Arc d'X

'Happiness is a dark thing to pursue and the pursuit itself is a dark thing as well.' These are the words of Erickson's Thomas, guiding spirit of this passionate, brave, unforgettable novel. In Thomas' love for his fourteen-year old slave, Sally, and in her irrevocable choice to forfeit freedom for that love, lies the emblematic dilemma that has forged our nation's destiny—the tension between history's denial of the dictates of the human heart and our secret pursuit of the heart's expression. Over Arc d'X hovers the smoke of an eighteenth-century slave who was burned at the stake for murdering the white man who raped her. Through the ashes move the many incarnations of Sally, and the men who are touched by her.... Arc d'X is a reckless, visionary elegy for the second millennium; it is the novel that has been looming at the end of the American imagination, where the center of the soul meets the blunt future of the street.