Product Description: Thomas Jefferson's love for and enslavement of his mistress, Sally Hemings, forms the center of an exploration of the American spirit. By the author of Days Between Stations. 50,000 first printing. National ad/promo. Author tour.
Paradise, sacrifice, mortality, reality. A previous reviewer ventured the bold opinion that Steve Erickson cannot write.
This authority has a point. Steve Erickson cannot write in the same way that Bob Dylan cannot sing.
If you care to be somewhat challenged (Mr. Erickson has a reputation as one of those difficult writers, but he's not really that difficult, if you're in the habit of paying attention to the book that you're reading), and you ache to understand both your nation and your soul, I suggest that you read this book. It will lead you down a path you do not expect.
Perhaps the most profound American novel of the 20th century.
Recipe for a Steve Erickson novel Half a dozen books in, and the pattern is going strong:
1. One (1) mysterious, sexually-charged, rather mute young woman.
2. Up to Three (3) tortured men (all haunted by lots of ghosts from their pasts).
3. Several stylized sex scenes, in all of which the woman should exercise her blase magic.
4. Travel, but it must be to someplace in the very near, very erotic future: post-nuke Tokyo, post-apocalyptic L.A., &c.
5. Some sort of natural disaster: fire in L.A., tidal wave across Japan, lake in L.A. (as I believe the new novel, "Our Ecstatic Days," has opted for), etc.
Half-bake until prose reaches the proper level of bloated "lyricism."
Steve Erickson writes puerile, sex-obsessed pulp for readers who don't like to read, a la Chuck Palahniuk or Sylvia Plath. Since the late '80s he's been coasting on a few jacket blurbs from Thomas Pynchon and Tom Robbins (Erickson's publishers keep recycling quotes regarding his first two novels; no one seems to still be reading him). Apparently nobody has told him that having your heroine stare fiercely or brandish a knife or treat coldly her clientele at the strip club does not necessarily make for a novel about sexual liberation.
His stuff is what a highly-intelligent college freshman who REALLY wants to get laid and has some Anais Nin under his/her belt might write. Don't give him your money (SuicideGirls.com subscriptions just keep getting more expensive, you know, so you've got to budget).
Surreal Very surreal, with a lot of sex (but most of it used for atmosphere) and a continuously changing narrator that sometimes left me lost. But I loved it. My biggest piece of advice is that if you get bored in the middle, keep reading. Erickson ties everything up in the last 100 pages rather spectacularly.
Don't expect everything to make a lot of sense in this book. People suddenly end up in different times and different places just by walking down a hallway or into a field, characters are found dead in the middle of the novel and then show up in the end as a kind of flashback. Like I said, very surreal and dreamlike. It's not really sci-fi although some of it is set in a somewhat futuristic, noir dystopia.
a whirlwind of truth This is a creative work than spawns further than the imagination will typically allow. This is an exuberant blend of creativity to come to the truth about the soul, and the reality of that wich posseses it, or vice versa. A must read, if your willing to be exposed to the insane chaos it may reveal. 5+
a whirlwind of truth This is a creative work than spawns further than the imagination will typically allow. This is an exuberant blend of creativity to come to the truth about the soul, and the reality of that wich posseses it, or vice versa. A must read, if your willing to be exposed to the insane chaos it may reveal. 5+
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