Review by New York Times Review
The hero of Steve Erickson's new novel is obsessed with movies. AHH, the lure of the madman - the harrowed, sinewy figure with glowing eyes who approaches out of the shadows, burning to communicate his incommunicable truth. Think of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" with his wild stare and lurking ax: "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" When such a person nears, do you step back? Do you linger, frozen in terror, compelled by his mesmeric gaze? Or do you, like Vikar, the "cinéautistic" protagonist of Steve Erickson's latest novel, "Zeroville," regard him quizzically, without fear, thinking only, "I don't understand comedies"? Erickson, the film critic for Los Angeles magazine, writes surreal, highly visual novels that he splices together as if they were art films. Two of his earlier books, "The Sea Came In at Midnight" and "Our Ecstatic Days," feature the same symbolic heroine, Kristin, a young woman who bears a child named Kierkegaard (Kirk for short) to an "apocalyptologist" in Los Angeles, only to have the child disappear as the city is inundated by magical portents - a lake fills the valley, owls swirl overhead and invisible "melody snakes" infest the skies. Yes, Erickson likes to mess with his readers' heads. But that's nothing compared with what he's done to the head of Ike Jerome (known as Vikar to his friends because of his divinity-school background and mystic mien), the troubled, visionary hero of the fascinating piece of phantasmagoric Hollywood homage that is "Zeroville." Vikar's shaved head is covered with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, "the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies," their lips nearly touching in a close-up from "A Place in the Sun." Strangers who meet Vikar recoil from the skin cartoon that stains his cranium, but unless you offend the flesh and blood (or celluloid) people Vikar loves, you're safe. In the words of the Clash, one of the punk bands he listens to, "Everybody say, 'He sure look funny.'/Ah but that's Montgomery Clift, honey!" The story takes place between 1969 and the early '80s, following Vikar from Los Angeles to Madrid to New York to Cannes, even to Oslo, and back. But as one of the characters, a director called Viking Man, observes, "It's all Hollywood, everywhere is Hollywood, the only place on the planet that's not Hollywood anymore is Hollywood." While narrating Vikar's journey in a fairly linear chronology, interrupted by flashbacks, Erickson weaves in fleeting references to actual actors, directors and rock bands. He allows Vikar to spy on Ali McGraw flubbing her lines as she shoots "Love Story"; to party in a beach house with the young Robert DeNiro in his pre-"Taxi Driver" days; and to happen upon CBGB's at the dawn of its punk heyday. Nearly a decade ago, the longtime executive editor of Premiere magazine, Peter Biskind, recapped the same era in his nonfiction book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood." "Zeroville," with its dizzying, in-the-know, name-and-place dropping (and its incessant allusions to famous movies and their stars, both cryptic and explicit) is a kind of novelistic refutation of Biskind's book - without an index. Its very title is a cinematic inside joke, drawn from the New Wave Godard film "Alphaville." In that movie, the private eye cries, "This isn't Alphaville, this is Zeroville!" Vikar, with visions of "Blade Runner" zipping through his head, thinks Hollywood is Zeroville because "there's no sunlight in this Los Angeles; every day is reset at zero," and "the movies have been reset at zero." For him, that isn't necessarily an indictment, since "the movie is in all times, and all times are in the movie." Both Biskind's and Erickson's books begin with the Manson murders and an earthquake. Vikar arrives in Los Angeles in August 1969 on a bus from Philadelphia, determined to bring his visual sensibility to the film business and haunted by family memories. (His Bible-spouting father crept into his bedroom to rage about sin, on one occasion while brandishing a long knife.) Vikar quickly makes an impression on his fellow Angelenos: his tattoo is an unforgettable calling card. When a hippie at a sandwich shop mistakes the tableau on his head for a scene from "Rebel Without a Cause" and says, approvingly, "Dig it, man. My favorite movie," Vikar smashes him with his tray, incensed that anyone could mistake Liz for Natalie, Monty for James Dean. A couple of days later, Vikar is the one brought to ground when a dozen cops charge him as he emerges from the Harry Houdini house in Laurel Canyon, a ruin amid burning caves in the Los Angeles hills. By ill luck, Vikar has taken his hillside stroll on the morning after the Manson family slaughters, and his body art makes him look like Public Enemy No. 1. Still, he's regularly employed building sets at Paramount, and Viking Man reassures his friends that although Vikar is "nuts about movies," he's not a violent cult member Even freaky, groovy actors aren't entirely convinced, particularly Soledad Palladin (rumored to be the daughter of Luis Buñuel) whom Vikar reveres. "He may not be one of the Manson family," she admits. "But he's not harmless." BEYOND establishing these (somewhat) grounding details, it's simply impossible to explain the intent and direction of this funny, disturbing, daring and demanding novel - Erickson's best. The set pieces in "Zeroville" are particularly breathtaking. It's hard to read the scene in which Vikar ties up a burglar who's broken into his apartment, then sits with him for hours arguing about the '40s studio system and dissecting Bette Davis's performance in "Now, Voyager," without thinking of Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." When Viking Man summons a reluctant Vikar to Madrid to edit a film (a job that earns him applause, boos and a special award at Cannes), and Vikar ends up being kidnapped every night to cut a clandestine film on Generalissimo Francisco Franco, it's easy to think of Roberto Bolaño's mad, fertile Barcelona campsite scenes in "The Savage Detectives." Terse, fanciful, dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish, this remarkable novel will test you and tease you and leave you desperate to line up at Film Forum (or hunt down Erickson's top 150 on DVD) so you can submit yourself to the celluloid bonds that hold Vikar and his creator such willing captives. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Ex-seminarian Vikar Jerome comes to Hollywood in 1969. On top of his shaved head is a tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift ( the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies ). Operating with a childlike intensity, Vikar falls in with a group of equally obsessive film devotees as old Hollywood gives way to the passionate auteurs of the early '70s and their immersion in sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll . Vikar meets the world-weary woman who edited A Place in the Sun, and she becomes his mentor. He eventually makes a name for himself as a visionary film editor, although this recognition barely registers when he becomes sidetracked by his discovery that an image that has always haunted his dreams is one that is contained in every film ever made. Although cineasts are the obvious audience for this atmospheric novel (it contains literally hundreds of references to obscure and classic films), others may find themselves falling under its spell, for its effect is much like that of a strange but very beautiful art film.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
