The Ice Harp

(Paperback)

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Description

Ralph Waldo Emerson battles dementia while debating whether to intercede in a Black soldiers unjust arrest

In 1879, toward the end of his life, the Sage of Concord has lost his words. Beset by aphasia and grief, Ralph Waldo Emerson is scarcely recognizable as Americas foremost essayist and orator. To the dismay of his wife, he frequently entertains the specters of his fellow transcendentalists, including Whitman, Thoreau, John Muir, and Margaret Fuller, and frets about the future of humankind and the natural world. Does the present displace the past Do ideas always precede actions What responsibility does each of us bear for the downtrodden, the preservation of liberty, and the Earth itself These metaphysical concerns become concrete when Emerson meets a Black soldier accused of killing a white man who abused him. The soldiers presence demands a response from Emerson, an action outside the parlors of philosophy and beyond the realm where language and logic hold sway.

The Ice Harp, the tenth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, is a poignant portrayal of a literary luminary coming to terms with the loss of memory, the cost of inaction, and the end of life.

Reviews

Advance Praise for The Ice Harp

An elegiac, powerful book about a thinkers limitations. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In The Ice Harp, Norman Lock deftly takes us into the polyphonic swirl of Emersons mind at the end of his life, inviting us to meet the man anew even as the philosopher fights to stop forgetting himself. Who will I be when the words are gone, the great thinker wonders, and how will I know what is right I gladly asked myself these same impossible questions on every page of this remarkably empathetic and deeply moral novel. Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and Refuse to Be Done

Here is Emerson unleashedcaustic, brilliant, befuddled, wrangling with the living and the dead. Delights of language and character shine on every page of The Ice Harp as Emerson confronts his own humanity. Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything and Paradise

Select Praise for Norman Locks The American Novels Series

Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature. Joyce Carol Oates

Shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. NPR

Our national history and literature are Norman Locks playground in his dazzling series, The American Novels. . . . [His] supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character. Washington Post

Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth . . . to create something entirely newan American fable of ideas. Shelf Awareness

[A] consistently excellent series. . . . Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue. Booklist

On The Boy in His Winter

[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finns journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into Americas pastand future. Readers Digest

On American Meteor

[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twains spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . Like all Mr. Locks books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield. Wall Street Journal

On The Port-Wine Stain

Locks novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mtter] but with decadent fin de sicle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Locks story as [his novels narrator] is by Poes. . . . Echoes of Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freuds theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction. New York Times Book Review

On A Fugitive in Walden Woods

A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreaus time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now. . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day. Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling

On The Wreckage of Eden

The lively passages of Emily [Dickinsons]s letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery. . . . Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Locks thought-provoking series continues to impress. Publishers Weekly

On Feast Day of the Cannibals

Lock does not merely imitate 19th-century prose; he makes it his own, with verbal flourishes worthy of [Herman] Melville. Gay & Lesbian Review

On American Follies

Ragtime in a fever dream. . . . When you mix 19th-century racists, feminists, misogynists, freaks, and a flim-flam man, the spectacle that results might bear resemblance to the contemporary United States. Library Journal (starred review)

On Tooth of the Covenant

Splendid. . . . Lock masters the interplay between nineteenth-century [Nathaniel] Hawthorne and his fictional surrogate, Isaac, as he travels through Puritan New England. The historical details are immersive and meticulous. Foreword Reviews (starred review)

On Voices in the Dead House

Gripping. . . . The legacy of John Brown looms over both Alcott and Whitman [in] a haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Author Bio

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted twice for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.