These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson

There are few writers I'd rather read than Steve Erickson, but when I began These Dreams of You, I wasn't sure the author would be able to carry this one off, so new is the subject, and so filled with  overtones that have yet to be fully articulated.

But I shouldn't have worried. 

Certainly too early is better than too late or never at all? However timely, These Dreams of You might even be somewhat late when it comes to present day politics. But neither too early or too late has much bearing on the novel's urgency. If anything,  this is a more serious and complex book than Erickson's previous outing, the excellent and transgressive Zeroville.  In fact, this might be Erickson's most important book, as firmly in the cultural pocket as Leap Year, and ranking up there not only with Zeroville but his monumental Days Between Stations.

It's also a deeply a deeply troubling book. Which is as it should be.

Because These Dreams of You- the title of course comes from the Van Morrison song- reads like a dream-photograph of contemporary America, focusing as it does on the culture's anxiety-inducing  undercurrents. So it matters little that  Erickson's novel, almost four years after the fact, harbours remnants of that initial naive enthusiasm. Because this is more about what we've become as who we elected, though, as the novel attests, the two can't really be separated. 

These Dreams of You has been called the first Obama-era novel. Perhaps it is.  But it could also be called  the first pre-Occupy movement novel. Whichever, it seeks to bridge the gap between 2008 and the present. Consequently,  it addresses the disillusionment following Obama's election, which was, of course, based on hope rather than a program or a movement. At the same time, the novel attempts to keep those dreams alive even if there is little evidence that it might still be possible to do so.  To accomplish this legerdemain,  Erickson, as he has done so often before, delves into myths that bubble  under the surface of a nation teetering on the edge of a precipice. Myths we're  all suckers for,  if not victims of,  even if they contain no more than a kernel of truth. 

Moving from  L.A. to London, Paris, Berlin and Addis Abada, Erickson's novel views race as central to the culture, whether by virtue of the man who occupies the White House,  through the music that has created  the culture or Sheba, the protagonist's four-year old, adopted Ethiopian daugther.  In doing so, Erickson embraces the dialectics of living in a post-race world (Van: "Ray Charles was shot down/but he got up to do his best").  All the time realizing that such an admirable a notion was probably premature, a false promise that, while heightening the debate, has revealed some ugly remnants that would destroy the body politic.  

What I've always liked about Erickson is how his books are able to mix fact and fiction, reality and dream, subject and object. With overlapping narratives, the setting might move in time and place, but the specifics are always clear. Though not the only protagonist, the book revolves around Zan, a former novelist and pirate radio deejay, who looks on helplessly as the country as well as his life goes into economic free fall, and the world suddenly becomes evermore dangerous and inhospitable. Soon all he  has left is his family, a handful of dreams and memories, such as election night, 2008, which he compares with RFK's 1968 political campaign. Though Zan's house is about to be repossessed, his bank account is practically non-existent,  and his family about to be split apart, he manages to do what he can to salvage the situation, and maybe even find a sliver of hope for the future.

Of course, most are just a step away from being in Zan's situation. No wonder all such dreams have been deferred, if not, for some, extinguished. Says Erickson,  "...never has a president been heard so differently by so many, but what everyone now holds in common is what they don't hear anymore, which was his music that once so mesmerized them and now seems to have gone silent."  But isn't that the logical result of creating a facsimile of a movement? So what was once in the air- be it the radio waves that emanate from Zan's adopted daughter or his pirate radio program which played tracks from various cultures- has been silenced or made negligible. But despite his loss, Zan, in his craving for the music and what was once possible, pursues meaning in a country that, despite his love for it, is on the verge of destroying him.

But These Dreams of You raises another question: that  it's those who voted for the president as much as the president, who have changed, having succumbed to a flat-screen reality in the same way the president has succumbed to realpolitik and Wall Street. Proving that his campaign was simply an attractive advertising campaign in which someone appeared to be speaking truth to power.  As Van said in the song, "you said I was the one who had to reap what you did sow." But perhaps that goes with the territory. As These Dream of You illustrates, to move beyond that requires  a Sisyphus-like task that entails pushing a political boulder which more often than not moves backwards if it moves at all.

These are only a few  of the issues raised by Erickson in what is, finally,  a political novel that purposely refuses to offer a political analysis. But that should only be troublesome to those who don't believe the trite but true saying about the personal being  political and the political being personal. It hardly matters that Erickson's analysis veers off-track, or skirts various issues. Because These Dreams of You is less about down-in-the-dirt politics than the state of a nation in which there exists a thin line between dream and nightmare, and too much emphasis is placed on the singer and the song, when what really matters is the music, and where that music comes from. 

Perhaps, Erickson is right: "failed writers should be something other than presidents."

Which is to say that along with Russell Banks' Lost Memory of Skin (which I'll write about at a later date), These Dreams of You is, for me,  the year's most important and provocative novel about the state of contemporary America.

The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Critcism by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards

In 1996, when my first book, Pulp Culture, appeared, there seemed to be just a handful of books on the subject of noir film and fiction. These days it's   impossible to keep up with them all. But Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards' The Maltese Touch of Evil- Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Dartmouth College Press) seems to be one of those books that shouts out  to be read. Mostly comprised of entries from the authors' podcast, Out of the Past, The Maltese Touch of Evil- the title denotes the book's inherent playfulness and the manner in which one film noir feeds another- deconstructs images and scenes in order to construct, however tentatively, an aesthetics of noir. Despite the book's academic tendencies, the project turns out to be an on-going, even populist, affair. 

Not content  to stay within the confines of the traditional noir critique- the  template of which must still be, on the one hand, Silver and Ward's Film Noir Encyclopedia, and on the other, Borde and Chaumeton's Panorama of Film Noir- Clute and Edwards, by combining the historical and the analytical, attach their dark city sails to the Oulipo movement. A literary workshop based in France whose texts are defined by either mathematical or lexiconical constraint, Oulipo can list amongst it  practitioners Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau and, of course, George Perec. The latter not only wrote the screenplay for Alain Corneau's almost-successful 1979 film Serie Noir, based on Jim Thompson's Hell of a Woman, but penned the widely read Oulipian text, La Disposition (A Void), a crime novel written that does not use the letter e. Thus no mere, no pere, no crime, no accent grave, and, of course, no George Perec. Likewise, Clute and Edwards seek a comparable methodology, one that allows them to step back from the usual approach, and, in doing so, makes their criticism anything but impersonal.

Through such constraint Clute and Edwards would call our attention to the constraints made on the genre. Though I've never been fond of the cliche that freedom can only be found through constraint,  the golden age of noir was definitely created under those conditions, whether regarding the production code, directorial and studio demands, film aesthetics, cinematography and history. And those can be broken down into a set of further constraints- lighting, set design, writing conditions,  and the script itself, which has its own set of constraints with which to contend. You don't exactly  have to reach for your Oulipo to realize such was the case. On the other hand, the imposition of constraints and artificially creating them, Oulipo-style, are two entirely different things which, in turn,  necessarily create different sets of possibilities.  

No doubt about it, The Maltese Touch...  works well within its  circumscribed area. More an anthology in reel time, it's comprised of 102  entries- here called  noiremes- that range from the opening shot in  Sunset Boulevard to the foggy ending of Gun Crazy and the significance of the two cigarettes in an ashtray below the words The End in The Big Sleep. In between snippets derive from some thirty films, including  Out of the Past, Sunset Blvd, The Killers, Touch of Evil, The Hitch-Hiker, Kiss Me Deadly, D.O.A.. In reviewing those moments, Clute and Edwards are quick to point out that film noir is a self-critical and self-referential genre, representing what the Oulipians call potential criticism and plagiarism by anticipation, terms that denote their multi-directional movement in time as well as cinematic space. With cultural and cinematic critiques integral to these films, templates emerge which display an array of subjects and signifiers, traumatic as well as subversive, political as well as cultural.   

The perceptions embedded in these  takes are for the most part incisive, though they occasionally arc in the opposite direction; for instance, maintaining The Set-Up's real time reminds the viewer that time is running out for the protagonist; or that the explosion at the beginning Touch of Each denotes that film noir as a genre is being blown to bits. On the other hand, its comments on the cultural history behind Chinatown, Siodmak's grim assessment of post-war America in The Killers, the image of the staircase in Sunset Blvd, the lighting in The Postman Always Rings Twice, are bound to be  thought provoking. Personally I would have liked a wider selection of films-  Fallen Angel, The Big Combo, Raw Deal, On Dangerous Ground, Devil Thumbs a Ride- rather than It's a Wonderful Life, On the Waterfront and Good Night And Good-Luck, which,  though they contain elements of noir, lay outside the genre. Equally, I thought the first few chapters went to greater lengths than necessary to explain the book's Oulipian roots and methodology. But that could be because I was never quite sure to what extent their self-imposed constraints informed their perceptions. Though the authors list a series of self-constraints, that list hardly exceeds the demands any good editor might make. Of course, editors, in this context, and however necessary, could also be regarded as a constraint. 

As a footnote,  I read The Maltese Touch... at the same time as David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 years. Consequently, I was unable to stop  thinking about film noir  in terms of debt, which, in turn, might another  example of constraint, as well as plagiarism of anticipation. After all, debt pretty much defines film noir's sub-text,  in terms of subject as well as style, with its concentration on  relationships reduced to  monetary value, manifested by heists, loan sharks, contract killings, corruption, gambling, prison (the debt one owes to society). Moreover, such debts are not only financial, but social and historical. Then there's  the literal debt owed to studios, actors, technicians and box office receipts. All of which illustrates that, despite, or because of, its limitations, The Maltese Touch... will make any  noir afficianado consider the wider implications of such films. So, even with the plethora of books on the subject, The Maltese Touch... is about to be placed on my bookshelf alongside such favorites as Silver and Ward's Film Noir Encyclopedia, Gerald Horne's  Class Struggle in Hollywood 1930-1950,  McCarthy and Flynn's King of the Bs, Nicolas Christoper's Somewhere In the Night and Michael Naremore's More Than Night. After all, this is one of those books that, after reading it,  you're not only going to want more, but you're going to find yourself thinking so much about these films that you'll immediately want to see them all yet again. Which can't be a bad thing, and says a lot for the provocative nature of the book.

Savages by Don Winslow

I've long been an admirer of Don Winslow's crime fiction. One of the things I like about his work is that, no matter how light or entertaining his novels appear to be, one comes away from them having learned something. For example,  California Power and Light is a veritable degree course in fire insurance investigation. I've used bits of information gleaned from that book on a number of occasions. While in Power of the Dog- one of the best crime novels to appear over the last two decades- you learn pretty much  everything you need  to know about Mexican drug cartels and their relationship to law enforcement in the US and south of the border.

Which brings me to Savages. I was really looking forward to this one, having heard it combined his two prime subjects- surfers/slackers and Mexican drug cartels. That it does, and even though it noir to the core,  I was disappointed. Savages centers on  two guys- one a hardcore, former soldier, the other a green-minded son of two psychotherapists- who make a very good living producing  and selling high quality weed, until, that is, they run afoul of the Mexican drug cartel. They have an off and on menage-a-trois with a young woman, not quite an airhead but not far  from being one. The head of the cartel-  a woman with a daughter not unlike the young woman living with our two drug dealers- wants to horn in on the action of our two protagonists. Of course, she has to watch her back when it comes to rivals within the cartel. Nothing wrong with the plot or the politics of the novel. The problem comes with the way both are executed. Because, for me, Savages came across  as a comic-book version of Winslow's two favorite concerns, and ends up being far too lightweight and frivolous, when compared with Power of the Dog.  Moreover, it lacks the informative background material  I have to expect from Winslow's fiction.

There's also the matter of Winslow writing style which I have also long admired, particularly his use of short, cryptic chapters, that can sometimes seem like something close to poetry. But in Savages he uses that style throughout the book, mixed with a vocabulary which mirrors and often mocks his characters.  Not that Savages isn't  entertaining- I read it on the train from London to Paris, which made the trip pass in no time at all- but I expected more from the novel.  Still, I'm not going to let one disappointing novel put me off reading him in the future. I hope Savages is simply Winslow biding his time before he drops his next epic novel on his readers.

A Handbook of American Prayer by Lucius Shepard

This is yet another excellent Concord Press free book (in exchange for a donation to your favorite charity). A perceptive writer and original stylist, Shepard, over the years, has ventured into various genres, describing the lives of those on the margins of the culture.  Considering the role religion still plays in American politics and public life, A Handbook of American Prayer is as relevant a novel as one is going to read this year.  It's a dark tale that  revolves around Stuart Wardlin, a violent brawler yet strangely innocent, who, while serving a prison sentence for murder, writes a best-selling, self-help book about something called prayerstyle- a DIY style of prayer that combines poetry and wish-fulfillment. While inside he corresponds with a woman whom he eventually marries, and the two of them move to nowhere, Arizona. Having mellowed, Wardlin becomes, in no time at all, a cult hero, but one who can't  escape  the product and celebrity status he's created. Of course, in rejecting God and organized religion,  prayerstyle falls foul of the representatives of God Inc.. Wardlin, who, as Shepard has said, cons himself in order to con others, is eventually visited by a character from his own prayerstyle, the Lord of Loneliness who functions as a 21st century Grand Inquisitor. The plot, though sounding far-fetched, is, as Russell Banks says in his introduction, all too plausible. My favorite passage might be when Wardlin is visited by his own metaphorical creation, who explains to Wardlin his entropic theory:

"Neolithic culture, they didn't have time or the wherewithal to produce anything except what they needed to survive...Maybe they carved toys for the kids. Toy mammoths and shit. That's about it. But as societies grew more sophisticated, more technologically competent, the more trivial, whimsical objects they produced. Now we're in the Golden Age of the trivial and the whimsical. Eventually society will produce nothing but trinkets. Everything will have been trivialized. Every resource trashed, every idea reduced to a slogan, every boulderlike edifice crumbled into rubble. We'll inhabit a landscape of lizard-shaped ashtrays and digital crickets and Harry Potter oven mittens. Art will be manufactured, not ripped from the soul. Greatness defined by merchandisers. Love that once inspired poetry, novels, symphonies, and inspires pop songs...it'll inspire some even more vapid form of insignificance. Hell, we're almost there. Your book's perfect example. You've taken that whole burning-bush, heavenly-glory thing and marketed it as your basic build-a-Jehovah kit. That's why I admire it so much. It's cutting-edge."

Shepard not only savages the role of religion, celebrity culture and the need for easy answers, if not  instant gratification, but addresses issues of masculinity, and the mis-use of language, as well as the relationship between between prayer and poetry. Whether we're in the final stage of the age of me or not,  Lucius Shepard has  again written another provocative, entertaining and important novel.

Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder the writer might not be as incisive and exact as Ry Cooder the musician, but, for me, the near-amateurish quality of Los Angeles Stories constitutes part of its charm. Not that it's badly written, it's just that those who've covered other aspects of this terrain-  Cain, Chandler, Ellroy, Fante, Mike Davis, Joan Didion, DJ Waldie- have set the bar extraordinarily high. Still, Los Angeles  Stories is more than admirable, coming across as the work of someone trying not only to resurrect the past, but to make sense of it, while, at the same time, looking for a way to tell a story,  trying things out on the page. That Ry has long been able to mix musical styles with tasteful flourishes only adds to the mix, generating its own demand and interest.

For me, these stories, whatever their surface deficiencies, function like a memory theater, conjuring up  an LA of fifty to sixty years ago, with its anti-Communist witch-hunts, Red Cars, City Directory, Bunker Hill rooming houses, downtown burlesque houses, bowling alleys and, of course, music, whether country, jazz or Mexican.  It was a time when Town Hall Party was on TV every Saturday night, Jazz Man record store was still situated on W. Pico, Pershing Square rang out with gospel singers, preachers and Oakie wannabes, radio stations like KGFJ and KXLA blasted across the airwaves, Chavez Ravine was little more than a dusty neighborhood and Angel Annie's voice could be heard behind third base at Wrigley Field. Ry writes about that time, centering on ordinary and forgotten, people, whether jobbing musicians, dental technicians, petty criminals and scam artists. Then there are those who make peripheral appearances, like d.j. Hunter Hancock, legendary guitar honchos Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, and the infamous cross-gender pianist and band-leader Billy Tipton.  I found myself wishing Cooder had written more about Tipton, who undoubtedly deserves a novel all her own. 

Like Ry, I grew up in the twilight years of that period and rarely a day passes when I don't travel back there in my mind. So even though Los Angeles Stories might be something of a one-trick pony, it has charm and no small amount of historical value. Likewise, it doesn't surprise me that Cooder should have branched off into story writing. Because this book also works as an addendum to Cooder's recent albums Chavez Ravine, I, Flathead and Pull Up Some Dust, which exists as texts in their own right. Los Angeles Stories reflects the fact that Cooder's music has become increasingly narrative and political. But then Ry's a product of the Ash Grove, where the civil rights movement and the Peace and Freedom Party rubbed shoulders with Lightnin Hopkins, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Stu Jamieson and Sleepy John Estes. As anyone who was there can attest, it was a time and place from which no one escaped unscathed.

Give + Take by Stona Fitch

Judging by what's out there, writing a decent crime/noir novel about music must be difficult. In fact, you can probably count the good ones on one hand and still have a couple fingers leftover to pluck out Blue Monk on the piano. Which is strange since crime/noir fiction and music, or, at any rate, jazz, have always been inextricably linked. In his latest novel Give +Take (published by Two Ravens Press), Stona Fitch manages to carry it off and then some. This isn't just an excellent novel about a working jazz musician- in this instance, Ross Clifton, a lounge piano player schooled in the likes of Monk, James P. Johnson and the Great American Songbook- it's also about a working thief who, when not improvising on melodies, steals BMW's from rich motorists and diamonds from wealthy women. A talented but, in the end, pedestrian musician with gifted hands, Clifton is anything but an ordinary thief. After all, this is someone  goes out of his way to give away what he makes from his one man blitz on conspicuous consumption, stuffing any profits into anonymous mailboxes, dumping it in trashcans or throwing it on side of the road.  Meanwhile, Ross'  brother, who makes his living as a counterfeiter, sends his sixteen year old son, Cray, to his uncle mostly to put some of those ersatz bills  into circulation. The idea being if we live by a fiat currency, then counterfeiting becomes something close to a legitimate business. Though reckless, immature, and forever driving his uncle up the wall, Cray is no fool, but intelligent enough to comment to his uncle that, although his financial contributions might be making people happy in the short-term, eventually the money will run out that they will have to return to their miserable lives.

As well as being a fast-moving, dark and often humorous novel that focuses on the politics of crime in our present economic climate, Give+Take is also something of a road novel. So Ross moves from town to town, playing various types of establishments, always with an eye out as to how to play the crowd, milking them for all their worth, extracting from them whatever he wants, whether applause, or getting them to part with their money.  His never-ending itinerary, arranged by his agent provocateur, Malcolm, invariably overlaps with  jazz torch singer Marianne London. When the two finally meet they immediately fall for one another, only for Ross to discover that Marianne has her own line in scams, preying on elderly rich men just as he preys on rich women. But together, giving as well as taking, they discover that everything comes at a cost, and even the best laid scams can sometimes go astray. 

This is no simplistic anti-capitalist screed, but a novel that examines what it takes to get by in a world under economic siege,  while questioning the ethics of the black economy, and considering where work ends and crime begins. Certainly, anyone who enjoyed the knife-edge quality of Fitch's earlier fiction, in particular the nerve-jangling Senseless, will want to read Give+Take.  If you haven''t read Senseless, with its anti-globalist theme, you'll want to once you've finished this book. Both are  intelligent crime novels with incisive social commentaries written by one of the best practitioners of the genre around.  But there is even more to Fitch than his critique of the culture. Because this former jobbing musician has recently put his money where his pen often strays, with the establishment of Concord Press (stonafitch.com) which gives away its high quality books by formidable writers like Scott Phillips and Lucious Sheppard, in exchange for a charity donation (a concept that fits perfectly with the title Give+Take) and the promise the book on to someone else.  In this day of corporate publishing, celebrity-oriented lists, and the pursuit of profit margins over literary quality, we need more publishers like Concord Press and more books like Give+Take.