Over the past 20 years, with each succeeding book, Steve Erickson doesn't so much add to his work as expand it. Though it's unremarkable for a novelist to examine his fiefdom from an array of vantage points, Erickson examines his creation from an array of realities. For many years, literature has explored the vagaries of memory by using subjective chronology. As Kristin, the central character of Erickson's latest novel, Our Ecstatic Days, declares, “Every life is a millennium unto itself.” What charges her statement with a radical form is its literalness. In Erickson's work, the elect, or those singled out by providence for great trials and tribulations, don't just lug around Lilliputian perceptions of time and space; like Kristin, they're the zeitgeist incarnate -- fields of being capable of generating seismic phenomena.
Our Ecstatic Days picks up where The Sea Came In At Midnight (1999) left off. At the end of the previous novel, Kristin, a teenager, has a miscarriage. Denying the irrevocability of the event, she gathers up the yolk spilt from her body and rubs it into herself “until she can't distinguish the tears of her eyes from the discharge of her uterus.” Replenishing her womb, she gives birth to Kierkegaard (Kirk). Along with paying homage, Kirk's name evokes the Danish philosopher's emphasis on the leap of faith as the bridge capable of spanning gaps that emerge within a system of logic. But for Kristin, it's not logic that must be overcome.
Kristin's son was fathered by an “apocalyptologist,” known as the “Occupant,” whose specialty was the study of illogic. The cast the Occupant's studies took was a sprawling nonlinear calendar, a record of dates where chaos erupted in the world. A sensualist in the extreme, the Occupant animates his work by inscribing a date on Kristin's thigh. The date, which means nothing to either person at the time, transforms her into more than an extension of the calendar; she becomes “a traveling center of the apocalypse.” Wherever Kristin goes, calamity follows: Trains break down, structures collapse, and, in Our Ecstatic Days, a puddle she notices while walking around Los Angeles blossoms into a lake. As the lake continues to rise, covering greater portions of the city, Kristin has a vision: The lake is coming for her toddler. Paddling a silver gondola to the lake's source, Kristin leaves her son in the boat and swims to the bottom of the lake “to go to war with the womb of the century.”
This grandiose image of a mother battling an epoch recalls Tours of the Black Clock (1989). In that novel, Banning Jainlight, a writer, takes possession of a woman's (Dania's) womb. With his words, he impregnates her with a seed that encapsulates the horrors of World War II. In the throws of delivery, it's only by deciding to love her offspring, come what may, that Dania thwarts Jainlight's plan. Whereas love provides grace for Dania, it threatens to obliterate Kristin as she tries to shield her son from the chaos of the world that can't be restrained.
Passing through the lake's source, Kristin emerges into a parallel reality. Resurfacing, she finds the gondola empty. As if appeased by her sacrifice, the lake stops rising. Traumatized by her loss, she sheds her identity, transforming herself into Lulu Blu, a dominatrix oracle. Blu, a name she acquired on the other side of the lake from Jainlight, was a name once used by her mother, a woman she never know.
It's difficult to picture anyone accusing Erickson of penning secondhand tales. Moreover, unlike other postmodern magicians, what distinguishes Erickson -- and, one supposes, turns some off from his work (too much of which is out of print) -- is that he doesn't sheath his vision in irony. Amid the bifurcating realties and typographical fancifulness, his sentences hum with sincerity; again, it's their literalness that makes them daring. When Blu has a vision of God in which she makes him her submissive, humiliating him while pining for her son, there's nothing trite about this scene. If one finds the idea of God dressed in S&M regalia corny, then Blu becomes not a universal surrogate for a non-passive-aggressive Job but a lady in need of grief counseling.
While Our Ecstatic Days abounds with metaphysical issues such as order, chance, God, and chaos, the ideas serve the characters rather than vice versa; in turn, this keeps Erickson's inventiveness from being an end unto itself. By investing his book with so many fantastic images -- a man with a transparent monocle in his hand, a woman who listens to the walls of buildings to ascertain their psychological state -- he, like the magical realists who preceded him, fertilizes reality so that one may be startled afresh by life in its more mundane aspects.
Perhaps no section of the book so marvelously displays these virtues as when Doc, the psychiatrist of architecture, journeys through a whirlpool at the center of the lake to pass through the “Hotel of the Thirteen Losses.” The typography of this section, with its varyingly attenuated columns and its authorial conceit that 13 rooms can symbolize the range of human loss, is indicative of the author's willingness to court charges of pretentiousness. But such charges are nullified: The layout is not without purpose, as it suggests the flow of running water, and the mingling of concept and image achieves the depth of a poetically inflected philosophical parable.
“ … Doc's gondola sails into a huge ballroom or, in fact, three ballrooms that are conjoined as one. These are the Ballroom of Lost Faith, the Ballroom of Lost Dignity and the Ballroom of the Lost Soul. It would be difficult to tell where one finishes and one starts; the conjoined ballrooms are mirrored from one end to the other and the chandeliers that hang from the ballroom ceiling glitter not only in the mirrors and the mirrors' reflections of each others but off the water … so that the cumulative light is blinding. Thus all perceptions are refracted, dazzled, suspect. What seems to be lost faith may be a failure of will or nerve. What seems to be lost dignity may be wounded pride or ego. And at the far end of the ballroom, where the tides flow in from all other rooms of the hotel and collide … it's often impossible to know which transgressions of behavior, integrity and conscious will drag the soul down into the undertow of the irredeemable.”
Erickson's book makes good on the promise of the adjective in its title. The sentences swoosh into the ether as the characters are forced to acknowledge a reality that compels their awe. It is to great benefit that we share their predicament.
Christopher Byrd is a writer living in Maryland. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Believer, The Wilson Quarterly, and Bookforum.
