The Boy in His
Winter: An American Novel
Norman Lock. Bellevue Literary Press,
$14.95 paperback (192p) ISBN: 978-1-934137-76-5
Repurposing great works of literature,
famous characters from same, and/or dead authors in modern ways and to modern
ends is almost overdone as a phenomenon. Really, writers. Stop it.
I said "almost overdone"
because, if I know publishing at all, they will collectively ride this
hobby-horse's hooves entirely off. There are a few of these cultural
appropriations that are enjoyable, of course, it's statistically impossible
that such a gigantic amount of work won't produce a shining light now and then.
I think of Catherynne Valente's Russian fairy-tale reinterpretation of Baba
Yaga in Deathless and grin all over
my face. So the tap will continue to drip even after the shower's over. It
ain't over yet, though.
It's in that silver river-shine light
that I approached The Boy in His Winter.
Is this another misappropriation or maladaptation of a novel that's been
entwined into the USA's sense of itself? Happily, no...but.
I love author Lock's prose (my copy of
the book has 10 Book Darts marking especially lovely passages or especially
telling insights). It slides easy, inviting toes to dangle or shoulders to
float, gently rocking.
“To ennoble is
to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their
humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.”
That these complex and honeyed words are put in crude, ill-bred Huck Finn's mouth works because we're told from the get-go that he's an old man now and telling his story to an unnamed, depersonalized amanuensis. And I wonder, since the novel's frame is 2077, if that amanuensis isn't some form of AI, which might also account for the fact that Huck (now called Albert, or Al, since rejoining normal time after Katrina) always addresses the unseen being as if responding to questions. Much like a good writer's-amanuensis software would program it to do: "Comes complete with wandering-thought alert and long-silence breaker!"
That I'm conjecturing this, since I
wasn't told or shown it in any way, is a source of my itchy lack of
satisfaction with the book as a whole. Huck and Jim get on their stolen raft in
1835 and float, magically out of time's reach, until certain points in history,
national and personal. I can go there. I can love the trip. My disbelief is
suspended from the moment I open this kind of book. But when all the author
does with my suspended disbelief is take advantage of it so as not to have to
work at explaining his authorial choices...well, pop goes the weasel and here I
am with my teeth in my mouth wondering what I was thinking when I started this
sentence:
“The raft was
seized, with a noise like needles knitting, and we were hemmed in for winter --
river and the old channel's oxbow lake having frozen solid. By now, we guessed
we were not two ordinary river travelers...it must have been the river that was
extraordinary: a marvel that protected us by the same mysterious action that
had given a common horse wings and changed a woman into a laurel tree.”
I read the author's mind (always a
dangerous act) to hear, "I'll make a classical allusion to magical
transformations and maybe they'll glide on by the Hows and gaze lovingly at the
Whys." Now, don't mistake me, I'm not asking Lock to invent some hard-SF
gobbledygook that doesn't belong in this book. What I'm left wanting is a Why
that has the power to cause Huck to introspect all through the book, to
meditate on the nature of his and Jim's unique experience and how it's made him
who and what he is.
“{Y}ou make do
with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write
fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the
hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for
its own.”
Don't know about you, but I could use
more of this beautiful revelation and on many more topics. Again, I stress that
I don't want the book to be something it isn't, some Guide To Life or some kind
of Aliens Messed With My Tachyon Bodyspace. I love the concept as it's written.
But it isn't doing enough of what it does so well to merit the full five stars
I begin by giving every book I am seduced into picking up.
Bellevue Literary Press is to be
commended for publishing this life-intersecting-science story in such a
beautiful, well-crafted package. Norman Lock is Norman Lock, and doesn't need
the likes of me to praise his talent, demonstrated so amply so very often in a
long career. Yet I wanted more than I got of the sweetness he gave. (May 2014)
Purchase The Boy in His Winter HERE.
Reviewer bio: Richard Derus is a
biblioholic and a passionate reader. From underneath his tottering towers of
unread tomes, he writes obsessively about his darlings at Shelf Inflicted (a group blog), Goodreads (where he is a
Forbes 25 top reviewer), LibraryThing (where his
personal library is comprehensively cataloged), and Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud, where many
otherwise unknown books are praised, panned, or poked fun at.
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