THE ICE HARP

An aging Ralph Waldo Emerson grapples with an ethical dilemma.

Over the last decade, the stylistic range and subtle connections on display in Lock’s American Novels cycle have afforded many pleasures. This latest installment focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, opening two and a half years before his death. He’s showing the effects of dementia—which, unsettlingly, include a moment in which he doesn’t recognize a passage from one of his own works. Emerson also converses with other people, living and dead, with whom he crossed paths. “I hope Garrison doesn’t take it into his head to visit me. His opinions are fiery, and I dread being scorched,” he thinks at one point. In his introduction, Lock writes that this book “can be thought of as a play for voices”—and an early passage in which Emerson ponders the word spoon suggests, perhaps, a slight influence of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in the mix. Eventually, Emerson must try to focus on the present moment; he meets James Stokes, a Black soldier who deserted after defending himself from a racist attack and killing another soldier in self-defense. As in A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017), Lock explores the gulf between some transcendentalists' idealism and their reticence to take a stronger moral stance on racism and slavery—and Emerson occasionally muses on Samuel Long, the protagonist of that earlier novel, strengthening the connection between the two books. There’s a profound sadness here, as Emerson muses on his losses, noting that “our bereavements bring us no nearer to God.” And his awareness of his own condition is heartbreaking to ponder: “Soon the universe inside me will slip out like a yolk from an eggshell.”

An elegiac, powerful book about a thinker’s limitations.