American Nomad [Hardcover]

This is the first non-fiction effort from novelist Erickson. It started as an assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the 1996 presidential election from start to finish but became something else when Erickson was fired by Jann Wenner after the New Hampshire primary. Erickson kept going, turning his on-the-road reportage into a vehicle for addressing--dare we say it?--his fear and loathing on the campaign trail of what the country was becoming. With Thompsonesque doses of hyperbole, rock music, painkillers, and booze, Erickson paints a picture of a nation on the brink of breaking away from its special heritage of law, fairness, and freedom.

Erickson, the author of several great and near-great novels (e.g., Amnesiascope, LJ 5/15/96), scampered around the country during last year's presidential campaign, part of the time at the behest of Rolling Stone magazine, and produced this startling, novelistic cross between journalism and memoir. To Erickson, political common sense has become a chimera in a country in which advocacy substitutes for the search for truth, and the American landscape, as a new millennium approaches, is littered with the carcasses of utopian visionaries. Wonderful, brief portraits of Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, Christian pol Gary Bauer, and their brood comprise a picture of (mostly) venal men scrambling for power and influence, with sincere belief in the righteousness of their often-misguided thoughts and actions. As good in his way as Norman Mailer in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, the nomadic Erickson is the reader's Virgil in a cross between the Inferno and "Hellzapoppin." A lament on American polity in the late 20th century and essential for romantic, weepy watchers of American life.
-?Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Erickson's celebrated fiction includes Days Between Stations and Rubicon Beach, but when the folks at Rolling Stone magazine hired him, they thought he would be an unconventional commentator who could contribute a unique perspective in writing about the 1996 presidential campaign. The pairing did not work out--Erickson was fired. But it did not stop him; and in this at times painfully incisive book, he seizes the opportunity to reflect on the very soul of the U.S., expounding not only on political factions to the Right and Left and center but also on its apathetic core, as he crisscrossed the country. Sharp-witted, brutally candid, and wryly humorous, Erickson's intricate panorama pulls no punches in assessing the candidates, their staffs, and countless peripheral figures encountered on his nomadic journey. And all the while he factors in compelling meditations on the likes of Nixon, Springsteen, Oliver Stone, and the shadowy life and work of Philip K. Dick. Alice Joyce

Fired from his job covering the 1996 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, novelist Erickson (Amnesiascope, 1996, etc.) decides to stay on the candidates' trail and comes to some sobering conclusions about our country and its political legacy. Erickson attacks left, right, and center with equal abandon. Part rant and part serious analysis, often hysterically funny, American Nomad argues in a variety of ways that we have, in routinely choosing style over substance in our politicians, sold our Jeffersonian birthright for a mess of pottage. Take, for instance, his ``Sane Man/Crazy Man'' theory of electoral politics, wherein the most sane candidate wins the primaries, only to be defeated by the crazier candidate in the general election. This can get tricky, Erickson concedes, as in 1960 when the presidential race involved ``two undisputed psychotics.'' Erickson applies the same scrutiny to himself and to a palpably neurotic Jann Wenner, to whose caprices Erickson is subject until he is finally sacked. Deciding to stay on the campaign trail, Erickson becomes an American nomad, but this moniker carries a heavier connotation. It also represents those who are ``possessed by their country's dangerous fever and estranged from their country by that fever.'' Fellow travelers, in this sense, would include (according to Erickson) Whitman, Elvis, Nixon, and Philip K. Dick. A peculiar but ultimately rewarding digression on Nixon has Erickson playing with the reality of the last 17 years, suggesting an alternate universe where Carter has won reelection in 1980, and a slew of successors, including Ed Koch, have brought the country to even greater ruin. If American Nomad ranges widely (and wildly), plenty of actual election coverage, from the New Hampshire primary through the general election, is also mixed in. Erickson's saga operates brilliantly as both a political chronicle and a zany memoir. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Here is a brilliant novelist's road trip across the landscape of the national zeitgeist, all the way to the last election of the Millennium. Steve Erickson wanders the highways of a republic in revolt against itself and in search of its own meaning.