| Title | : | American Meteor (The American Novels) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1934137944 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781934137949 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 208 |
| Publication | : | First published May 18, 2015 |
By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America’s fabulous and murderous history.
American Meteor (The American Novels) Reviews
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Rating: 4* of five
Latest comment from today on my review from Bellevue Literary Press!
My *beautiful* review! Well, did you ever? I am 2/3 done with book 3, THE PORT-WINE STAIN, so a review early to mid-June.
Bellevue Literary Press
.@expendablemudge (ie, me) is reading Norman Lock's American Novels series. Here's his beautiful review of AMERICAN METEOR
http://tinyurl.com/heqenkh
My review of Norman Lock's AMERICAN METEOR is live now at
The Small Press Book Review! I really enjoyed the read, moreso than the first book in Lock's American Novels, THE BOY IN HIS WINTER. Have to love Bellevue Literary Press for publishing the series, which is planned for five in total. Don't wait...scoot! Get over there and see how much you'll like the book!
MY REVIEW POSTED AT LAST:
The Publisher Says: In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, receives a medal from General Grant, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln’s funeral train, goes to work for railroad mogul Thomas Durant, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse, his life will be spared but his dreams haunted for the rest of his days.
By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America’s fabulous and murderous history.
My Review: At some point in this brief, pithy book, I caught myself wondering why I was turning pages so fast, why I couldn’t wait to find the next golden moment described in lovely, burnished prose, when I knew how the story ended already. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a puzzle novel, it’s a meditation on the Manifest Destiny era. The myth of the poor lad who comes from nothing and nowhere to make a fortune is an oft-told tale. Lock’s spin on that is to have the traditional humble lad, this on named Stephen Moran, as protagonist:While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings.
And while she’s creating the world anew for her son, she’s also priming the pump for his life-long belief that there is fate even if there isn’t a god to be found, since all the old fairy tales involve come-uppances and just deserts.
Growing up in antebellum Brooklyn, harvesting oysters to sell for his own food, and working all the hours it’s possible to work leaves the narrator with a clear-sighted picture of his future. His childhood, if you can stretch a point and call it that, ended with mother’s death. Hard work, little pay, no future:
I had sucked on the tit of disillusionment and teethed on the bitter root of cynicism. I was on the way to the misanthropy that would sour me.
Intervention in this soul-killing, life-shortening grind is the cataclysm of the Civil War. Young Stephen Moran takes an escape route from worthless labor and attaches himself (at thirteen, he can’t really be said to join) to the Army. He becomes a bugler and loses an eye, but these events aren’t dwelt upon. Moran is more interested in analyzing “the sickness of the degenerate age in which I lie at night, listening to the boasts and grievances of the dead” for his audience, interested in the powerful figures of the age for their benign or malign impact on creating the age he’s lived though.
Looking back, reminiscing, nostalgically reliving moments of pleasure, momentous and public or quiet and quotidian, isn’t in Moran’s nature. He is leaching the poison of a life into his listener’s ears. He has seen but never made a difference to events that form the national mythology:Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.
The perspective of the aging on the course of life isn’t always so searingly honest, but it serves the narrative needs of the story for it to be so. I hope for all our sakes that such unflinching clarity becomes pandemic in our own degenerate, I’d even say diseased, age.
Back to the Civil War...Moran’s lost eye lands him in the hospital, where he’s visited by a familiar figure from his life in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Walt Whitman. As Whitman pauses beside the bed of our sixteen-year-old hero, they share a moment that will stay with Moran his whole subsequent life:‘How old are you, son?' Whitman asked.
'Going on seventeen.'
'So young,' he said, stroking the back of my hand with his poem-stained fingers. 'How did you come to lose your eye?'
I told him the story of my heroism, with embellishments--told it so well, I was nearly persuaded of my exceptional character.
'You sacrificed what little you had to call your own for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. You gave an eye, half of man's greatest blessing, when rich men up north paid a small price to keep themselves and their sons from harm.'
With those few words, accompanied by a glance that seemed to measure the dimensions of my meager existence, Whitman made me see myself as a sacrifice on the altar of wealth, but a hero notwithstanding.
Receiving such a benediction from the “poem-stained fingers” (isn’t that a lovely phrase?) of America’s most revered poet? Oh my! And the effect of Moran’s story on Whitman leads to a momentous change in the fortunes of a no-longer-needed bugler from an ended war. Whitman remembers Moran, and mentions the tale of his heroism to General Grant. Grant summons the lad, gives him a Medal of Honor for sacrificing his eye, and gives him one of the signal honors available to any American soldier at the time: he is to be the bugler playing “Taps” at each stop of Lincoln’s funeral train as it wends its way from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, for the assassinated president’s ceremonial burial.
Moran has plenty of time to accustom himself to the smell of death, from battlefields to the decomposing president. He sleeps in the funeral car, an ostentatious gift from the railroad interests to the living president for his use in meeting with his generals in the field. (Lincoln scorned it, never used it, while alive.) It is usual to meditate on the dead princes of our world, and Moran is no exception:What is a good man if not one who does not believe in himself to the exclusion of others? ... He was asked to bear what cannot be borne--what should not be borne. I hope never to be so tested, for I have it on the best authority that I will not bear it.
No ordinary person can bear the extreme pressure of the Presidency; Lincoln bore it in time of civil war. Moran is far from alone in his realization that his ordinariness is also an advantage. His life after the brief flash of fame will go on, unlike Lincoln’s. He will go on, traveling and meeting remarkable men, running from all women, all of which confirms his core belief:For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!
It doesn’t matter that one rubs shoulders with the world’s history-makers, alive or dead. You are what you are, and that’s all there is to it. Heresy to think, still less speak aloud, in that time of Manifest Destiny’s ascendency. Moran rides in the Lincoln Parlor car as a steward to the paladins of the day. He watches the slaughter of buffalo in their millions. He sees mile-long swaths of prairie grass torched to amuse the grandees.
As horrible as he thinks all of that is, it brings Moran his life’s purpose: He becomes a photographer as the largesse of his railroad tycoon employer. He documents the progress of the railroad through the Indian country his government swore would be theirs in perpetuity. His mentor, famous wilderness photographer William Henry Jackson, makes photographs for the railroad tycoon as a means of financing the his true passion: recording the end of the people called the Ute, starved, shot, and left for disease to finish off. Jackson chose Moran as his assistant when Moran was learning basic photography from Jackson’s portrait-taking brother in Omaha. Jackson scorned this as much as he scorned the documentary whitewash he splashed on the railroad, an attitude that well suited Moran. It was Moran’s gift to watch genius work:What was not possessed of the 'fat light'--an immanence that shed radiance over the world of gross matter--should be left to the portraitists of sausage-shaped ladies and their rich consorts.
It was also Moran’s fate to travel, in the teeth of the oncoming winter, with Jackson to photograph the Ute in their last days. As reluctant as Moran was, it provided him with the agreeable experience of first love with a Ute girl. What makes his experience endurable, though, and allows him to cling to the edge of life:The negatives he did manage were made in the hour or two when the sun seemed to rally with a yellowy light reminiscent of an egg yolk; usually, it looked pale as a pearl on the steely blue or leaden sky above the snow-scrubbed lake. That's a purple passage fit for a novel but hardly descriptive of the actuality of that winter, which was almost past enduring.
Jackson’s art, his astonishing eye and precise technique, set a bar that Moran knows he can never reach, still less surpass. He is, however, urged on by the brush with greatness.
As Jackson heads off deeper into the wilderness, Moran heads to Fort Abraham Lincoln, there to attach himself to General George Armstrong Custer as personal photographer. He is mesmerized by the aura of Manifest Destiny shining from Custer’s brilliant golden locks. As he observes Custer more and more, and from an intimate viewpoint, Moran comes to loathe the man, as he already loathed the philosophy that he embodies:At his request--a Custer request was a command impossible to refuse--I produced a series of prints for the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia: the general with Bloody Knife, his favorite Indian scout; with the Custers' pack of eighty dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux; with Libbie in the parlor of their quarters at the fort; and the general striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoléon's; arms folded across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent destiny.
The repugnance of the images makes my skin crawl. Lock’s clarity and transparency of prose has a way of allowing the underlying emotional state to reach me before I’m aware that what I’m reading is horrible, vicious, evil, full of the darkest smoke from hellfire. Moran, in whose mouth these utterances are placed, is himself invisible. He feels, as he’s said, his own smallness, and this is what makes him the perfect mouthpiece for Lock’s excoriation of our founding Western myths.
Moran makes his most life-changing decision while preparing to photograph the slaughter at Little Big Horn. In the run-up to this national tragedy Moran determines that it will be he who kills Custer, he who will stop this particular monster from causing more horrendous suffering, win or lose. The hubris of which Custer was guilty in his pursuit of the battle made Moran’s task, oddly, more difficult, as it led directly to the almost immediate destruction of his forces. Yet Moran manages to carry his self-imposed duty to its end: He shoots Custer in the temple, destroying the seat of his evil thoughts.
And at this moment, Moran (the only white survivor of the massacre) has the single most important meeting and takes the single most important photograph of his life. A figure bends over him, he thinks to finish him off. Instead Moran will lose the autonomy of his soul.
It is Crazy Horse who seeks Moran out. Crazy Horse, the seer whose prophecies began this branch of the war that will end at Wounded Knee, in bitterest defeat for the Native Americans. Crazy Horse gives Moran the “gift” of prophecy. Moran, in his turn, gives Crazy Horse the Medal of Honor he has come to despise. Prophecy is a gift that Crazy Horse gives him by the simple expedient of living on after his body dies in Moran’s mind. Crazy Horse as an intimate roommate? Sounds horrible, knowing the future and seeing its inevitability as Fate unfolds before your eyes:A sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age and of the age to come, when Trinity--not the Christians' but Oppenheimer's--will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs will engender tribes of lepers--not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial chambers with a pharaoh's curse.
As the reader shudders with the sense of doom, Moran’s listener is finally revealed to be his own doctor house-calling on him at the end of his life. All the years of his small life after the last brush with Manifest Destiny, Moran has never so much as whispered of his extraordinary dual nature and his fellow passenger.
He also tells the doctor that he has the only image of Crazy Horse on earth. His camera had fallen with him during battle and, against all odds, the glass plate did not break and the lens exposed Crazy Horse’s image. The doctor asks why wouldn’t you sell such an incredibly valuable image, the price would be astronomical. Sell?Crazy Horse said, ‘Remember this moment well.’
‘I will,’ I said solemnly…
‘I’m going to spare your life so that you’ll never be free of me.’ -
This slim book is spare and powerful, with our protagonist finding himself around major historical figures and events over and over again. It starts with Moran as a cynical 16-year-old Union bugler. He’s wounded because he picked up a gun that subsequently misfired and took out his eye. His–err, creative–retelling of the event leads to his appointment as the official bugler accompanying President Lincoln’s funeral train tour in cities throughout the northern states. This is what good historical fiction should be. Lock doesn’t embellish unnecessarily, but simply moves his character through a brutal and tumultuous period in our country’s history.
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Some beautifully written historical fiction. The Custer section is too short but the Lincoln section is lovely
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I love historical novels--and I love reading about the American West even more, but this book left me frustrated. In too many places were anachronisms that just couldn't be overlooked by this reader.
Essentially the book uses the fictional character of Stephen Moran to connect dots linking Abraham Lincoln's funeral train, Walt Whitman, the photographer William Henry Jackson, railroad tycoon Thomas Durant, and General George Armstrong Custer, along with events like the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Battle o Little Bighorn.
In theory, this is clever. It shouldn't be too easy to draw a Forrest Gump-style character who witnesses these events and personages, but in Moran, there is just a shallow man. He hops in and out of bed with a National Geographic issue's worth of American ethnicities without a hint of emotional engagement. He takes up photography, supposedly, because one of his conquests was photographed the morning after.
There are clever insights here, don't get me wrong. The opening image of Whitman "yawping" across the waters of Sheepshead Bay, a valley of bison, pony and Indian bones, the repeated suggestion that Leaves of Grass is an American bible of sorts--these are powerful, but instead of a giant "Yawp," the book left me with more of a plaintive "Meh." -
Like “Forest Gump”, sans chocolate. A war, in this case the Civil War, introduces our main character, Stephen Moran. As a young bugler injured, he makes up a story of bravery and passes it on to Walt Whitman, who connects him with US Grant, the deceased President Lincoln, and so one to other famous figures. Moran tells the story of his life, talking of men like meteors, bright and burning out quickly, leaving nothing behind. Custer was somewhat an example of this, but others he met, like the Chinese man Chen, were quite the opposite. In retrospect, the men discussed all were partly like a meteor, but often had something left behind. The writing was of the period. This one had the makings of a great story, but just didn’t grab me, quite possibly because of the period writing, maybe just my mood.
A freaky thing about this book - I listened to the audio version. The book is written as if Moran is telling his story to his friend Jay, which is also my name. So every once in a while, he would drop a "Lucky for you, Jay" in the narrative. That really wakes a person up! -
“You tell a story like a can-can dancer’s legs.”
This historical fiction is a mix of truth, fiction, and an allegory of climate change and the curse of Sitting Bull on America.
Stephen Moran is a 15 year old bugler for the Union Army. He meets Walt Whitman in the hospital recovering from shooting his eye out in an accident, which he conveniently changes into a heroic tale. Before he knows it, he is bugling taps on Lincoln’s funeral train with medals and a higher rank.
Stephen has many adventures including falling in love with an Indian maiden, learning photography, making friends with a Chinese man who is helping to build the railroad across the country, and finally the climax at Little Big Horn. Stephen’s hatred for General Custer pervades the book and if you are a fan of that man, you won’t like this book. He creates a Custer that is all preening and bluster with little substance.
I enjoyed the book but I also think “Little Big Man” was better. The Sitting Bull curse at the end of the book reflects the future facing our country and the world. Some of the prose is truly beautiful and I will read more of this author. I liked Mark Bramhall’s narration. -
This had absolutely rave reviews, but it just didn't work for me. The psychology and motivations of the character were too abbreviated and the story was emotionally uninvolving. At least it was short, or I would never have finished it.
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A young Civil War veteran ventures West, encountering violence and moments of revelation on his way.
Lock, whose work often encompasses eras and notions of history and literature in unexpected ways, is working in a more restrained manner in this novel. Narrator Stephen Moran encounters real-life figures (including Walt Whitman and Ulysses S. Grant), his path quietly intersecting with major historical events from the Civil War to the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Initially a bugler, Stephen loses one eye in a battle and winds up working on President Abraham Lincoln's funeral train.
From there his life takes him West, which will further shape his character, especially his time working for photographer William Henry Jackson. There’s a brief metaphor involving an aging Huck Finn that will stand on its own to some readers and evoke for others Lock’s The Boy In His Winter (2014), in which Huck and Jim travel through decades’ worth of history via the Mississippi River.
Like that novel, this one is structured with an older narrator looking back over his life. As the story progresses, Stephen has fateful encounters with George Custer and Crazy Horse, leading to moments of vengeance and haunting realisations. Stephen is aware of his moral shortcomings and conscious of the racial conflicts and power struggles—some of them fatal—that play out around him. “There was room on the calendar for only one martyrdom in April,” Stephen notes after a run-in with a group of Confederate sympathisers after Lincoln’s death.
He’s a memorable narrator, seeking to understand the new medium of photography but also capable of acts of swift violence. A subplot involving his visions of the future—"It came to me in dreams. Terrible ones!” he says—arrives halfway through the book but turns out to have a solid payoff.
This novel memorably encompasses grand themes and notions of transcendence without ever losing sight of the grit and moral horrors present in the period. -
I absolutely adored the language in this book. The sentences have such depth and despair that you can imagine what it must be like to be a poor lonely lad caught up in the Manifest Destiny of America and still despise the demonization of the natives and annihilation of the bison.
Stephen Moran starts out as the bugle boy of the Union Army at the tender age of 13, and ends up in the Armory Square Hospital a few years later with a lost eye from the battle of Five Forks. Here starts his further adventures and wanderings with famous men that define the era. Beginning with Walt Whitman, then Ulysses Grant who gives him a medal and rank so he may play taps on his bugle with Lincoln's funeral car on it's way to his final resting place in Illinois.
It's an enormous book, packed into small 200 pages, and something to be savored. I almost wish I had bought a copy of the book instead of reading one from the library, as this would be one to read again. -
I liked it. Not overaly enthralled however. The plot is creative and imaginative as is some of the writing though in some ways it felt a little flat - needed more time and character development. The main character doesn't connect well however as he comes across very "modern" feeling for someone who would have been living in the 1800s. He has a false sense of modesty and humility, in which he makes "honest" mistakes in certain areas (morality, drinking etc), but when it comes to issues like racism or treatment of animals, he's always on the "right" side. Throughout the book he displays a pessimism in America and its future, as well as a scorn for Christianity. But for the Indians and their mysticism, only reverence is shown. If this were a story actually written in the time period of the 1800s I would have enjoyed reading and getting the historically accurate perspective, but since it wasn't, it just felt like a historically improbable story with an underlying modern agenda. IMHO.
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Historical literay novel about a teen named Stephen Moran and his part in the history of the US and westward expansion. It's a remarkable story, if it were true, of a youngster from a broken home and town who joins the military of the time. His assignments include accompanying President Lincoln's body acrosst he country by train to his resting place. Moran is a bugler who becomes a photographer of the west in all it's stark reality of the time, the mass killing of buffalo, and the corraling of American Indians onto dismal reservations. The book follows Moran's adventures and personal journey of growing into a man. Splendid writing!
If you haven't read this author and you like literary reads, he's not to be missed. It took me awhile to read because I've been on an extended trip and was having too much fun to read some of the time. -
Lock tackles the westward movement in this beautifully crafted novel. Stephan Moran experiences the Civil War as a bugler, accompanies Lincoln's body to its resting place and heads West. He see the transcontinental railroad completed, becomes a photographer and accompanies Custer into the Black Hills in 1874. Along the way he witnesses the deliberate destruction of buffalo herds and the massacre of Indians. In prose distinct for its clarity he portrays Custer in a accurately harsh light. He was "the stamp and image of Manifest Destiny," Moran concludes, and he becomes obsessed with killing Custer for all that he did and all that he represented. Crazy Horse speaks to him and become his vision presenter. Well, I don't want to provide spoilers, so I'll just say it's an intriguing book.
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This book reads more like a diary. A very boring diary. There is no plot and nothing that compels you to the next page other than to just finish it. The writing is beautiful and wonderfully descriptive. However that’s some of the problem to me. It’s very flat and doesn’t match the background of the narrator. And the vocabulary. I love the use of obscure words but the author seems to go out of his way to include something impressive in every sentence. It’s not at all in keeping with the narrator or the story itself. I think this author could write a great book of essays and which is somewhat what this book really is. In the end, I just didn’t care what happened next which was just as well since nothing ever did.
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Sometimes it is hard for me to really enjoy and critique historical fiction, partly because I cringe at the putting of dialogue in historical figures' mouths, and also potentially erroneous readings of historical events. Sometimes when it is done with more humor, such as Berger's LITTLE BIG MAN, I like them a tad more, or if the figures make only cameo appearances, but this is neither. Overall, I enjoyed the book, though at times it had the feel of someone who did good research and then stuck it in the book, but I just wasn't feeling it as much as I probably should have. No offense to Lock. I suspect younger readers who do not know a lot of the history of this period---the racism, violence, etc.---they might like it and then it might get them interested in reading more about the period.
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Norman Lock does a masterful job weaving a story about a 13-year-old Irish boy from Brooklyn's tenements, his enlistment in the Union Army, and his lifelong adventures and crossed-paths with Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, Thomas Durant, William H Jackson, the Ute, Custer, and Crazy Horse. All in 201 pages! Passionate throughout, funny in parts, the author has created a new genre ... the fantastically plausible. I loved it, especially the sections with events in Utah and, well, that ending! (no spoilers). The January 2019 Book of the Month Club selection - Pleasant Valley Branch, Weber County (Utah) Library.
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Captivating narrator, the plot just couldn't hold my attention. I had some familiarity with photography in that time from Michael Crichton's, "Dragon Teeth," but I couldn't quit thinking that this lacked the charm of that story. I wish there would have been something that grabbed my attention. I gave it three stars because it was nice background noise for a day in the office, and I could focus in and out as needed without feeling like I missed plot points. I just left this book feeling underwhelmed, but not disappointed. Overall forgettable for me though.
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Recommended by a friend whose taste I usually admire, but I could barely drag myself through this novel. There are some beautifully-written passages, but overall the protagonist felt like a thumbtack that the author kept pulling from the Big Map of American Westward Expansion and poking back in so the characters could rub shoulders with as many Famous Figures as possible. It just didn't rise above the level of contrivance for me, and I'm very sorry to say that. Even Whitman feels exploited here as a pop-up personage. No, no.
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I quite enjoyed this book.
The narration begins with a young bugler in the Civil War and ends just after the Battle of Little Bighorn. Along the way, he meets Walt Whitman, Ulysses Grant, and Custer.
Insightful about the greed and corruption that were central to so much of 19th century American history. (And which continue today!) Particularly poignant on the destruction of so much that was precious in the West. -
I'm not really sure what I just read. Or why. Historical fiction? Narrated by a bloviating fellow who fancies himself key in our nation's history. It was a fairly entertaining read, I'm just not at all sure their was a point.
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Reading through the most critical of the Amazon reviews for this one, I'm finding I'm not the first to compare this book to a civil war era Forrest Gump. Was I dazzled? No.
I need to stop reading these dang ol' white man on the prairie books, they tend to disappoint me. -
American Meteor by Norman Lock (Believe Literary Press, 2015, 208 pages, $
27.99/10.99) is a picaresque coming of age novel featuring narrator Stephen Moran, a product of mid-nineteenth century Irish lower East Side of New York, as a Western Forest Gump, hitting many of the historical highlights of the westward expansion during and after the Civil War from Manassas to the Little Big Horn. Along the way he meets and is influenced by many of the seminal characters of that era, describing in often flowery, luminous language his experiences as he develops. While described as a “Western” novel, this worthy piece does not strike me as the sort of heroic, shoot-em-up western my reading experience has led me to expect with that designation. Rather, taking a reflective view of the Civil War and the rush to subdue the Indians while creating a continental nation, 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.
Moran is not much of an actor in his westward trip. Rather, he's an observer, eventually becoming that most detached of observers, a photographer capturing for posterity the events of a westward-bound people. We first see him as an Irish street urchin at the beach in Brooklyn where he observes a wild Walt Whitman proclaiming, to the waves hitting the shore, his love for everything. Moran finds himself in trouble, and sentenced to the Union Army where, because of his youth and small stature, he becomes a bugler, one who sounds the charge and proclaims the loss through his instrument. He's present at Bull Run, trains endlessly in Washington under McClelland, and is wounded in the Wilderness, where he loses an eye under rather unclear circumstances, but a pervasive image thoughout the novel. While in the hospital, he's nursed back to health by Whitman, who gives him a copy of Leaves of Grass, providing him with a wealth of imagery and understanding of American expansiveness which yields him insights throughout the rest of his journey. When Lincoln is assassinated, Stephen is there to play the bugle and Grant awards him with an undeserved Medal of Honor, which lubricates his stature. He's chosen to accompany Lincoln's body back to Springfield, playing taps along the way at each stop, while riding in the funeral car as Lincoln decomposes. Please read the rest of this review on my Blog at
www.tedlehmann.blogspot.com -
"I might not be interested in history, except for the parts I clambered through..." (page 64) but that is actually plenty more history than most in the life of Stephen Moran. Moran is a fictional character who orbits around some of history's famous: Walt Whitman, Ulysses S. Grant, Custer, Crazy Horse. From crowded New York City as an orphan to the desolate West. Moran loses an eye for the Union in the Civil War as a bugle player and joins Abraham Lincoln's funeral tour, playing his bugle at the back of the train for weeks before eventually reaching Illinois. Living in a train car with Lincoln's corpse leads him to work for the railroad. The day the Union Pacific railroad met the Central Pacific was the day Moran thought "the West began its long, slow dying". (page 99) Eventually he takes an interest in photography which becomes a convenient excuse to stay close to an arrogant man... to assassinate him. Becoming an assassin because life experiences can change a person: Moran is saved from drowning by a black man and barely survives a winter in the West with Native Americans. Both these events change Moran's opinions that were only too common in the mid 19th century. Moran uses his photography to try to change the killing of both Native Americans and the buffalo. It gets a little weird when Moran is sharing prophetic dreams with a deceased Crazy Horse, especially when the morals of the future he dreams don't go anywhere. Moran is an omniscient narrator for a most unusual reason and if this idea was used at all, it should have been run with. On a sentence level, the writing is vibrant and full of life, written as it might have been from Moran's point of view in the 19th century. At a spare 200 pages, this full life doesn't take too many pages to tell. I think I'm beginning to find that in my opinion, a shorter novel must be more perfectly crafted than a longer novel. In order to shine, a story must be done pretty well if it's around 200 pages, but a lengthier book deserves more leg room and more forgiveness from me if it isn't perfect. This book reminded me of Philipp Meyer's 'The Son' - now that's a book I can get lost in. I wouldn't have liked 'The Son' as much if it was 200 pages either but I guess that is the best complaint to have about a book - it's not long enough.
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Lock’s “American Meteor” is easy to summarize but hard to categorize. Its narrator is Stephen Moran, who recollects his life for Jay, a doctor friend. His remarkable biography moves from his boyhood as an oysterman in New York, bugle boy in the Civil War, wounded and decorated veteran, mourner of Abraham Lincoln, waiter for a railroad entrepreneur, photographer of the West and finally assassin of Custer. Viewed as history, the book is lacking in detail and seems extremely unrealistic, considering that Moran interacts with so many famous Americans (Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Thomas Durant, William Henry Jackson, George Armstrong Custer and Crazy Horse). Clearly the novel has elements of the long-form poem with evocative descriptions, extreme detail and use of symbolism. Moreover, it certainly is a coming-of-age picaresque. However, in the end, “American Meteor” may best be viewed as an allegory on the many flaws in the American psyche, as illustrated by personalities who inhabited the post-Civil War West.
Stephen is foremost a clear-eyed observer. His one eye, goal to become a photographer and the mentorship of William Henry Jackson seem to represent his bona fides as an observer. Clearly, we are meant to see the flaws in the American personality: greed, racism, genocide, environmental disregard, corporatism, pragmatism and delusion. These traits are on display for Stephen to observe in the historical figures Lock chooses to portray. Not unlike the plethora of historical characters in the book, Stephen’s observations about these flaws seem outside what might be expected of a young man of his time and background. But as an allegory, this seems reasonable. We are left to wonder if this long list of character flaws will represent the seeds of our own destruction as seen in the apocalyptic vision of Crazy Horse or will redemption be possible. Based on our lack of progress since that time, the latter seems unlikely.
