These dreams of you /

YOU don't need to read a word of Steve Erickson's new novel to figure out that it's broken. A quick flip through its pages reveals it to be fractured into hundreds of pieces, many no longer than a paragraph or two, each island of text banked by white space and heralded by a bold capital letter, like so much typographical bling. This visual oddity is just one of many ways the novel willfully resists being read as a conventional narrative. It alerts us to Erickson's more idiosyncratic designs and serves as an advisory for readers: not for the faint of heart. Not that Erickson has ever written for the faint of heart. Extolled by Pynchon, likened to Nabokov, DeLillo and Ballard, he has been deemed a surrealist, a visionary, a genius. His fictions play out among the shifting landscapes of sci-fi, fantasy, postmodernism and avant-pop. Occasionally, "These Dreams of You" reads less like a book than a prose contraption engineered to pry us loose from our bearings. It opens, however, with something like narrative realism. I say "something like" because the first three words, "But years later," hint that time will not be conforming to linear models. Still, we begin grounded in time and place: the night of Nov. 4, 2008, and the living room of a house on the edge of Los Angeles, where the Nordhoc family is watching the presidential election results on television. The four Nordhocs, who provide the messy, vibrant heart of the novel, make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up. The father, Zan, a novelist who hasn't published in 14 years, has lost his job teaching at a local college and now D.J.'s four times a week at a pirate radio station with "about a megawatt to its name." The mother, Viv, a turquoise-haired, out-of-work photographer, once gained acclaim by sculpturing stained-glass butterfly wings, only to find herself "at the center of one of the art world's most notorious scandales" when her innovation was stolen by "the world's most successful artist," whose reputation and pocketbook now profit while the Nordhocs fall deeper into debt. Parker, the 12-year-old son, has "gone gangsta lately," favors the prefix "über" and wears around his neck a music player "barely bigger than a stick of gum." These three members of the family are white. Then there's the 4-year-old daughter, Sheba, adopted from an Ethiopian orphanage 19 months earlier. Given to Owen Meany-ish all-caps outbursts, dragging a finger across her throat to convey dissatisfaction and saying things like, "What up, sweet cheeks?" and "Chillax," she is both the most magnetic and the most maddeningly drawn character. Erickson admirably refrains from rendering her as cute; she's as tough, as complicated, as any of the adults. Nor does he sentimentalize or simplify the underlying motivations and repercussions of interracial adoption. We are told early on that Sheba "was adopted in the first place out of white naïveté," and Zan grapples repeatedly with the question of what he, "a middle-aged white man," has a right to feel and think - and write - about race. Yet this preschooler's precocity occasionally beggars belief. "I'm sorry," she says at the end of a tantrum. "I'm only 4, I'm not 12 like Parker, I act braver than I am." And despite Erickson's evident thoughtfulness about the complexities of culture, privilege and marginalization, he exoticizes Sheba's place of origin ("civilization's ground zero, the land where God placed Adam and Eve"), her "other-worldly-looking" countrymen, with their "extraterrestrial features," and Sheba herself, whose body "perspires in song," literally transmitting sound on its own mystical frequency. Complicating any reading of the Nordhoc family is the extent to which it mirrors the author's own family, as well as the extent to which he means for us to figure this out, using the similarities as a lens through which to view the story's myriad layers. (Even the most desultory Internet search turns up the fact that Erickson is married to an artist whose work includes "butterfly stained-glass windows," which have figured in a controversy involving questions of plagiarism and the artist Damien Hirst.) Erickson, who has woven autobiographical and historical elements into previous novels, seems to invite us to fish out our trench coats and magnifying glasses. He sprinkles his breadcrumbs liberally. One subplot involves a novel Zan is writing, which (wink-wink) "isn't remotely autobiographical." We are told that Zan makes "an aesthetic out of coincidence," and once the family travels abroad - to London and then, splitting off like the fractured segments of the book itself, to Addis Ababa and Paris and Berlin - the coincidences accrue, fast and furiously. Oh yes, the plot(s). Brace yourself. The family goes to London (where Zan has been invited to lecture on the novel hi the 21st century). Viv departs for Ethiopia (where she hopes to find Sheba's biological mother). Molly, a young Ethiopian woman, inexplicably appears outside the Nordhocs' hotel room. ("I understand you are looking for a caretaker for the children.") Viv vanishes; Molly and Sheba vanish; Zan and Parker set off for Berlin (don't ask) in search of Viv. Meanwhile, in the novel-within-the-novel, Zan's protagonist is beaten by skinheads in Berlin, encountered by a black teenage girl, encumbered with a battered paperback copy of an Irish novel that "all of the 20th century knows, its literature having begun with this book," and magically catapulted nearly 80 years back in time, where he exploits the opportunity to plagiarize the famous novel before it is written. A third story line, also interwoven, takes place some 40 years in the past. Here a young woman of Ethiopian descent encounters a white Yank with "rabbit's teeth" and a "high, nasal voice." She campaigns for him in his bid to be president of the United States, is with him the night he's assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. Later, she lives in Berlin with a trio of musicians, whose real-life identities remain as opaque-transparent as that of the presidential candidate. (I had fun figuring them out.) One of these musicians sires the daughter who will be called Molly, also the name, "by coincidence perhaps," of a character in the aforementioned famous Irish novel. OCCASIONALLY Erickson's prose swirls and foams as irresistibly as the sea. Elsewhere it's more mind-boggling than the plot. For example: "Does one need to travel a birth passage, womb to uterus, to be a daughter, if already you're the descendant of an unforgiving century?" And: "Zan feels a prisoner of mysteries he can't name let alone solve, and implications of secrets so secret he barely knows they're secrets." Does he feel the implications or feel a prisoner of those implications, and either way - huh? But perhaps plot and even sentence structure are of secondary importance in a work where "the arc of the imagination" is forever "bending back to history," an idea that is thought by multiple characters in this book of multiple frames. Actions echo across time, continents and realities: historical, fictive and dreamed. Zan lectures on "the narrative as sustained hallucination." In the end, Erickson's seemingly fractured novel turns out to be something else - the novel as fractal, a series of endless, astounding tessellations. The four central characters are a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up. Leah Hager Cohen is the author of four novels, including most recently "The Grief of Others," and four books of nonfiction.

Erickson (Zeroville) follows middle-aged Caucasian Alexander "Zan" Nordhoc's adoption of a four year-old Ethiopian girl, beginning on the eve of Barack Obama's election and leaping back 50 years and forward to a newly cross-cultural world. Daughter Sheba's arrival coincides with Zan's family's personal recession (soon joined by the nation's). A former professor of pop culture and former novelist, Zan broadcasts underground blues radio from his home in L.A. while his wife, Viv, searches in vain for photography work. "The little girl who talks like she's twenty" brings issues of race and identity to the center of this family. In danger of losing their house, they are soon dealing with charges of human trafficking and illegal adoption. While Zan ferries Sheba to London for a rare paying lecture gig, Viv goes to Addis Ababa to try to sort out the adoption. But when Viv and Sheba both disappear, Zan is forced to examine his youthful mistakes and misconceptions and confront his dissonant reality. Told in a series of short, punchy sections, Erickson expertly weaves together themes of music, politics, and idealism in a modern story where preconceptions are outdated. Agent: The Melanie Jackson Agency. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Los Angeles novelist Zan Nordhoc begins this novel in trouble: he is broke, his house is underwater and on the verge of repossession, and he hasn't completed a novel in years. Life, he learns, can get much worse: his wife disappears in Ethiopia, and his adopted daughter vanishes with a babysitter in England. Throughout his compounding crises, Zan manages to compose a novel in his head in which a man is beaten in Berlin, finds a copy of Ulysses, travels in time, and encounters a woman who worked for both Bobby Kennedy and David Bowie. The characters in Zan's imagined novel overlap with people in his real life, including himself and the biological mother of his missing daughter. Somehow, Erickson (Zeroville) pulls these implausible elements together and creates an intriguing book about the past, politics, and the nature of fiction. VERDICT With family drama and cameos by the famous to keep readers' interest, this imaginative hopscotch through modern history will appeal to fans of contemporary literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/11.]-John Cecil, Austin, TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Zeroville, 2007, etc.) latest, the lives of Zan and Viv have imploded in the wake of their adoption of Sheba, an Ethiopian toddler "supernaturally cognizant beyond the span of such a short life." Alexander Nordhoc--Zan--is a novelist, but he's written nothing new for years. Instead he teaches and works as a disk jockey at a pirate radio station. Viv is a gifted photographer, one whose most prominent work was plagiarized by a celebrity poseur. Viv is indifferent. The Nordhocs are also too broke to sue. In fact, they face foreclosure on their California home, a house that's also, and symbolically, rat-infested. Into this mess comes a missive from J. Wilkie Brown, occupier of the J. Wilkie Brown Chair of the University of London, and Viv's one-time lover. Brown offers Zan 3,500 to lecture on the "Novel as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century." Too little to rescue them, the money is also too much to refuse, especially since Viv, white-angst guilty, wants to accompany Zan to England and fly on to Ethiopia and find Sheba's mother. Chapter-less, a stream of interconnected vignettes, Erickson's narrative segues toward surrealism while mimicking the chaotic interior emotions of real life. Threads and characters serendipitously stumble through a missing-link chain of coincidences, with mazes and labyrinths both real and imagined. Erickson even references Mussolini's use of mustard gas and a pizza-delivery mugging evoking Do the Right Thing, all while Zan dreams in parallel of a novelist who plagiarizes the future. The story is dense with cultural references and there's a beautiful, elegiac remembrance of Robert Kennedy, his campaign and assassination, from Jasmine, a grey-eyed Ethiopian woman whom RFK met while in London. Later, Jasmine will work for a Bowie-like rock musician, during which time she becomes pregnant with Molly, who becomes Sheba's temporary nanny during the Nordhoc's sojourn. With this book, set against the backdrop of Obama's ascendancy to the presidency, Erickson weaves a complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.