Icarus: An American Odyssey

"You can call me Robin, or you may call me Rob. Before I begin my story, understand I know that Dickens had a pet raven Grip, and the titular character in his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, had a loquacious pet raven so named. Nonetheless, my story is of the raven muse of Edgar Allan Poe. You may not believe that such a bird did exist, or that my relationship with this Corvidae was so benign. But to me, Edgar's raven friend Icarus was also a true friend.

It was close to a decade ago now, when first I spoke with Icarus. This name, supposedly, the Raven had acquired almost two centuries before, and he was subsequently addressed by this name, by Ulysses S. Grant and Samuel Clements, and a select few others of the homo sapiens species, as well as Edgar A. Poe, the name Edgar preferred, despite the efforts of his frenemy Griswold and others to include his foster father's name with his published works.

I first saw Icarus outside the window of the apartment in which I had spent almost all my previous 46 years and the eight years that have passed since the night we met, up until this December. This December the historic house, in which my apartment and four others are located on three floors, with the largest apartment, twice the size of the others, at 3000 square feet, on the top floor, in which my landlord lives with his family, was sold by the county, for back taxes owed . . "

So begins Icarus: An American Odyssey when a long-lived raven named Icarus came tapping on the window of the apartment in an historic Baltimore house in which the narrator had lived almost all of his life. With irony if not poetic license, besides a narrator who begins his narration much like Ishmael in Moby Dick, the story of a legendary white whale not so benign, rather than a black bird of higher intelligence, this novel has two main characters related to the Homer's Odyssey. One is related to the Greek Odyssey by his first name and the other by his many travels through cities of the then young United States while just trying to survive doing what he was meant to do.