and aphoristic philosopher in equal measure. The most delightful passages find Thoreau, Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne discussing the issues of the day in high literary style, trading barbs, and tossing off one-liners worthy of Bartlett's. The text interweaves dialogue known to be spoken or written by Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne with that made up by Lock and attributed to these giants of American literature. Lock's remarkable achievement is that the reader cannot tell the difference. The real power of the story, however, comes from Samuel, who more than holds his own among these geniuses. His experiences of brutality offer profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history.--Bill Kelly
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Kelly, Bill. "A Fugitive in Walden Woods." Booklist, vol. 113, no. 16, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A492536160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4e0dad48. Accessed 26 June 2024.
A Fugitive in Waiden Woods
Norman Lock. Bellevue, $16.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-942658-22-1
The fourth installment of Lock's the American Novels series (American Meteor) is the unflinching, penetrative, and bravely earnest account of fictional escaped slave Samuel Long's (the fugitive of the title) time living in Waiden Woods as Henry David Thoreau's neighbor. After Thoreau's death, Long reflects on his time with the American transcendentalists in his youth, when his freedom was tenuous and his sense of identity fluid. After Long makes his escape from slavery, Ralph Waldo Emerson gives him protection and asks that he stay in the woods with Thoreau and report on his progress. Along the way, Long becomes a part of Thoreau's circle of luminaries, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Lloyd Garrison. As Long comes into his own, his famous compatriots are pushed to face the implications of the role they would have him play in their own narrative. Long's remembrance of his friend is reverential while exploring the wider social context; he contemplates the intersection of his experience as a runaway slave--forced to put his life in the hands of white abolitionists like Emerson, while Thoreau's experiment is paid for with privilege--and transcendentalist beliefs in man's inherent goodness and individualism. With melodic prose that marvelously captures Long's searing insights and rich observations, Lock's imaginative novel is a stunning meditation on idealism and the cost of humanity. (June)
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"A Fugitive in Waiden Woods." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 16, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490820749/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=67acf5fc. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Lock, Norman THE PORT-WINE STAIN Bellevue Literary Press (Adult Fiction) $16.95 6, 14 ISBN: 978-1-942658-06-1
Doppelgangers, literary intrigue, unhealthy obsessions, and a secret society of the death-obsessed menace a young man in this novel of 1840s Philadelphia. Lock's novel is structured as a long remembrance told by an aging doctor, Edward Fenzil, working in Camden, New Jersey, in 1876. The story he tells is about his life in Philadelphia 32 years earlier, when he worked as an assistant to Thomas Dent Mutter, a surgeon fond of medical oddities, and became acquainted with Edgar Allan Poe. Gradually, Poe initiates Fenzil into an subculture of people who work with death. Fenzil's mind begins to fray as he becomes fixated, first on Poe and then on his newly discovered doppelganger. Both the presence of Poe and the fact that this is a long monologue by a not-necessarily-reliable narrator add an abundance of tension to the proceedings. Occasionally, the tone becomes dreamlike, as in a story told by a cohort of Poe's about the fate that befell the captain of a slave ship. This is the third in Lock's American Novels series: works that harken back to 19th-century history and culture. Each is self-contained, though readers of Lock's earlier American Meteor (2015) will note that the "Moran" to whom this novel is told is that novel's protagonist. (This book's chilling final sentence has a secondary meaning for those who have read its predecessor.) Beyond the presence of Poe, other literary figures hover on the book's margins--the framing story includes several mentions of Walt Whitman, and in his acknowledgements, Lock notes the influence of John Berryman's Dream Songs on one structural aspect of the novel. This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
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"Lock, Norman: THE PORT-WINE STAIN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A447747886/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d17641e5. Accessed 26 June 2024.
The Port-Wine Stain
Norman Lock. Bellevue Literary (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-942658-06-1
Lock has made a specialty of reimagining the American literary past: earlier works in what he calls the American Novels series took up Huck Finn and Walt Whitman (The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor, respectively). Now he fictionalizes Edgar Allan Poe, who takes the story's narrator on a tour of darkness--the dark side of 1840s Philadelphia and the more nefarious workings of the human mind. When he meets Poe, naive young Edward Fenzil becomes obsessed with him, readily falling under his "dark enchantment," and as he tells the story 30 years later, it is clear that this moment has shaped his worldview, his life's trajectory,' and his sense of self. Poe plays rough--briefly shutting Fenzil up in a coffin, for instance, so he can pick Fenzil's brain about the experience--but still Fenzil cannot tear himself away from Poe. In the language of the time, there is an affinity between them, but for Lock, that electric linking is also found in the power of story, which, as Fenzil says, functions as "a hook, a barb." Indeed, Poe's most lasting effect on Fenzil comes through a tale he writes (ably concocted by Lock). The problem here is that as a storyteller Fenzil lacks Poe's concision: there is too much foreshadowing, too much rumination on the nature of evil, free will versus fate, and the sciences of mesmerism and phrenology. Yet this is a worthy volume in Lock's American Novels series, and readers will find him to be an ideal guide for a trip into the past. (June)
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"The Port-Wine Stain." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 17, 25 Apr. 2016, pp. 64+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A450904526/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=82dd4e6c. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Review: The Caricaturist by Norman Lock
June 25, 2024
Nichole Louise
Oliver Fischer, a self-styled bohemian, boardwalk caricaturist, and student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, enrages his banker father and earns the contempt of Philadelphia’s foremost realist painter Thomas Eakins when he attempts to stage Manet’s scandalous painting The Luncheon on the Grass. Soon after, he is ensnarled, along with Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, in a clash between the Anti-Imperialist League and their expansionist foes. Sent to Key West to sketch the 1898 American invasion of Cuba, in company with war correspondent Stephen Crane, he realizes––in the flash of a naval bombardment––that our lives are suspended by a thread between radiance and annihilation.
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I usually don’t include the official blurb of a book in my reviews, but I am here because this one paragraph basically tells you the entire plot of The Caricaturist by Norman Lock. That statement is no hyperbole. That’s really all that happens! I went into this book thinking I would get an interesting account of an artist war correspondent covering the now little known 1898 American invasion of Cuba. In truth, the main character Oliver Fischer does not even make it to Key West until about 80% into the book.
Being from Philly, it was fun to read descriptions of the city and be able to orient myself on the streets the characters walked and the landmarks they passed. Logistically, Lock got things mostly accurate–except there was mention of Chinatown starting around 6th St. To my knowledge, Chinatown has historically never extended to 6th street, but started around 9th/10th which is where is remains today.
To be honest, not much happened in this book which made reading it a bit of a slog. I considered DNFing it a few times, but figured I’d push through hoping we’d get to the action of Cuba. In reality, the majority of the book follows Oliver and his friends bumbling around Philadelphia eating, drinking, drawing, and briefly getting caught up in anti-Imperialist protests. There were some humorous moments, but for the entirely of the book I was just waiting for something to happen to propel the plot forward. I suppose I felt this way because the stakes weren’t high. Oliver is relatively privileged and although his father threatened to cut him off financially if he continued bumbling about with his “frivolous sketching,” I never really got the impression that Oliver was ever in any danger of succumbing to dire circumstances. By the time we get to the precipice of action in Key West 80% into the book, the story pretty much abruptly ends before Oliver even gets Cuba to become an artist war correspondent!
The Caricaturist will be released July 2, 2024