Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Erickson gives us the first novel of the Trump years
Let’s see: Jesse Presley, Elvis’ stillborn twin, hears the Mekons on a transistor radio on the 93rd floor of the south tower, the twin towers having reappeared intact in the South Dakota Badlands 20 years after their fall. A man with an astrophysics degree runs the cash register at a gas station in Disunion territory. A young man and his sister, who is also a radio, drive a silver Camry hybrid containing “all that remains of American song,” searching for a lost highway “that cuts through the heart of the country from one end to the other with impunity.” Yup, “Shadowbahn” is a Steve Erickson novel, all right.
It’s also the novel of now — this moment that just passed and the one just around the bend — the first novel of the Trump years, of tatterdemalion America, the starless stripes, as one of Erickson’s chapter headings has it. A novel for “a defiled century and whatever defiled world inhabits it” The towers rise again, displaced, in a country riven by conflict, hostility, disputed territory, secession. It’s the return of a history so repressed that it is all on the surface — a national imaginary so towers-haunted, so Confederate-flagged, that tragedy must manifest physically as farce in order to reveal just how little anyone understands.
The plot of the novel — such as it is, and please do not imagine me capable of summarizing it — turns on a question Stephen Dedalus phrased in “Ulysses” this way: “But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?” Jesse Presley, the shadowborn, leaps from the south tower in 2021 to land in Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1966, at which point the narrative is interrupted by Jesse’s 12-page review of a record no one’s heard by a band called J. Paul Ramone & the Beatlebubs.
The review is printed in twin columns, like the towers, like the Presley brothers, like America. It recounts an alternative history where Jesse lived instead of his brother, so there was no Sun Records and thus no rock ’n’ roll, just a “short-lived rock & rhythm craze.”
Meanwhile, in another future, American nomads Parker and Zema, Camryborne siblings on the shadowbahn, listen to their dead father’s playlist, which is accompanied by his liner notes for each song — lyrical meditations in which Los Lobos rewrite history so that Ritchie Valens walks anonymously away from a plane crash in Iowa and “flying-dutchman phantasmatoons” drift “in the shoals of reef-smashed chords.”
That only Steve Erickson’s children’s father would or could produce such notes is both beside and precisely the point. For decades now, in novels like “Rubicon Beach” and “Zeroville,” Erickson has eroded narrative with prose poetry, geography and time unspooling like detonating cord before other logics, according to which the highway you’re on is never the highway you thought you were on, and you’re headed “the wrong way in the right direction.”
This is a novel we need, even if it’s somewhat predictably moved by a ghostly patriotism that doesn’t dampen rage so much as bewilder it. Even those readers for whom patriotism however bewildered was never an option might accept one rooted, as Erickson’s is, in the resistance of the Sioux Nation at Wounded Knee. “In the thirteen years since Zema came to America,” Erickson writes in the novel’s most telling passage, “she has never had any idea that having no idea who she is and having no idea where she belongs makes her more American than anyone.” This country is never what you think it is, whatever you think it is, this novel seems to say. It’s true that this is what liberal writers since Tocqueville always say. It’s an argument for flip-side America, “mixtape nation,” a country with hellhounds on its trail but better angels just over the horizon. It’s not a country I recognize. But Erickson knows all this; he doubles down and doubles back; he’s written a battle hymn: “No one believes in the same country anymore and probably never has.”