VOICES IN THE DEAD HOUSE

Lock’s latest novel reckons honestly with the legacies of two beloved writers.

Lock’s American Novels cycle of books has, since its inception, covered a wide amount of stylistic ground, from the surreal to the philosophical. While a few of the supporting characters in this book overlap with some of Lock’s earlier works, the bulk of it focuses on a few months in the lives of Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott, during a period when both were helping wounded Civil War soldiers convalesce. Through the writers’ proximity to the effects of war, Lock depicts both as grappling with their feelings on racial equality and the legacy of slavery in the United States. Each has a distinctive approach, with Alcott wondering whether her commitment to abolition is enough and the famously contradictory Whitman’s transcendentalist reveries occasionally interrupted by his use of bluntly racist language. What makes the novel, particularly its Whitman-centric first half, so gripping is the way in which Lock depicts Whitman’s inner conflict—sometimes offensive, sometimes empathic, and sometimes wounded when he’s called out for his hypocrisy. The legacy of John Brown looms over both Alcott and Whitman, offering an example of someone who turned his ideals into unambiguous actions. Lock also maintains distinctive narrative styles for each of his two narrators, with Alcott’s section memorably beginning with her calling Whitman “a shameless ass” and Whitman himself prone to more poetic reveries, as when he ponders the human cost of war: “I think there is a grand regiment of the dead, which is enlisting men and boys, white and black, from every corner of the nation.”

A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.