American Meteor by Norman Lock

I've always said that a man made his own bed. But now that I'm dying--there's no point in arguing the fact--now that I am, I realize the futility of struggling against fate. Our bed is made for us: We do as we are obliged. Leastways, enough to humble us. That's a bitter pill to swallow late in the day. While we're alive, we're like the man who steps in horseshit on his way to church. Only when he's home again and has cleaned his shoes can he smile at his humiliation and--more to the point--his helplessness before what lies in wait and is beyond his power to prevent. Here's what I think: Behind every gunman stands another gunman, in a concatenation of death and destruction, difficult to break.

Stephen Moran is only sixteen when he loses his eye in the Civil War. While languishing in his hospital bed, he looks up and sees a familiar face, friendly and long-bearded: a man Stephen used to see throwing rocks into the sea many miles away in Coney Island. The face belongs to Walt Whitman, who really did volunteer as Civil War nurse, and who shares with Stephen a copy of his new poetry book Leaves of Grass. When Stephen invents a story of heroism to explain his lost eye, Whitman shares it with the military brass, who pin a medal on Stephen and make him the official bugler on Lincoln's funeral train.

American Meteor is something like a Forrest Gump for the 19th century: though a mostly ordinary person himself, Moran's destiny intersects with Whitman, Lincoln, Grant, Union Pacific railroad magnate Thomas Durant, Western photographer William Henry Jackson, Custer, and Crazy Horse. Part of its appeal is the sheer madcap joy of recognizing these figures, like Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the television set. As Stephen says, if nothing else, his story is a "hell of a yarn." But it's also a fascinating meditation on the tumultuous 19th century--the century in which the United States concretized, reabsorbing the south and expanding all the way to the Pacific, a territory bought with much blood--and the nature of destiny. The title symbol of the meteor evokes ancient omens of both fortune and disaster, but it also represents something evanescent: "I might as well be a meteor as a man," Stephen says, "for all the difference I've made on earth."

American Meteor is also a love letter to the West. I brought it with me on a trip to Utah, where we drove out to the spot north of the Great Salt Lake where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad lines were finally joined by a golden spike, a moment witnessed by Stephen. In that remote and wide open space it's easy to appreciate how momentous it was to have the west opened by the railroad, but Stephen also talks about it as the moment the West began to disappear, flooded by capitalists, frozen by photographers. (It reminded me of Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, which has much the same thesis, though American Meteor turns a much more skeptical eye toward the myth of the wild West in the first place.) At several points in the book, Stephen exhibits the power to look into the future--a dubious power we learn was granted him by Crazy Horse--and see the continued bloodshed and conquest of the 20th century, as if reminding us that the turmoils of the 19th century are not long past but resonating still today.

American Meteor is, for a book clearly enamored with the great figures of the American West, remarkably cynical about Western expansion. All the worst qualities of manifest destiny are collected in Custer, a vain braggart and genocidal maniac for whom Stephen acts as an official photographer. Stephen decides to kill Custer, the apotheosis of all that is poisonous about the 19th century--and does! This part of the book was the weakest, I thought: its brisk pace--American Meteor gives a crash course of westward expansion pages--doesn't allow Lock to develop the moral choice to kill Custer in a sufficient way, but the logical sense of the choice is obvious.

American Meteor, which was published in 2015, really seems like a book of its moment. It's a book for the statue-toppling era of American cultural memory: how do treasure the vision and boldness of the 19th century, which made the America of today, while excising the bloodlust and greed? Even Whitman and Lincoln are not exempt from the contradictions: "In my opinion," Stephen writes, "Lincoln was a good man." But the next sentence disquiets: "If a man can be good."