.com Review "Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced."--Jonathan LethemA film-obsessed ex-seminarian with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his head arrives on Hollywood Boulevard in 1969. Vikar Jerome enters the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock and roll, sex, drugs, and--most important to him--the decline of the movie studios and the rise of independent directors. Jerome becomes a film editor of astonishing vision. Through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the secret that lies in every movie ever made. Questions for Steve Erickson Jeff VanderMeer for .com: Could you describe where you are as you're answering these questions? Erickson: At the moment I'm in my home office in Topanga Canyon, which I can see outside my window. .com: How do you feel your fiction has changed over the years, beyond the changes that occur from acquiring greater mastery of technique? Erickson: Well, being a novelist yourself, you probably understand this is something it's better for a writer not to think too much about. While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite. On the other hand, though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows--the theme of parents and kids, for instance, which lurked under the surface in earlier novels like Days Between Stations and Rubicon Beach and Arc d'X, has come to the forefront over the course of my last three novels including Zeroville, just because my own personal experience has become more first-hand. .com: Because you've got more ways to tell a story now than when you were first published, does that also make it harder to write? Do you ever find yourself debating the merits of more than one approach to the same material? Erickson: The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult." In my previous novel, Our Ecstatic Days, a lake has flooded Los Angeles and a young single mother believes it represents the chaos of the world that has come to take her small son. She dives down into the water to the hole at the bottom through which the lake is coming--and at the moment I wrote that scene, I had this idea she should "swim" through the rest of the novel, through the next 25 years of the story, and the reader sees this in the form of a single sentence that cuts through the rest of the text. A lot of people identified this as "experimental," but to me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters. In the case of Our Ecstatic Days, it was just a way of conveying the world of that particular novel. A number of people have noted that Zeroville is more "linear" than the earlier novels but that was calculated only in the sense that I thought a novel about the Movies and why we love them (as opposed to a "Hollywood novel" about the movie business) should have the pop energy of a movie. People have mentioned how fast Zeroville reads--that's because I felt it should move the way a movie moves. .com: What really sparked Zeroville? Was there a moment where you suddenly realized you had a story to tell? Erickson: The idea was born in a short story I wrote for a McSweeney's anthology, but the novel really fell into place when the character of Vikar came into focus, when I got a handle on this guy who shows up in Hollywood in 1969 on what happens to be the day of the Manson murders, with a scene from George Stevens's A Place in the Sun tattooed on his head. He's identified by one of the other characters in the novel as not a cineaste but "cineautistic"--movies have become his religion after he's rejected the one his father imposed on him, and he sees movies through the eyes of an innocent. Once I had Vikar I had everything--the story, the approach, the perspective, the tone. .com: How difficult was it to layer in all of the movie information that's in Zeroville? For example, you include several real movie people in the novel, sometimes anonymously so the reader has to guess who they are. Was that all there in the initial drafts? Erickson: The whole novel wrote itself from beginning to end, including the film stuff. It was the easiest novel I've written. I almost feel like I can't take credit for it--it was like the universe said, Here, you worked pretty hard on all those other books, so we're giving you this one. You type, I'll dictate. If anything, when I went back over the novel, I took film stuff out. The stuff about movies had to support the story, it had to support the characters and be informed by them -- the novel couldn't just be a compendium of movies I happen to like. It's not a DVD guide. .com: Did you know going in that this was going to be a very funny novel? And do you think reviewers have, in the past, missed elements of humor in your work, or is this new for you? Erickson: I knew it was going to be funny once I knew who Vikar was. Once I knew we were going to tell the story pretty much from his vantage point, it couldn't help being funny. There are moments of humor in earlier novels like Tours of the Black Clock and The Sea Came in at Midnight that probably are so dry and dark that some people didn't understand they were funny. But with the exception of Amnesiascope, which generally is considered a funny novel, the humor usually hasn't been this overt. Read more From Publishers Weekly Set primarily in Los Angeles from the late 1960s through 1980s, this darkly funny, wise but flawed novel from Erickson (Arc d'X) focuses on our collective fascination with movies. Vikar Jerome, whose almost deranged film fixation manifests itself in the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his bald head, wanders around Hollywood, where he gets mistaken for a perp in the Charles Manson murders and is robbed by a man who turns out to be a fellow film buff. After Vikar becomes a film editor, he's kidnapped by revolutionaries in Spain who want him to edit their propaganda film. Later, he wins a Cannes Film Festival award in France and receives an Oscar nomination, with strange consequences. Vikar repeatedly crosses paths with actress Soledad Palladin and her daughter, Zazi, though ambiguities in his relationship with this enigmatic pair, along with a recurring dream of his, derail this black comedy toward the end. The sudden point-of-view shift and possible supernatural element jar in an otherwise brilliant, often hilarious love song to film. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
J**S
A Nod to Godard (and his merry band of surrealist creative masterminds)
In the hands of actors, writers, directors and producers, Hollywood is a dream factory, a place that cranks out wish fulfillment scenarios like assembly lines manufacture automobiles. In novelist Steve Erickson’s hands, Hollywood is a fever dream, a waking nightmare that elucidates the truth of the self that only movies can attempt to uncover. ZEROVILLE - by CalArts professor, Los Angeles Magazine contributor and literary cult figure Erickson – delves into the mystery and allure of celluloid, where a master shot gives the audience its bearing, but the close-up scrambles all perspective and engulfs the collective psyche in freeze-frame moments spanning whole lifetimes.At the novel’s start, Ike “Vikar” Jerome, a cipher-esque, idiot-savant film fanatic, arrives in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969 and quickly sheds a Philadelphian past to embrace his new home. With a huge tattoo emblazoned on his bald head – of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor from a scene in “A Place in the Sun” – and anger coursing through his body without restraint, Vikar hits the local art houses and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in an effort to discover his own destiny. He visits the famous Roosevelt Hotel, where he searches for the ghosts of D.W. Griffith and Monty Clift himself; gets hauled in by the cops while camping out in the canyons, a suspect in the Manson Family’s horrific Tate-LoBianco murders; talks film theory with a career burglar tied up in Vikar’s new Hollywood pad; and is swept into the drug-addled, free-love, film-obsessed Next Generation auteurs plotting their movie industry revolution from the sandy beaches of Zuma.Vikar’s story spans a decade, with the very Chance the Gardner-like main character swept through Hollywood, Madrid and Cannes by outside forces who find themselves intrigued and spellbound by his presence. His bizarre physical appearance, his vexing, non-sequitur-heavy dialogue, and his earnest, “I like to watch” approach to the movies attracts figures great and small, famous and infamous. Verisimilitude mixes with literary license as Erickson’s fictional creation Vikar befriends thinly veiled Hollywood luminaries like John Milius, Margot Kidder, Brian DePalma, and even a pre-“Taxi Driver” Bobby DeNiro. The author is coy about some of the real life characters, discreet about others, and blatant as hell about the rest of the filmmaking crowd in his efforts to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, truth and conjecture.While there is much satisfaction in the guessing game of “what’s that film?” or “who’s that actor/director?” which Erickson offers throughout the book, there is also an abundance of movie references that became tiresome even for me, a fanatical movie freakster. When everyone Vikar encounters knows the difference between a Howard Hawks and a John Ford picture, or identifies themselves as a cineaste with the ability to pontificate for hours on the slightest minutiae of a Bunuel film, the book becomes the literary equivalent of a Tarantino movie. There is storytelling skill, fantastic dialogue and compelling action within, but there is also unfortunately a level of showing off that the author indulges in which strips the novel of its fun and magic.Those criticisms aside, ZEROVILLE is overall a remarkable novel that attempts to blur the lines between how reality shapes the movies and how the movies shape reality itself. The ideas are potent, the characters are engaging, and the ending manages to be mysterious, inconclusive and completely satisfying all at the same time. A Fade Out worthy of Fellini or Godard’s best.
C**E
God Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Steve Erickson is a first-rate film critic and an ambitious novelist. Zeroville is his unqualified masterpiece. It is both a reworking of the Isaac and Abraham story from the Old Testament--and a great L. A. novel as seen through the lens of the film industry (and a vexing film editor/ex-divinity student) from 1968 to 1982. This is a very serious and funny novel about the burden of living in a monotheistic culture-and a highly entertaining foray into pop culture in an era when films were regarded as art, and a means to salvation.
T**I
Not to everyone's taste, but a good read for a fan of film or a worker in the craft
I was first drawn to the book by reports of the poor reception for its recent movie version. I have been in the movie/video business myself for 16 years in one capacity or another, but always in small independent productions, never Hollywood. I have also been a long time film buff, but not as obsessed as the novel's protagonist. The bottom line is that I liked it, even though it is difficult to empathize with said protagonist on many levels. Before writing this I visited a number of the one-star reviews, and they do have some valid points. Much written about the protagonist seems to be a visit to the author's own head. It can be, as often said in the book, "vexing". For this I kept back one star.But I liked it. There are multiple oblique references to films and film makers, both famous and obscure, and one is challenged to figure out this "roman a clef" aspect, which is not to find a murderer but rather to test one's knowledge of the business and its history. Non-movie buffs or casual movie buffs would be less likely to be favorable.
R**8
Very good book but not sure about the ending
Very good book but not sure about the ending. It will require a second read. I do think it helps tremendously to know some of the movies and people that are referenced here otherwise you miss quite a lot. For instance the conversation toward the end with Vikar's idol is sprinkled with many of Clift's actual movie lines. "you got trust in your eyes, like you were just born" to Monroe in the Misfits or "just because you love something doesn't mean it loves you back" Prewitt in FHE. I loved that about this book. It makes it that much enjoyable.
B**R
Astonishing
I just put the book down. My head is spinning. Haven't read anything like this in a while. If ever. The gentleman who gave it a one-star review and hates it and threw it away after only 50 pages is likely to find my fawning blather unfathomable. Whatever. I'm not even sure what to say about Zeroville, other than to warn you: you could hate it, too. It's fractured. It's unusual. It's literate. It's impressionistic. It's pop-cultural. It's funny. It's intense. It could be mere mind candy. It could make you really, really angry. It could set your world back to zero. It could make you a believer in Steve Erickson. I say: surreal homage to the movies by a man who probably has an unhealthy obsession with them and knows how to channel it for our reading pleasure. (For the record, I found it neither boring, nor nostalgic, and certainly not overly erudite--an evaluation that's kind of a head scratcher. Nor am I a "yupped out baby boomer." Far from it.)Especially if you love movies and aren't afraid of literary pretensions that stray from convention, spool it up.
O**S
More Trivia than Novel
Erickson's ZEROVILLE is a primer on classic 1970s movies more than a novel. That makes it fun at points figuring out who the characters are modeled after, but it the protagonist, Vikar, never is fully developed.
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