The Wreckage of Eden (The American Novels) - Softcover

Lock, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942658389 ISBN 13: 9781942658382

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press, 2018

Synopsis

“[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” ―NPR

When U.S. Army chaplain Robert Winter first meets Emily Dickinson, he is fascinated by the brilliance of the strange girl immersed in her botany lessons. She will become his confidante, obsession, and muse over the years as he writes to her of his friendship with the aspiring politician Abraham Lincoln, his encounter with the young newspaperman Samuel Clemens, and his crisis of conscience concerning the radical abolitionist John Brown. Bearing the standard of God and country through the Mexican War and the Mormon Rebellion, Robert seeks to lessen his loneliness while his faith is eroded by the violence he observes and ultimately commits. Emily, however, remains as elusive as her verse on his rare visits to Amherst and denies him solace, a rejection that will culminate in a startling epiphany at the very heart of his despair.

Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson’s life, times, and artistry, this fifth stand-alone book in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

About this title

About the Author

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and 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, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In spite of my resolution and a rancor that would not quit me, I carried your letters and poems, as well as the daguerreotype, all through the bitter years of war. Rarely were you absent from my thoughts, although they were often unkind. I might have called Amherst home and escaped the bloodshed had you shown me kindness. I did not require love; I would not have embarrassed you again by my former importunity. I wanted, wished for, the mystic chords of affection, to alter Abe Lincoln's phrase for my own narrow purpose. I wished for a connection, a bond, to another person. Charlotte was too young and too close in blood to satisfy my need for intimacy, and Tess, by then, too dotty. Ruth was dead, and memory is a thin broth of little nourishment.

During that endless war, whose tokens are, for me, a muddy ditch flooded with rain, a jumble of dead men beside a fence, pigs rooting in shallow graves, green leaves spotted with crimson, 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 mini-ball, all through that endlessly harrowing war, I did as John Brown had adjured me. That I did so perfunctorily and believed in almost nothing was beside the point. The emptiness I felt was my sacrifice and confirmation of my place on earth, never mind in a future heaven or hell. I was like a man who is kept upright by his suspenders and his bootstraps, by the starch in his shirt and the crease in his pants. My black frock coat with its nine brass buttons was adequate to the performance of my duty.

In this way, I endured.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1942658389
• ISBN 13: 9781942658382
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288