The Film We Dreamed
A review by Charles Taylor
"The last time he was in the United States," begins a sentence in Steve Erickson's 1993 Arc d'X, "driving aimlessly through Wyoming and the Dakotas for the purpose of being aimless, he heard the news of the Cataclysm the same way he heard all the news that year, on the car radio." The nub of Erickson's fiction, the physical and metaphysical essence, is in that line. Since 1985, with his first novel, Days Between Stations, and now with Zeroville, his eighth -- and best -- novel, Erickson has been a singular voice in American fiction, for my money our most imaginative native novelist. The praise he's received -- "visionary," "a dealer in myths," "mind-warping," "almost violently individual" -- while perfectly accurate, may also have led some readers to assume that Erickson is too wild for them, that his books don't offer the pleasures of character and narrative that are still the main reason people read novels. There's no denying the hallucinatory nature of Erickson's novels...
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