Fractured novel a mashup
By Leah Hager Cohen |
February 3, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
YOU don't need to read a word of Steve Erickson's new novel to figure out that it's broken. A quick flip through its pages reveals it to be fractured into hundreds of pieces, many no longer than a paragraph or two, each island of text banked by white space and heralded by a bold capital letter, like so much typographical bling. This visual oddity is just one of many ways the novel willfully resists being read as a conventional narrative. It alerts us to Erickson's more idiosyncratic designs and serves as an advisory for readers: not for the faint of heart.
Not that Erickson has ever written for the faint of heart. Extolled by Pynchon, likened to Nabokov, DeLillo and Ballard, he has been deemed a surrealist, a visionary, a genius. His fictions play out among the shifting landscapes of sci-fi, fantasy, postmodernism and avant-pop. Occasionally, "These Dreams of You" reads less like a book than a prose contraption engineered to pry us loose from our bearings.
It opens, however, with something like narrative realism. I say "something like" because the first three words, "But years later," hint that time will not be conforming to linear models. Still, we begin grounded in time and place: the night of November 4, 2008, and the living room of a house on the edge of Los Angeles, where the Nordhoc family is watching the presidential election results on television. The four Nordhocs, who provide the messy, vibrant heart of the novel, make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mashup.
Occasionally Erickson's prose swirls and foams as irresistibly as the sea. Elsewhere it's more mind-boggling than the plot. For example: "Does one need to travel a birth passage, womb to uterus, to be a daughter, if already you're the descendant of an unforgiving century?" And: "Zan feels a prisoner of mysteries he can't name let alone solve, and implications of secrets so secret he barely knows they're secrets." Does he feel the implications or feel a prisoner of those implications, and either way - huh?
But perhaps plot and even sentence structure are of secondary importance in a work where "the arc of the imagination" is forever "bending back to history," an idea that is thought by multiple characters in this book of multiple frames. Actions echo across time, continents and realities: historical, fictive and dreamed. Zan lectures on "the narrative as sustained hallucination." In the end, Erickson's seemingly fractured novel turns out to be something else -- the novel as fractal, a series of endless, astounding tessellations.
Not that Erickson has ever written for the faint of heart. Extolled by Pynchon, likened to Nabokov, DeLillo and Ballard, he has been deemed a surrealist, a visionary, a genius. His fictions play out among the shifting landscapes of sci-fi, fantasy, postmodernism and avant-pop. Occasionally, "These Dreams of You" reads less like a book than a prose contraption engineered to pry us loose from our bearings.
It opens, however, with something like narrative realism. I say "something like" because the first three words, "But years later," hint that time will not be conforming to linear models. Still, we begin grounded in time and place: the night of November 4, 2008, and the living room of a house on the edge of Los Angeles, where the Nordhoc family is watching the presidential election results on television. The four Nordhocs, who provide the messy, vibrant heart of the novel, make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mashup.
Occasionally Erickson's prose swirls and foams as irresistibly as the sea. Elsewhere it's more mind-boggling than the plot. For example: "Does one need to travel a birth passage, womb to uterus, to be a daughter, if already you're the descendant of an unforgiving century?" And: "Zan feels a prisoner of mysteries he can't name let alone solve, and implications of secrets so secret he barely knows they're secrets." Does he feel the implications or feel a prisoner of those implications, and either way - huh?
But perhaps plot and even sentence structure are of secondary importance in a work where "the arc of the imagination" is forever "bending back to history," an idea that is thought by multiple characters in this book of multiple frames. Actions echo across time, continents and realities: historical, fictive and dreamed. Zan lectures on "the narrative as sustained hallucination." In the end, Erickson's seemingly fractured novel turns out to be something else -- the novel as fractal, a series of endless, astounding tessellations.
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