In his American Novels Series, Norman Lock presents reconstructed eras in American literary history. Each novel involves a writer: Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Melville, among others. In The Caricaturist, the 11th stand-alone novel in this series, the narrator, Oliver Fischer, encounters poet and novelist Stephen Crane during the tumultuous run-up to the Spanish-American War.
The essence of Lock’s writing is mis-en-scène, embedding the reader within a historical period via the use of time-bound diction and granular details of the physical setting, as well as political speeches and rallies, contextual historical facts. and a plethora of actual newspaper headlines, poems and ditties of the day. In The Caricaturist, while attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studies under renowned artist Thomas Eakins, Oliver spends his time, to Eakins’ dismay, sketching macabre anatomical anomalies preserved in a nearby tourist museum and caricatures of people strolling on the boardwalk in Asbury Park.
Oliver’s bohemian friends are young artists and art models whose lives center on banter and frivolity. Early in The Caricaturist, the gang is off on a frolic, taking a boat up the Delaware River to a spot where they will dress in costume and create a tableau vivant mirroring Manet’s painting Luncheon on the Grass in which two couples picnic on a forest floor, one of the women being naked for the occasion.
When they assemble to recreate the painting, a wasp stings the bare model on the breast, causing her to run screaming through the forest, scandalizing a group of nearby Baptists at their picnic. The model is stoned by the Baptist women, and four of that party are police deputies. The bohemians are arrested and released from jail only through the intercession of Eakins.
There follows a long series of similar encounters involving public figures, including Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and sharpshooter Annie Oakley. At one point, Eakins shows Oliver a newspaper article by Crane extolling an Experiment in Misery, in which one is urged to understand a destitute person’s perspective by appearing destitute. Oliver and his friend oblige and are immediately arrested as vagrants—only to be rescued in court by humorist and essayist Mark Twain and industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who throw around their luminary weight.
Each of the many adventures and incidents is embedded in a detailed description of the streets and buildings existing at the time in Philadelphia and includes artifacts and personages of the time, sometimes enumerated in long lists. These references and extensive quotidian dialogue that mainly consists of casual insults among friends are presumably offered to provide verisimilitude. Still, the extent of such detail can bog down the narrative pace. Where details engendering realism are at issue, less is often more; a few vivid, well-placed details often suffice to enable readers to imagine themselves in the scene.
Such incidents are well-written, extremely readable, and humorous, and mostly go nowhere as plot points other than to illuminate the period. The scenes with a newspaper publisher are an exception, eventually leading Oliver toward an assignment in Key West, from where he is to ship out to Cuba to create sketches relating to the erupting Spanish-American War in tandem with Stephen Crane, who is to send back dispatches from the front as he has done in other foreign war zones.
Although he is name-checked several times early on, readers don’t meet Stephen Crane until page 284. He and Oliver spend time in Key West, chatting in a variety of venues, including hotels, bars, and brothels (although Lock tells us that Crane was a man of extraordinarily few words in conversation) before they set sail. At the end of The Caricaturist, they ship out to Cuba, but we don’t see them make landfall.
However, what Lock presents in the end is a truly impactful moment. On the ship, Oliver witnesses the detonation of a shell fired into the night sky by a nearby U.S. warship, and there is a long, suspended moment before Oliver feels the concussion.
“I am waiting for the blast to thud in my breastbone.
In the moment between coruscation and detonation,
the roulette wheel clicks, the cards have yet to be dealt,
or the die cast. All is impending. The world holds its breath.”
In the Afterword, Lock tells us that for Crane, “the trick is to hazard all, live in earnest, behave as though each act were the final one. …The wheel spins, and time is in adjournment… [yet] time, we know, cannot be adjourned.”
In The Caricaturist, the characters find themselves in a fraught time of war fever (and its isolationist counterpoint) just as one century dies and a new one is born – a moment of history suspended. While the unspooling of the plot involves a lot of business and bohemian banter without much consequence, Lock expertly provides readers, in the end, with a peek into a lost time wherein, much like the present, America holds its breath.