‘Eden’s Clock’
By Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press, 304 Pages

The spirit of Herman Melville suffuses the 12th and final book of Norman Lock’s American Novels series. “Eden’s Clock” stands by itself, but if you don’t read the entire series you will have missed stunning portrayals of personages such as Susan B. Anthony, P.T. Barnum, John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe — to name only a few of the figures in literary, political, and social history treated with critical attention and affection.

Melville showed the darker side of American history, of monomaniacs like Ahab and cunning and duplicitous operators like his version of Benjamin Franklin, not to mention the flim-flam artist in “The Confidence Man.” Of special note in “Eden’s Clock” is an ex-slave, Bonaparte, named after a mule by a slavemaster but with the kind of grandiose sense of himself that is worthy of a Napoleon. Bonaparte has learned how to manipulate white people — what slave didn’t? — but in his case, he gets around with considerable aplomb that would give Melville’s confidence man a worthy contest.

In Mr. Lock’s novel, the story of a clocksmith in 1906 trying to get to San Francisco to repair the gigantic clock on the Embarcadero, becomes an epic journey that rivals Twain’s picaresque novels. Mr. Lock employs an ingenious narrative device: The clocksmith narrator, Frederick Heigold, describes his life and that of his deceased suffragist wife in a letter to Jack London, whom Heigold is sure will understand an account of the unjust treatment received by social and political activists. 

Heigold lands in Manhattan’s Tombs jail simply because he is in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s one of those cases where the police arrest first and then make up the charges, abetted by a judge who professes ignorance of how justice is meted out on New York City streets. That Heigold is a Civil War veteran and has broken no laws matters not at all in an America where a person can be imprisoned quite easily even if he or she is just a passerby.

Do-gooders in this novel, like Heigold’s wife, are on the right side of history, but the toll society takes on them is appalling. Heigold is a narrator without a voice, having had his larynx destroyed on the Gettysburg battlefield. He writes on a slate, and you could say his account slates America.

Mr. Lock’s wry humor and irony is reminiscent of Melville. Like Melville, Mr. Lock has not given up on his country, even though, at any given moment, it does not seem worthy of much respect. Hiegold does not surrender to his trouble, for he has been shamed into persevering by his wife — who won’t allow him a moment of self-pity, not even in his dreams of her after her death.

Heigold writes to London not simply as his hero by any means. As Mr. Lock notes in his Afterword, London did actually say: “I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist!” But like Mr. Lock, Heigold identifies with fallible heroes — the only kind to be found in the American Novels series.

Hiegold learns a good deal from Bonaparte, by the way, about how to survive and even thrive in America: “You learn not to lay all your cards on the table,” Bonaparte says to Hiegold: “First, I wanted to see what sort of white man you are.”

Don’t skip the Afterword. There, Mr. Lock lists his sources, disclosing what he made up, modified, or otherwise transformed to slot into his deft narrative. The photo credits demonstrate the impressive range of the novelist’s research for a work full of period pictures that enhance the verisimilitude of “Eden’s Clock.”

Does the clock in San Francisco ever get fixed? Well, Heigold does make it to the city, but you will quake when you discover what happens to him, which includes a fateful meeting with London.

Mr. Lock has a lot of fun playing with the very notion of time and clocks, but I don’t have time to explain — except to point out that in vital ways the America of 1906 can seem not only like yesterday but a portent of what is to come.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is a biography, “Herman Melville Anew.”