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A review by ben_miller
A Fugitive in Walden Woods by Norman Lock
4.0
Full review here: http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/a-fugitive-in-walden-woods/
When asked for his motto in a 2016 interview, Norman Lock answered: “One must write as if a book really could change the world.” It’s no wonder, then, that he’s attracted to American writers of the nineteenth century—notables like Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. After all, they wrote books that really did change the world.
Lock’s new novel, A Fugitive in Walden Woods, is the fourth in a loose series grappling with those early American literati who can, in some ways, be credited with inventing the nation’s idea of itself: Twain’s sophisticated folksiness became the quintessential American voice, Poe’s gothic tales mined the dark veins of our national psyche, and Whitman’s exuberant poetry tried to give us our own Homeric epic.
In A Fugitive in Walden Woods, Lock turns his gaze to the New England trio of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who framed America’s troubled, contradictory relationship with nature and authority. Ventriloquizing historical figures is always tricky, but Lock does it with just the right mix of reverence, humanity, and skepticism. The story, unfolding across five seasons from 1845 to 1846, is rich with illuminating incidents and lovely meditative passages, bathing its subjects in a light that is more revealing than worshipful.
But the novel’s boldest (and most dangerous) choice is to present itself as a memoir by Samuel Long, an entirely fictional escaped slave who has fled to Massachusetts via the Underground Railroad. Writing nearly twenty years later in the early days of the Civil War, Samuel looks back on his time at Walden under Emerson’s patronage.
The rest of this review appears online at the Colorado Review: http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/a-fugitive-in-walden-woods/
When asked for his motto in a 2016 interview, Norman Lock answered: “One must write as if a book really could change the world.” It’s no wonder, then, that he’s attracted to American writers of the nineteenth century—notables like Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. After all, they wrote books that really did change the world.
Lock’s new novel, A Fugitive in Walden Woods, is the fourth in a loose series grappling with those early American literati who can, in some ways, be credited with inventing the nation’s idea of itself: Twain’s sophisticated folksiness became the quintessential American voice, Poe’s gothic tales mined the dark veins of our national psyche, and Whitman’s exuberant poetry tried to give us our own Homeric epic.
In A Fugitive in Walden Woods, Lock turns his gaze to the New England trio of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who framed America’s troubled, contradictory relationship with nature and authority. Ventriloquizing historical figures is always tricky, but Lock does it with just the right mix of reverence, humanity, and skepticism. The story, unfolding across five seasons from 1845 to 1846, is rich with illuminating incidents and lovely meditative passages, bathing its subjects in a light that is more revealing than worshipful.
But the novel’s boldest (and most dangerous) choice is to present itself as a memoir by Samuel Long, an entirely fictional escaped slave who has fled to Massachusetts via the Underground Railroad. Writing nearly twenty years later in the early days of the Civil War, Samuel looks back on his time at Walden under Emerson’s patronage.
The rest of this review appears online at the Colorado Review: http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/a-fugitive-in-walden-woods/