‘The Caricaturist’
By Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press, 352 pages

Set in turn-of-the-20th-century America, ‘The Caricaturist’ features boardwalk caricaturist Oliver Fischer attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, yearning to be a bold artist even as he is slapped down by a bullying father, a pious racist who mistakes an Italian girl for a Negress and admonishes his son not to consort with people of color. 

Oliver, chafing at the confines of conventional life, rejects his banker father’s scorn. He conducts his own experiment in misery, emulating a sketch of New York City bowery life by Stephen Crane, toward whom Oliver is destined for a rendezvous in Key West as Crane is on the verge of embarking to cover the Spanish American War.

Oliver reminds me of Sir Walter Scott’s Edward Waverley — that none-too-distinguished youth who is a romantic and much taken with the Jacobite cause that aims to restore the Stuart line to the throne of England. Oliver gravitates toward rebels: to anti-imperialists like Mark Twain and fearless reporters like Crane, as well as artists like Oliver’s teacher, the famous and controversial Thomas Eakins. 

The stymied Oliver’s exchange with Eakins, whose bloody painting of surgery in the Gross Clinic outraged Philadelphia, sharpens Oliver’s awareness that he cannot simply imitate what he admires. He asks Eakins what he thinks of Edouard Manet’s famous painting, “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.” Eakins says it is “one of a number of troublesome paintings by an artist I admire for his realism. Le Suicidé, The Café-Concert, Le Bateau goudronné, showing two men tarring their boat on the beach at Boulogne-sur-Mer—marvelous pictures! The four people he studiously posed in Luncheon on the Grass, however, could exist nowhere but in a painting. Their world is not ours. I doubt it was anyone’s.”

Eakins was forced to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts because his realistic paintings were repellent to his time’s sense of propriety. Oliver affronts his father’s desire to settle down as a bank employee, and as a result loses his father’s financial backing of his art school studies. So Oliver is propelled out of the Academy and into newspaper work, and to his fateful meeting with Crane.

In “The Historical Novel,” the great Marxist critic Georg Lukács pointed out that Scott used actual historical figures sparingly. History and biography emerge only at pivotal moments in the lives of ordinary characters, and the consciousness of events is filtered through neophytes like Edward Waverley in “Waverley” and Darcy Latimer in “Redgauntlet.”

The relatively brief appearances in this bildungsroman of Twain, Eakins, and Crane, and a few other historical figures, come at important points in Oliver’s development. Crane, for example, does not have to say that much.  It is rather his commanding presence that impinges on Oliver’s sensibility, giving him courage to jettison the last vestiges of his father’s reactionary regime.

Mr. Lock has chosen a time of great ferment in American history, when the country is perched on the precipice of imperial expansion in Cuba and the Philippines — all in the purported service of spreading democracy and defeating decadent Old World powers like Spain. Oliver’s triumph over domestic despotism parallels that historical change. 

Mr. Lock is not writing history, but his fiction acts as a sort of carapace around actual events and historical figures, showing how a Twain or Crane appear from the protagonist’s perspective, speaking to his craving for participating in the events he reports.

Oliver Fischer does not become another Crane, but without Crane’s fortitude in covering wars and the urban down-and-out, Oliver could not embark on a quest that his unconventional father cannot fathom.

In historical and biographical novels, uneasy readers wonder what is true, what not. Turn, then, to Mr. Lock’s afterword, in which he lays out the facts he relies upon as well as specifying the liberties he has taken with chronology and with what his historical characters say. We also learn  about the novelist and his intersection with history.

“The Caricaturist” is the 11th book in Mr. Lock’s American Novels series. He promises one more, in which Jack London “appears in a cameo role.” How could it be otherwise in the depiction of what Mr. Lock calls “our literary inheritance”?

Mr. Rollyson is author of “American Biography.”