STEVE ERICKSON'S ECSTATIC VISION
In his most intimate novel yet, the author explores coping with loss and chaos
The book begins in probably the most down-to-earth fashion of any of my books," says Steve Erickson about his latest novel, Our Ecstatic Days. "With the exception of that lake that's coming up out of the middle of L.A."
The man sitting opposite me in a booth at Musso & Frank has published seven summary-defying but sublimely mesmerizing novels. With his tousled gray hair and faraway expression, the 54-year-old gazes into his drink as if he were conjuring up the past, the future, or both.
"They don't have to be read in a certain sequence, particularly since there's not a strong sense of linear time in my books anyway," Erickson said of his books when we first met in Chicago in 1993. He was on a publicity tour for Arc d'X, the magisterial novel that garnered his widest readership and greatest critical acclaim, with characters including Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and a writer named Erickson who's murdered by Berlin skinheads. "There's no such thing as something that really happened and something that didn't," he explained. "I care about the way one reality just sort of naturally bleeds into another."
Impelled by, not "the clocks of strict chronology," but "the internal clock of memory," his narratives direct us down subterranean and crepuscular passages we've never before seen in the same dreamy half-light. Tours of the Black Clock investigates the havoc of the 20th century from within the mind of Hitler's private pornographer. The Sea Came in at Midnight explores characters held captive by various manifestations of a millennial subconscious. His presidential campaign-trail memoirs, Leap Year and American Nomad, are delirious odysseys across a spectral American landscape. Erickson - the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and a music fan who enjoys rearranging his favorite albums on CDs in the same way he shuffles his novels' chronologies - melds pop culture with his own ecstatic sense of the larger questions. His books have wrestled with identity and reality, love and freedom, sex and redemption, transcendence and oblivion, memory and history. Greil Marcus dubbed him "the only authentic American surrealist."
"I'll let you invent the genre," Erickson replies when asked to characterize his own writing. "I don't choose the books; the books choose me."
At the core of Our Ecstatic Days, published this month by Simon & Schuster, is the story of a mother and son and their separation. Kristin, a character from The Sea Came in at Midnight, is raising Kirk (short for Kierkegaard) as a single mother. One day she fears "Lake Zed" - the body of water that appears mysteriously in Los Angeles in September 2001 and begins to create a "city of drowning addresses" - is coming to take her child. She plunges into the lake to seek an answer, only to find her son gone when she resurfaces.
"The loss of a child is presented as kind of the emotional DNA of the universe," Erickson says. "All the secrets of our emotional lives can be distilled into that one experience." He dedicated the book to his wife and seven-year-old son, but, he notes, "The theme of parents losing children and children losing parents has been in my work from the beginning," even before he became a father. He recites a quick inventory of shattered families going all the way back to his debut novel, Days Between Stations, then ponders for a moment. "I don't even know what that's about."
After discovering her son is gone, Kristin is transformed into an oracular dominatrix named Lulu Blu. She then confronts an older version of Kirk (who's also a variation of a character from Erickson's Rubicon Beach), as well as his lost twin sister, Brontë, who becomes Lulu's S/M protegée.
The lake swirling around the city encapsulates "the age of chaos" that seeps into the characters' lives. The novel also juxtaposes the anonymous act of a protester facing down tanks at Tiananmen Square with the faceless terrorism of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. "Those are the yin and the yang," Erickson explains. "In the same way that Tiananmen Square was a moment of unquestioned heroism - which this book, I think, subversively questions - 9/11 was a moment of unquestioned villainy, no matter how you may feel about the policies of our government. The book counterpoints the two events in a way that, perhaps, speculates on how we might emotionally and psychically live with chaos."
Erickson's works are much more than philosophical or political fables. They have emotional and human centers that belie his seemingly postmodern prose. The beautiful, bewildering Our Ecstatic Days is his most intimate story yet, and his most female-centered. It carries forward - and revisits - Kristin's story from the more accessible Midnight, narrowing the scope of Erickson's subject but freeing him to explore a primal terror and its emotional ravages. A staggering contemplation of loss and paralysis, the book examines how the throes of ecstasy might offer a key to understanding the self, and a bulwark against a rising tide of chaos in the mind and the world.
Kristin's journey into the lake even creates a rift in the typography of the book itself. A single line of text is cast out on page 83, a kind of lifeline or umbilical cord, as Kristin will, Erickson says, "swim through the rest of the book." It's meant to be a visual presence, he says, rather than something to be figured out. "People ask me if they are supposed to read the rest of the book and go back and read the line, or read the line and go back and read the book," he says. "I think you're supposed to read both at the same time."
Along with mapping the "psychotopography" of where time and memory collide, Erickson is an alternate cartographer of Los Angeles, the setting for many of his works, wherein the city's clubs, hotels, and billboards have appeared in strange guises. "It's the non-linear city," he explains. "It doesn't lend itself to an urban identity that can be laid out in a grid." Clearly, he adds, "that's somehow informed my sensibility, and probably even the way I see things."
But if Angelenos all create their own "internal" geography of the city, couldn't the landscape within his books disrupt a reader? "I hadn't thought of it like that," Erickson reflects. "I certainly wouldn't argue for a second that my L.A. was more important than anyone else's."
Some readers and reviewers have criticized, not only his version of L.A., but also what they consider his tendency toward the grandiloquent and his obsessions with the apocalyptic and the erotic. "When I get negative reviews, invariably they seem to be about the sex, even when the reviewer is writing around it," he says. "I'm extremely reluctant to say this - because it will sound self-serving - but I don't know if we've gotten to a point in the culture where a heterosexual male writer can write about sex. In terms of a lot of work out there," says Erickson, who has written about both Henry Miller and Samuel Delany, "my work is not that sexually explicit."
A teacher with CalArts' MFA writing program, he's also the editor of the CalArts-sponsored literary magazine Black Clock. The third issue, due in April, is loosely organized around "Visions and Hallucinations." "Lots of crazy women in Black Clock 3, from sex-crazed teenage vampires - for which I'm sure I'll hear more about my ongoing obsessions - to Mary Magdalene," he says.
Since his novel is entitled Our Ecstatic Days, I ask what makes for the most revelatory and powerful art, and how that might relate to his definition of ecstasy. "It rearranges the ways I think about myself and the ways I think about how I would like to live my life, even if I don't succeed in doing it," he says. "I guess ecstasy has been for me about liberation and the ways I can break free of myself."Published: 02/10/2005
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