Rubicon Beach

If you’ve attempted it, you know it’s much harder to write about something you love. Love can’t be shown any justice ever, just chipped away at with congratulatory compliments here and there. So here are a few of mine for author Steve Erickson:

1.) He is underrated. He takes the cryptic, densely referential material of Thomas Pynchon and makes it readable, more straight-forward, and more universal. He successfully builds on the vast influence of Pynchon (and the writers that inspired him) by retaining the intertwined nature of a narrative rooted in disorientation. Fragmented bits of information are loaded with overarching questions about humanity and an American culture that has been in decay for decades.

2.)  His books reach for that universal revelation that is integral to good (and classic) literature. Though his narratives focus more on the journey itself than any outcome, Erickson still pieces together linear scraps that draw the reader closer to finding something, anything, that might resemble a conclusion.

3.)  He is an individual. His characters and settings reappear throughout his various novels in different times, places, or personalities; his writing style is unique, mixing pop culture and historical references, reveling in melodrama at times, and visually working with the words on the page. He blurs the boundary between what is real and what is dream.

In Rubicon Beach, Erickson’s second novel and the first I read, characters try to overcome the prevailing numbness present in the decaying world around them. The city of Los Angeles (where the book is mostly set) is swallowed up in apocalyptic flood waters, but an eerie life force resides in mysterious music that emanates from the city’s ruins and collapsing structures.

The book, which is made up of smaller plots within a larger text, turns on three central characters. The first is a man who has been released from prison and is now under state surveillance. Living in an abandoned tower, he wanders in and out of the empty buildings of LA where he witnesses a mysterious woman commit murder. This woman, with dark hair and glowing eyes, is central to the uneasy tone of the entire novel. She is an object of obsession throughout the book, crossing borders and inhabiting several personas to arrive in the lives of the characters around her, sometimes seemingly out of coincidence. The third character, a successful screenwriter, is driven insane by his artistic inadequacies and this mysterious female character, who seems to make light of said inadequacies.

Erickson’s fiction is difficult to categorize. The way he blends reality and the surreal is almost Lynch-ian, dealing with the fast pace of modern society and its consequential lack of historical memory. All that exists, past or present, is interchangeable. His characters are abstractions, transcending the mediocrity of being human. They are special because some force pulls them toward a greater truth about themselves, their environment, or their culture. The questions that are presented and that remain in Rubicon Beach set the tone for Erickson’s later work, and this book is a compelling introduction to the author.