ZEROVILLE

Name: ZEROVILLE
Author: Steve Erickson
ISBN: 978-1-933372-39-6

by Steve Erickson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2007

A novel that will especially appeal to cinephiles, for Erickson (Our Ecstatic Days, 2005, etc.) makes more allusions to...

bookshelf

Standards of verisimilitude don’t apply to this dreamlike novel of obsession and movies.

In 1969, Vikar Jerome arrives in Hollywood, a holy innocent of sorts, fresh from seminary studies and out from under his rigidly Calvinistic father. He’s recently seen his first movie, and one of his first reactions to this stunning experience is to shave his head and have images of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (“the most beautiful woman and the most beautiful man in the world”) tattooed on his lobes. We mark time in the novel by cultural events (Vikar briefly finds himself accused of the Sharon Tate murders when he’s holed up in a cave in Laurel Canyon) and by cinematic experiences, both films being released in the ’70’s (e.g., The Long Goodbye, Apocalypse Now) and classic movies (especially Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc) that Vikar catches in various art theaters around L.A. Vikar moves through many of these experiences much as a child would, for he has little knowledge of the mean streets of the city, but he also shows himself capable of violence, for one of his first acts is to hurl a food tray at a hippie who mistakenly takes the figures on his head for James Dean and Natalie Wood. Ultimately, Vikar finds himself rubbing elbows with an assortment of Hollywood denizens who seem like refugees out of a David Lynch film—he becomes obsessed with Zazi, young daughter of a star of lesbian-vampire movies—and he also winds up becoming an Academy Award–nominated editor with, needless to say, a quirky approach to montage. At the end of the novel, dream becomes reality when a disturbing image of one of Vikar’s recurrent dreams turns out to be a frame inserted into almost every movie ever made.

A novel that will especially appeal to cinephiles, for Erickson (Our Ecstatic Days, 2005, etc.) makes more allusions to film, starting with his Godard-like title, than perhaps any novelist you’ve read.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-933372-39-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SHADOWBAHN
by Steve Erickson

- BOOK REVIEW
THESE DREAMS OF YOU
by Steve Erickson

- BOOK REVIEW
OUR ECSTATIC DAYS
by Steve Erickson

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.