Fifty-five thirty-one North Third Street–address of the house that I was as eager to put behind me as Stephen Crane was New York City.
from The Caricaturist by Norman Lock

When I read that address I had a jolt, a sudden feeling of traveling back in time. Ollie Fischer’s family lived in the community of Olney in Philadelphia where we lived for seven years. So many familiar places are mentioned from our fifteen years in and around Philadelphia. We had walked through Fisher Park to get to Fifth Street and the Olney public library. We walked along Tookany Creek, been in Franklin Square, lived in Kensington among Father Son Holy Ghost row houses, rode the subway out of Broad and Market, stood in the shadows of City Hall.

The novel is set in 1897 when the country and Philadelphians are watching what is happening in Cuba. Will the United States go to war against the Spanish? Mark Twain decries such a move as imperialism while Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt is pushing for war, hoping to raise a troop and win fame that will guarantee a political career. Oliver Fischer’s friend Robert rails that he won’t go to war “for pineapples and Domino sugar.”

Ollie is a failed art student, his teacher Thomas Eakins and Ollie’s banker father both attacking him after his attempt to reenact and photograph Manet’s scandalous painting The Luncheon on the Grass ends badly. Eakins decries him as an artist, his father as a never-do-well who doesn’t even deserve a job at his bank.

Robert finds a job for Ollie illustrating advertising copy but his real skill is political cartooning, creating humorous caricatures. Ollie and Robert are hired to go to Cuba to illustrate Stephen Crane’s war reports. Crane is disheveled and ill yet full of spirit, In conversation with Ollie and Robert he imparts much of his checkered history.

The cast of historic characters who have cameo appearances includes Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Clara Barton, with references to a multitude of other local and national luminaries from the era. Ollie’s artist grandfather is inspired by Lock’s own grandfather, Franklin Barrett, and Ollie’s boat trip on the Frankfort River reflects his family photographs. Ollie, Lock tells us, “bears a passing resemblance to the author as a young man.”

Lock recreates the world of 1897 through a barrage of references from popular culture, historical events, newspaper headlines, and references to people, places, and businesses of the era. It is a time of great change and growth, but also turmoil. Americans were gung-ho for going to war with Spain, purportedly to protect the Cuban citizenry, but in fact to protect American business interests. The war would cement America as a major military–and imperialist–power.

But there was an anti-war movement made up of anti-imperialists and Ollie attends a rally where Andrew Carnegie warns against the infusion of “alien races” that would come with imperialism: “I say that imperialism is tantamount to watering single-malt scotch whiskey with soda water!”

With his decadent lifestyle turned upside down with his father’s removal of support, Ollie finds himself preparing to go into a war with Crane, who took the job of war correspondent because he was desperately in debt. The novel ends before they reach Cuba and are immersed in the danger and trauma of war. Crane at twenty-six was an old hand as a war reporter. But Ollie had been living a decadent life–we first meet him wearing a fez and smoking a hookah.

One of the first books I purchased as a teenager was The Collected Poems of Stephen Crane. I had found the volume on the shelf of my high school library and the poems made a huge impact on me. One of my favorite poems was this one:

There was crimson clash of war.
Lands turned black and bare;
Women wept;
Babes ran, wondering.
There came one who understood not these things
He said, “Why is this?”
Whereupon a million strove to answer him.
There was such intricate clamour of tongues
That still the reason was not.

by Stephen Crane
When I read that poem the Vietnam War was happening and the boys in my classrooms were aware that after graduation they could be drafted.

Thinking of Ollie and Stephen on the eve of the Spanish American War and the conflicting reasons for the war, I recall the many other wars since then and the reasons given that manipulate American’s heartstrings and the unspoken considerations for the wars. I think of how many lives were impacted and altered forever by wars. And how the reasons for the wars are too often cloaked in idealistic reasons.

This rich portrait of a time over 100 years ago, as in all of Lock’s American Novels series, brings fresh understanding of how we “got to here” and how we cycle back to the same errors.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )