These Dreams of You – Steve Erickson

"It's a country that does things in lurches.  Born in radicalism, then reluctant for years, decades, the better part of centuries, to do anything crazy, until it does the craziest thing of all.  But it's also a country - inherent in its genes - capable of imagining what cannot be imagined and then, once it's imagined, doing it.
Six years before, another president, a white privileged Texan, swaggered across the deck of an aircraft carrier in a pilot's jacket, a banner unfurled behind him proclaiming the end of a war that, in fact, was only beginning.  It was an image that the country embraced almost as much as it believed it.  Now a black Hawaiian with a Swahili name?  It's science fiction, Zan thinks.  Or at least the sort of history that puts novelists out of business." 

Plot:  A Los Angeles family reeling under the weight of the recession seek temporary respite.  A trip to find the mother of their young adopted daughter results in the family physically split apart and their attempts to get back together take them all over Europe.  And a lot more too hard to explain.

Why read it?: While more conventionally plotted than a lot of Erickson's work, it still retains some fantastical elements.  Time travel, Ulysses, Robert Kennedy in a state of doubt, Bowie and Iggy in Berlin, there's a lot to like here.

This book affected me personally as few other books have, particularly in the first few pages.  For a book taking its title from a Van Morrison song (at least tangentially about Ray Charles, if a Van Morrison song can actually be about something), includes a lengthy section with a conscience stricken Robert Kennedy on his way from opportunistic son a American royalty to the political soul of late 60's America, another lengthy bit involving David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin, a bit of a time travel problem involving a copy of Ulysses, and even stops for a short time in a hotel in Ethiopia, it’s a very intimate novel that begins the night of the 2008 election.  Despite his family’s life being in financial disarray as a casualty of the financial meltdown of the time, Zan is brought to tears via TV as he watches what is happening in Grant Park.  For me, it had been a few months earlier, August 28, watching what had seemed impossible not too much earlier in my life.  The idea of possibility seemed infinite at that moment, and an America that could deliver on it’s promises was real.

What happened after was not surprising in hindsight.  Erickson’s novel wanders through the wasteland of 2008-09.  Zan and Viv have adopted Sheba, now 4, from an Ethiopian orphanage.  Sheba is precocious, with a vocabulary of words and sayings beyond her years, and transmitting music through her body. While Zan and Viv are not your typical white middle aged couple (Viv has turquoise colored hair and is an out of work artist) they are at times baffled by their daughter.  Much is made of the perplexities in even beginning to understand the meaning of race.  Yet this is, along with their 12 year old son Parker, a family.  It isn’t long before they are leaving Los Angeles and their increasingly creaky existence there, for London (Zan, Parker and Sheba) and Addis Ababa (Viv, in search of Sheba’s mother).  The novel will eventually also reach Paris and Berlin, people appear and disappear, and the novel redirects for awhile to a sublplot involving Robert Kennedy who may possibly envision a 2008 America 40 years earlier.  There’s also a 2^nd subplot imagining Ulysses suddenly showing up in history before it’s actually written (not surprisingly a Molly shows up in the 08 story).  And what you might do about that, if you were so lucky to find it.  Also, which seems to be pretty much a ritual for Erickson, there's a brief entry of a character from his previous novel Arc d'X. And then there’s Berlin Bowie and Iggy.  They somehow become integral to the plot in a roundabout way.

Ercikson can write some indecipherable sentences, but I’m fine with a few misses sprinkled in with many more hits.  His novel Zeroville is a brilliant piece of movie fandom built around a story of 1970’s Hollywood).  Again, history is important here.  Erickson doesn’t see it as fixed as most of us do; as some of the other writers I have read, he sees the importance of point of view, but more than that he seems to see it as something we can mold and use today to better ourselves.  We are a country of assembled parts that have had to be repaired again and again to make something more unique and better.  What happened in 2008 was a culmination of events going back more than 2 centuries.  A belief in the magic of America doesn't have to be blind faith in exceptionalism - we can also see it as a long experiment that has succeeded more often than not, sometimes in spite of itself.