Writers on Steve Erickson

John Domini wrote an exceptional two-part essay on the history of mainstream publishing's vilification of untraditional, "postmodern" style novels that began here in the States (I paraphrase) in a big one-two punch beginning in '76 when Gore Vidal wrote his "American Plastic" piece, and in '78 when John Gardner published On Moral Fiction. The full essay is right here.

In the second part of the essay, Domini defends Erickson's Zeroville, and is critical of reviewers who have been unable to adequately review the work of Steve Erickson. "Adequately," as I see it, meaning a critic demonstrating the willingness to engage enough -- work, sweat, labor -- with the content and shifting narratives of the novels rather than merely off-handedly critiquing the work with what amounts to an easy "I don't get it" or some other flippant diminishment.

Help! I'm guilty of Domini's accusations! I found myself completely lost, for instance, in my first go-round with Tours of the Black Clock, unable to even summarize with much coherence or confidence when I attempted to "review" it a few years back, what it was I'd just read. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy reading the book -- the writing, the imagery, the ideas, all of it was mesmerizing -- I just didn't, uh, sorry John Domini, "get it" as much as I'd hoped to get or felt I should have gotten! I hope to get it much better my second time around once I begin it again after I finish Rubicon Beach in a few weeks.

I'm comforted knowing that I'm not alone in being sometimes mystified by Steve Erickson. I'm in some pretty good company. Anthony Burgess (thank you, Alex Austin, for the heads-up on this Burgess criticism you referred me to a couple months ago), wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Erickson had "jettisoned too many of the novel's traditional properties" in describing Arc d'X, Erickson's fourth novel (1993), for the novel to work. Burgess went on and slammed Erickson as being essentially an incomprehensible upstart. Ouch. I've read elsewhere that Erickson for a long time has stopped reading reviews of his work. I've had to hunt hard just for these few excerpts from that Burgess review, otherwise I'd of linked it here.

I'm more than prepared to maintain this group as an occasional ongoing conversation with myself and my random travels in discovering and deciphering Erickson's fiction and reportage, but I'm also eager for other voices to eventually emerge and relay their experiences and perspectives on Steve Erickson's novels and the critical response he's received.

Do you want to post this on the Europa Challenge blog? I bet people there would be interested. I'll post it for you if you don't want to join the challenge.

That'd be great, Marie, if you'd post it there for me. And could you leave a link here for the challenge too when you can so we can check it out? Europa is a great press. They've published Steve Erickson's last two novels as you know; 2007s Zeroville and this year's These Dreams of You.

It's EuropaChallenge.blogspot.com. I'll post your article tomorrow. There's a review up now of These Dreams of You in case you're interested! Glad to have you aboard.

I read Arc d'X years ago and loved it. But that is the only book I have read by Erickson. Because of what you have written about him, Rubicon Beach is definitely next on my list right after I finish Stephen Wright's Going Native (which I am also reading based on your excellent review).

I am really surprised that Burgess said that. ..."jettisoned too many of the novel's traditional properties". Really?!? Has he read his own animal A Clockwork Orange lately? What the hell? You'd think he would welcome new alternative writing styles. Burgess always seemed like a snobby bitch to me.

Rubicon Beach I'm finding to be so far the "easiest" book of Erickson's I've read. Shorter chapters, more immediately comprehensible connections between his sometimes abrupt shifting p.o.v.-tendencies. An enjoyable, semi-noirish read so far. A sci-fi mystery feel to it too.

I like Burgess a lot. His criticism has been very helpful to me over the years (i.e. 99 Novels), but I think you're absolutely right when you mention "Clockwork" (I hadn't thought of that) and how Burgess "jettisoned the novel's traditional properties" (or at least some of them) when he wrote that novel. I need to search harder and find a copy of the entire review.

Full disclosure: I could not be more biased on this subject, as I work for Steve's publisher, Europa Editions. But I also feel very passionate about this book, which ranks among those I'm most pleased to have been a part of publishing at Europa. I just posted the following thoughts on the Europa Editions challenge blog before realizing it originated here.

The poet T.S. Eliot once remarked that meaning in a poem was like the piece of meat a burglar throws to a guard dog to keep it occupied while he steals the silverware.

Searching for meaning is a habit that readers can hardly be expected to abandon, hyper-cerebral things that we are. But providing meaning is not the work of the poet. It is, if anything, the consequence of the relationship created between poet and reader. It is yielded rather than conveyed or received.

Now, Erickson is not a poet and his work has changed somewhat from those early books, yet getting it still seems to be beside the point. Rather than being got, Erickson's books exist to be experienced, and I think if one is open to that experience then the possible meanings are myriad, more varied and richer than those offered by a great many of his more gettable contemporaries.

I may be a little sensitive to this issue because unfortunately, almost 20 years after Burgess's silly review, critical coverage of Erickson's work is still suffering from a lack of rigor, on one hand, and a sort of timidity on the other, a fear of letting oneself go, intellectually and aesthetically, of abandoning familiar shores. These defects feed preconceptions about his work. Even more seriously, they suggest to writers (and publishers, and agents, and young critics and reviewers) that no matter how talented you are, no matter how prodigious your imagination, it doesn't behoove you to write things that do not fit into the one-size-fits-all paradigms of contemporary american fiction.

These Dreams of You, for my money, is a minor masterpiece about family, fatherhood, race, recent american history, and the nature of aspiration, thwarted and met. Those are all messy, amorphous, complicated things and every simplification is a betrayal. Steve seeks to betray as little as possible.

I'll get off my soap box now and get back to work.

thanks as always
michael

Love your passion, Michael,

First, my full disclosure is that I've become a bit of a lunatic fan of Steve Erickson's over the past three years. In fact, last year, I noted in another thread here in LT that Our Ecstatic Days was my favorite read of 2011. More recently, I "reviewed" (it's not really a review, more a fan gush) Erickson's first novel, here. I've written glowingly of him several times over the past year on my blog as well.

As a fairly new fan, I feel that arguably unfair pain in bringing up Burgess' notorious review, but being that I'm beginning from the beginning with the novels of Steve Erickson -- and ultimately, maybe by years-end or in to early next year, getting to These Dreams of You -- I plan on discussing just about every writer who's ever written about Erickson on this thread (Paul Auster, Kathy Acker, etc., to name a couple from the early days), and certainly not with the intention of impugning Erickson's reputation, but understanding and seeing the history of the criticism, both positive and negative, that's been levied his way. I figured beginning with Burgess might spark some interest in the thread.

I totally get what you're saying about experiencing the fictive universe of Steve Erickson. I've loved the experience so far! He's a writer I've come to greatly admire, whether I (that confounded word!) "get" him or not. I like the poetry analogy of yours a lot in approaching his novels.

Here's a link to The Europa Challenge blog mentioned above. Do know I'm following it now, Marie.

After visiting the Europa Challenge, I've decided I'm going to tweak my reading plans a little. After I finish up Rubicon Beach here shortly, I'll jump ahead twenty-six years to These Dreams of You, and then after that, return to my originally planned chronological reading of Steve Erickson's career, which would put me back at Tours of the Black Clock. These Dreams of You is hot off the press right now, lots of writers, bloggers and critics are discussing it, so I think it makes more sense to experience it sooner rather than later.

Kathy Acker's NYT review of Tours of the Black Clock from twenty-three years ago, nearly to the day:

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/05/books/in-was-hitler-s-pornographer.html

Sarah Vowell on The Sea Came in at Midnight:

http://www.salon.com/1999/04/21/apocalapse/

Probably my favorite novel of Steve Erickson's I've read so far. I like that Vowell mentions the poeticism of his work and that despite the shifting, blurring realities in the novel, the characters still feel real to her, as they did to me, and kept the experience of the narrative grounded.

I totally agree, and that flies in the face of some criticism I read recently, but forget where or by whom (I'll probably find it and report back here w/it eventually), in which the writer alleged that Erickson's characterizations of women are weak, two-dimensional and ubiquitious from novel to novel. Hogwash.

"Catharine" for example (not her real name, but the one given her by another character) in the novel I'm finishing up presently, Rubicon Beach, is one of the strongest heroine leads I've encountered in a novel in some time, totally unique from the other female leads in the four other books of Erickson's I've read. She's survives, even thrives, being kidnapped, escaping her kidnapper, escaping her coyote transporting her across the border into the States, escaping malicious Hollywood men left and right, and does so not knowing the language, but possessing powers that trump even what words can accurately describe.

Nary a mention from Acker or Vowell, either, about these alleged "weak women" in his novels.

right after I finish Stephen Wright's Going Native

That's the one with the crack addict? Meh-ish, though it's been a decade since I touched it.

Yeah, a crack addict and a serial killer. I am not even half way through it but it is not bad. It contains some very beautiful sentences. Freeque wrote a really good review on Wright on his blog (which I would include a link to but my demon corporate employer won't allow me to access blogs here at work...).

14> missed your note from a couple weeks ago. Thanks. I fear (as you now know) that I overhyped Going Native.

I'd like to thank beelzebubba, a good devil, assuming he's around, for going to the trouble of obtaining the microfiche of that dastardly Anthony Burgess review from '93 at the library he works at, and forwarding it to me so I could gaze in wonder at one of the strangest reviews I've yet read. A review in which Burgess spends the first half of his piece rarely mentioning Arc d'X, the novel in question, but instead bemoans being old, having poor eyesight, and lamenting the lack of respect given a James Michener by the younger upstart whippersnappers of the world. Although he does spend a good paragraph writing a nice neutral summary of Erickson's career preceding Arc d'X, I'll grant him that. But then he mocks his contemporary, Thomas Pynchon's, laudatory language regarding Arc d'X, and further slams Pynchon at the end of the piece for his promulgation and reliance upon pop cultural allusions in his work rather than more elegant mythological allusions that are naturally more proper for a novel; and then Burgess further avoids fully engaging with the novel supposedly being discussed -- Arc d'X by Steve Erickson -- by praising another historical novel he deemed more astute in its period settings and psychology, The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag, a novel while no doubt brilliant has little to do with Erickson's other than serving as a convenient segue for his mentioning in the next paragraph the volcano that rises in the eastern U.S. in Arc d'X. By the end of the review, Burgess has barely, just barely described, excepting his summary dismissive declarations, much that's substantive about Arc d'X. And I love Anthony Burgess; I've written glowingly of his criticism in 99 Novels, but he was just plain down in the dumps, clearly having a very bad day that day in early 1993 when the New York Times Book Review commissioned him to write his review.

David Bowman wrote an interesting piece in 2005 that touched on the consequences for Steve Erickson's career in the bloody wake of Burgess' semi-pro hatchet job of Arc d'X: http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_05/bowman.html

Hmmm ...

I need to track down the Burgess review. It sounds bizarre. And James Michener??? Please.

15> Of course I'm still around! But demons, by nature, prefer to lurk, you know. I'm looking forward when I can get into Erickson's works (as soon as I find my way out of Infinite Jest, that is) and reading Burgess' nasty little review made me want to even more (demons are contrarians, too.)

16> w/out presuming to speak for the devil, perhaps that great lurking Satan might be amenable to shooting an email (in lieu of a fiery dart) your way ....

It sounds bizarre. And James Michener??? Please.

I've read a pretty good chunk of Michener's stuff (though I'd be hard-pressed to remember a lot of it). Growing up in Southeast Pennsylvania, I used to work for an estate auction company. He seemed to be pretty standard fare for a good chunk of the population at one point. As it is, Michener always seemed to be about disguising history lessons as novels. Nothing terrible about it, nor nothing especially great. But I want to say that DFW also had a soft spot for Michener, though I could be making that up entirely.

As it is, a lot of the authors that are being bandied about (Pynchon, DeLillo, Nabokov, Borges) are well known for blurring the lines between "Low" and "High" art.

18> Of course! My best friend is part goat (and he speaks highly of Mother U's care-taking of his cousins) so I'd be delighted to help her out.

16> Urania, if you'd like to PM me w/ an email address to send it to, I'll speed it on its way.