Zeroville [Paperback]

I am putting together a new Freshman level class for the Spring semester, and after reading Zeroville and several other of Erickson's books, I want to toss out all the textbooks I have assigned and replace them with Erickson's novels. He is so passionate about digging through different historic events, exploring America's bizzare and dangerous obsessions with its own exceptionalism and millennial fantasies, that Erickson outshines just about any academic text on American history and meaning (it doesn't hurt that he writes better than historians).
But specifically, the way in which the character Vikar approaches reality and movies is as a complete innocent: he sees horror movies and thinks they are comedies; after watching The Sound of Music, he believes the An Trapps are a re-invention of the Manson family, trailing songs and terror throughout Europe. This narrative choice allows the reader to experience the last four decades of history and movies with completely new eyes, revealing just how odd a place and time America really is.
Vikar's innocence is balanced by his violence (smashing a hippie in the head with a dinner tray because the man mis-identified the Taylor/Clift tatoo on Vikar's head) suggesting, at least to me, the public claims to innocence that the U.S. has historically claimed while it has been engaged in some of the most violent actions of the modern period.
But, again, Zeroville stands up to readings on multiple levels and calls out of multiple readings. It also sheds light back on Erikson's earlier work, suggesting the linked but non-linear continuity of all his works.
If you like movies, punk rock, beautiful narrative prose or just flat out, off-handed weirdness then Zeroville is the perfect drug.

There are several things I want to say about Steve Erickson's Zeroville, but none of them really describe what's going on here. The first would be that you really need to love and know vintage movies to get this, but that's not entirely true. Yes, it would add to the experience to know the difference between Rio Bravo and Red River, and to understand what Vikar means when he says that Travis Bickle is in another movie where he's a boxer. But that's also completely unnecessary to get into the quest--and that's what this story is, a quest--that Vikar undertakes. The second is that this story, with its piles upon piles of coincidence, wonder and desperation reminds me, more than any other book, of House of Leaves. I think Vikar and Johnny have a lot in common, but Vikar's quest is absent the unnamed menace of Johnny's.

Vikar knows movies. In fact, that's all he knows. He finds his feelings in them, but learns how to communicate with others not through what is said during movies but rather what the people around him say about the movies. That's the thing about Erickson's writing that makes this book so hard to pin down: it's not a book about the movies, it's a book about how we feel about the movies. And in a way, it's a book about how the movies feel about us. Vikar gives his whole life to unspooling a cosmic reel of questions--saying that makes the book sound lofty and sanctimonious, but Erickson brings it down to earth with the grit of Vikar's obsessions, appetites and fears.

Like House of Leaves, I'm still not entirely sure that what I have written about Zeroville is even accurate. But to its credit the book was fun to read, even through its ruminations on God and sacrifice, so that I am ready to revisit this, and soon.

Zeroville

This is from my Myspace Blog:
Many of you have already heard me rant about how great Steve Erickson is. Not as much as you have heard about Vollmann or Murakami but probably a lot. He is one of those well reviewed but not well read authors for whom I like to play town crier. I have only read three of his novels. The first I read was amazing and those few of you who have taken my recommendation and read "The Sea Came in at Midnight" agreed. It is one of the best plotted literary efforts I have ever read and one reviewer on the book's jacket refered to it as a mobius strip and he was not far off. The book haunts and lingers in the best way; a cerebral imprint. The second I read by Erickson was not very good, I hate to say it, but skip "Rubicon Beach" if you see it in a remainder bin. He is better than that (no matter what Paul Auster blurbs on the back).

Long story short, Erickson has a new novel due out in November. It is called "Zeroville." I already posted about it on the book page [...]/whatchu_reading but I wanted to mention it again here. Like "The Sea..." this one still haunts my memory. It is a book about movies, not just Hollywood but moviemaking and a true love of cinema, the making of dreams; Celluloid Eden. I love movies and I might have to guess that a love of movies is necessary to enjoy this book, to really get it. Not just a love of movies but a body of knowledge about the history of film. "Zeroville" makes no allowances, it cuts a path through film history, especially the New Hollywood of the late sixties and seventies and the reader must keep up. The birth and rise of punk music and the downtown NYC scene is there too (common in Erickson novels), its iconoclasm on the same trajectory of Hollywood's decade under the influence.

Stylistically it is such a simple book of delicate prose driven by a film-worshipping cypher protagonist. He has the Montegomery Cliff/Elizabeth Taylor kiss scene from "A Place in the Sun" tattooed on his bald head. He is like Forrest Gump in the best violent-Faulknerian-idiot-man-child way possible; the anti-gump maybe. It is a Hollywood book in the abstract sense, not the geographic sense, as politics and spirtuality all try their hand at abusing the medium; a hallowed medium that wears its tarnish like polish as part of its charm. But like all arts, it is a medium of sacrifice and the story of Abraham and Isaac is a dark and constant leitmotif of the book.

I read it a month ago in an advance review copy and I want to read it again. I also now have "A Place in the Sun" in my amazon wish list and want to read Dreiser's book the movie was based on. West's "Day of the Locust," Vidal's "Hollywood," Chandler's "Little Sister," or Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" don't seem to get at the inner depths of the meaning of film itself like "Zeroville" does. Those books go for the geography of Hollywood, but not the abstraction. Erickson makes it Platonic and Biblical, a Celluloid Eden of fear and awe, to be sought for and worshipped.

Who knows, maybe I am wrong. Maybe the book's not that great. Maybe I just like film a lot. But the book haunts me. Its images. Like memories from a thousand dark and timeless movies. Like Isaac on the altar or St. Joan on her fiery stake. "Zeroville" does more than linger; I feel bound and burned.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 21 reviews  4.2 out of 5 stars