“Divided We Dream”

Charles Taylor has a beautifully turned review in the Nation of Steve Erickson‘s new novel, Zeroville:

But the feeling of being adrift in vast physical spaces touches something familiar in the back of our minds, and I think it’s what makes Erickson a quintessentially American novelist. The scale of his dreamscapes–water and sand swallowing entire cities; a train journey covering an area so immense that there are literally days between stations–are fantastical versions of American vastness. As with the vistas Edward Hopper painted, Erickson creates spaces that are both empty and haunted, spaces that threaten to swallow their inhabitants. For Erickson’s characters, trying to live in these spaces is a way of both declaring their presence and accepting anonymity. And so they’re constantly prey to an anxious spiritual homelessness, caught by the inchoate mix of both promise and doom in America’s wide open spaces.