Marc Schultz

Erickson 101
July 16, 2007

I don't really know how popular novelist (and movie critic) Steve Erickson is, I only know that I'm never met with anything but blank stares when I bring him up. I discovered him late in high school, sometime between discovering Vonnegut and D.H. Lawrence. Jonathan Lethem calls him "as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced." Greil Marcus calls him "the only authentic American surrealist." If you've read Arc d'X or Tours of the Black Clock or Rubicon Beach, you'll see why. His books are strange, strange, strange, and Erickson doesn't always go out of his way to make it clear what, exactly, is going on.

That said, I think he's in general a great read--he doesn't weigh down his weirdness with overwrought prose or complex exposition. Arc d'X, if I remember correctly, is about Thomas Jefferson and his slave/lover Sally, who progress through time repeating their tragic affair in different characters and forms, accelerating toward a "temporal black hole" at the end of the 20th century.  Just thinking about it weirds me out and makes me want to pick it up and start reading from a random page.

So it's kind of disappointing--to me, anyway--that his new novel, Zeroville (Europa Editions, due in November) is such a straight story. It begins promisingly enough, with a large, damaged, savant-like anti-hero--much like the large, damaged arsonist/pornographer anti-hero of Tours of the Black Clock--who has the sillhouettes of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tatooed on his shaved head. Arriving in Hollywood just after the Manson family murders, he's roused to terrific violence every time someone mistakes his tattoo for the wrong pair of screen idols.

But from there Erickson makes very few of the daring leaps I've come to expect. It's all pretty standard: there's a femme fatale, a lost little girl, a wise mentor and a cast of not-quite-the-real-thing moviemakers (I'm not movie-man enough to keep up with Erickson's veiled references, but I managed to ID De Palma, working out the idea for Sisters) who guide our hero through an unlikely carreer in the film industry.

Not that there aren't some great moments--there's some affecting explosions of violence, an intriguing subplot about a secret movie hidden a frame at a time, and a throwaway The Sound of Music gag that made me laugh out loud--and I understand he's doing an evoke-and-subvert thing with Hollywood cliches; still, it doesn't really come to much.

But again, that might just be me--for those ready to take the plunge into Erickson's mad mad mad mad world, Zeroville makes a pretty good starting point. It's fast, about a third less strange than his others and, helpfully, weaves about a zillion movie suggestions throughout--so even if you don't like it, you've got plenty of ideas for something to watch instead.

Posted by Marc Schultz on July 16, 2007 | Comments (0)