I hope to expose both the moral horror and criminal injustices of the age and to speak to their persistence in our own. ~Norman Lock interview
As a genealogist I have uncovered things about my ancestors that were meant to be kept secret, things no one ever talked about.
There are the usual crimes--sneaking out of Russia to avoid serving in the Czar's army, marriages soon gone sour and the divorces never spoken of, children born out of wedlock. And some that are disturbing, like a beloved grandparent who admitted to a crime and was jailed, which was kept secret from his children.
I found the newspaper articles, first downplaying that anything would come of the charges, then his admission of guilt, then the ad where my grandmother sold off furniture. She moved the children to her parents home and they never knew their father spent three months in jail.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor's sins were not hidden. They were in the history books. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a Puritan judge in Salem, Massachusetts, who sent women and girls to their deaths, accused of witchery. To disassociate himself from this heritage, Nathaniel changed the spelling of his name.
Tooth of the Covenant, Norman Lock's eighth book in his American Novel series, places Nathaniel back in time, planning to arraign his ancestor and prevent the deaths. Framed as Nathaniel writing a story, using the persona Isaac Page, his journey through time alters his perception.
Salem in 1692 was a dangerous place. Isaac/Nathaniel uses his woodworking skill acquired at the failed idealist Brook Farm community to earn his bed and board on the fringes of Salem.
He drinks at taverns where men ignore the 'one and no more' mantra of the Puritans, and dangerously discusses theology condemned by the Puritans. Married in his own time, Issac/Nathaniel finds himself attracted to a pretty indentured servant.
As Issac delays his mission, his resolve weakens, and fatally, he is able to see through the lens of the past and becomes allied to his detested great-grandfather.
We can judge the past, and yet we cannot escape it. We carry the prejudices and legacy forward, sometimes unthinking, sometimes purposefully. Our legacy insidiously skews our world view, distorts our perception.
"What are we if not our stories," Hawthorne/Lock writes early on, and he ends, "If there is witchery, it is in the stories that we tell, their power to enthrall, transform, uplift, and corrupt. A scarlet letter or a great while whale--what are they if not figures in a tableau behind which lie truths that can crack the foundation of the world and let the angels or the devils out into broadest day!"
The American Novel series enthrall us as they break open the veneer of righteousness we sometimes claim for ourselves. We miss the log in our own eye when we think only of the sins of the past, for the past remains with us.
I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Tooth of the Covenant
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication July 6, 2021
Trade paper
ISBN: 9781942658832
Ebook US $16.99
ISBN: 9781942658849
From the Publisher
Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge.
In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant, in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution.
But when Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds that it is his own life hanging in the balance.
An ingenious and profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt.
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