Finished Steve Erickson’s Zeroville earlier tonight. Am still stunned, piecing bits of it together; it manages to sustain a surreal and ominous tone while still remaining critically spot-on and even, in places, hilarious. There’s also something odd about a novel in which the film-obsessed protagonist thinks about his strict Calvinist upbringing and you think, “Huh, just like Paul Schrader,” and then Schrader shows up a few pages later.
Links of interest: Liesl Schillinger’s NY Times review; an interview with Erickson on The Elegant Variation.
Once more, I am deeply glad I picked up Arc d’X on a whim in high school.
***
Went to the Happy Ending reading series this evening, mainly to see Chris Adrian — though I liked what I heard from Steve Toltz and Margot Livesey as well. Adrian read from a novel-in-progress, and all I can really say is: sinister, toga-wearing Jimmy Carter. I’m curious to read the finished work, mainly because it seems like a radically different method of engaging contemporary politics than, say, his stories “Why Antichrist?” and “The Vision of Peter Damien”.