When Frederick Heigold begins his tale of an unlikely cross-country sojourn, the year is 1906 and his intended audience is Jack London, who\u2019s sitting at the table next to his at a hotel bar. The story isn\u2019t being spoken out loud, however; Heigold has been mute ever since he was shot in the neck at the Battle of Gettysburg. An expert in the maintenance of clocks, he\u2019s been summoned to San Francisco to attempt to repair a tower clock; readers familiar with that city\u2019s history will note that he\u2019s arrived just before an earthquake is set to devastate the region. Heigold is a complex narrator, mourning his late wife, Lillian, and as prone to political musings as to lyrical passages: \u201cEach clock and pocket watch I took apart and put together again was a triumph over time, however small.\u201d His initial voyage west from Dobbs Ferry, New York, ends when he\u2019s framed for being a radical and imprisoned. After his release, he meets Bonaparte, a charismatic man born into slavery with plenty of trauma in his past. When Bonaparte and Heigold part ways, it\u2019s a bittersweet moment, and his absence is felt throughout the rest of the book. Lock is unsympathetic in his depiction of the past: Heigold witnesses plenty of racist cruelty on his journeys, and one leg of his voyage ends with a deadly shipwreck. With London an ever-present figure in the novel, Heigold is forced to reckon with the radical politics his late wife shared with the author as he confronts the injustice in the world that motivated both Lillian and London.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Frederick Heigold begins his tale of an unlikely cross-country sojourn, the year is 1906 and his intended audience is Jack London, who\u2019s sitting at the table next to his at a hotel bar. The story isn\u2019t being spoken out loud, however; Heigold has been mute ever since he was shot in the neck at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}