BOOKS
Review of Zeroville by Steve Erickson
/ Scott Bradfield
10.25.07
Zeroville
by Steve Erickson
Europa Editions
329 pages
$14.95
Steve Erickson is that most unenviable of contemporary American writers––people either don’t read him at all, or they read him too carefully for all the wrong reasons. More often than not, useless and misleading adjectives are applied to his work: “visionary,” for example, or “mythmaking,” or God help us all, even “Pynchonian.” But Erickson isn’t, to his credit, any of these things whatsoever. Rather he is, quite simply, a really absorbing and continuously inventive novelist. He creates unusual characters worth caring about––and he devises original ways of telling about them.
His latest book, Zeroville, is just about as good as he gets. A sort of pop-culture-retelling of American history from 1969 through the early eighties, it follows the life and career of a renegade ex-Calvinist named Isaac Jerome (though he prefers to be called by the weirdly-appropriate name of Vikar.) Raised without any of the usual cultural amenities––television, radio, magazines, and simple human affection—Vikar eventually defies his father by going to the movies. He has a disparate introduction to world of cinema by viewing everything from Blow Up to The Sound of Music, and this turns out to be only the first step in an escalating series of transgressions.
When his father starts looking too intently at the kitchen knives and mumbling something about Abraham, Vikar splits for Hollywood. He shaves his head, imprints his skull with a tattoo of Mongtomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor embracing in A Place in the Sun, and establishes a new home amidst the overheated landscape of palm trees, mansions, movie stars, and their directors. He hears rumors of strange families roaming the hills; he works as a gopher at the studios, and wanders with ghosts at the Roosevelt Hotel, Schwab’s Drug Store, and the Houdini Mansion. Whenever he has a free moment, he scouts for meaning in the flickering frames of every film he can get his hands on––because, like Chauncey Gardiner, Vikar doesn’t like to be. He only likes to watch. (So long as he doesn’t feel like anybody else is watching back.)
by Steve Erickson
Europa Editions
329 pages
$14.95
Steve Erickson is that most unenviable of contemporary American writers––people either don’t read him at all, or they read him too carefully for all the wrong reasons. More often than not, useless and misleading adjectives are applied to his work: “visionary,” for example, or “mythmaking,” or God help us all, even “Pynchonian.” But Erickson isn’t, to his credit, any of these things whatsoever. Rather he is, quite simply, a really absorbing and continuously inventive novelist. He creates unusual characters worth caring about––and he devises original ways of telling about them.
His latest book, Zeroville, is just about as good as he gets. A sort of pop-culture-retelling of American history from 1969 through the early eighties, it follows the life and career of a renegade ex-Calvinist named Isaac Jerome (though he prefers to be called by the weirdly-appropriate name of Vikar.) Raised without any of the usual cultural amenities––television, radio, magazines, and simple human affection—Vikar eventually defies his father by going to the movies. He has a disparate introduction to world of cinema by viewing everything from Blow Up to The Sound of Music, and this turns out to be only the first step in an escalating series of transgressions.
When his father starts looking too intently at the kitchen knives and mumbling something about Abraham, Vikar splits for Hollywood. He shaves his head, imprints his skull with a tattoo of Mongtomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor embracing in A Place in the Sun, and establishes a new home amidst the overheated landscape of palm trees, mansions, movie stars, and their directors. He hears rumors of strange families roaming the hills; he works as a gopher at the studios, and wanders with ghosts at the Roosevelt Hotel, Schwab’s Drug Store, and the Houdini Mansion. Whenever he has a free moment, he scouts for meaning in the flickering frames of every film he can get his hands on––because, like Chauncey Gardiner, Vikar doesn’t like to be. He only likes to watch. (So long as he doesn’t feel like anybody else is watching back.)