| Title | : | Conversations with Steve Erickson |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Format Type | : | Kindle , Hardcover , Paperback , Audiobook & More |
| Number of Pages | : | 266 |
| Publication | : | Published July 1, 2021 |
In these twenty-four interviews Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and political visions are inextricable from each other. He diagnoses the American condition since World War II, only to reveal that America’s triumphs and failures have been consistent since its inception—and that he presciently described decades ago certain features of our present. Additionally, the interviews expose the remarkable consistency of Erickson’s vision over time while simultaneously capturing the new threads that appear in his later fiction as they emerge in his thought. Conversations with Steve Erickson will deepen readers’ understanding of how Erickson’s books work—and why this utterly singular writer deserves greater attention.
Conversations with Steve Erickson Reviews
-
In a career-spanning collection of conversations and interviews with Steve Erickson, this book gives a lot of insight into not only Erickson’s own thinking about his novels and writing, but also a glimpse behind the veil of his process. However, it will likely come as no surprise that that process is a highly intuitive one, where the characters and themes carry the work forward.
Erickson claims to write his novels basically from page one straight to the end, with only minimal rewriting/revising along the way, and he’s never working from outline. Instead, he describes things kind of similarly to David Lynch his notion of “catching a big fish,” which is the idea, and letting the idea form the work. This linkage seems apt since I’ve often leaned in on describing the feeling of Erickson’s novels as akin to a novelistic form of a Lynch film. That is, they exist in the slipstream logic of dreams, deal with deeply human themes and emotions.
Reading a man talk about himself and his work across 30 years does lead to a lot of repetition—the way we create kind of tight/easy ways to talk about our work in general, or specific ideas or characters. Often he rails against being called “experimental,” and he has a joke in his pocket where he maladapts the line about “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver,” wherein he replaces “culture” with “experimental.” A fair stance when he has the chance to express where he’s coming from: that experimental writing is often a subject of its experiment, and therefore other concerns of a typical novel are secondary. He argues, in fact, that he’s one of the most old school types of writers because he believes story comes from the characters, and in that way, we can begin to see some of the conventional underpinnings of otherwise highly surrealistic, chaotic worlds on the crepuscular boundary of time and memory.
Really, this is the kind of work for academics and obsessives of Erickson’s oeuvre, of which, I’m in the latter camp. For my money, Erickson should have the prestige and recognition of someone like Pynchon in literary venues. Unfortunately, he seems cursed to be in that seamy underbelly of category—what’s known as “a writer’s writer.”
Anyway, for those who haven’t read Erickson’s work and you’re a fan of someone like Pynchon or De Witt or Lynch or Cronenberg or surrealism in general or if you’re at all attracted to ideas like a lake suddenly forming in the center of LA which leads into an alternate LA, then please read Erickson’s work immediately. -
Admittedly a niche read, but if you like Steve Erickson’s novels, reading his collected interviews about them is gold.
