ZEROVILLE by Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson is one weird dude. I mean, of course, the implied author of his novels and not the actual LA-living, movie-reviewing, flesh-and-blood author, of whom I know nothing save those two facts and the third, gleaned from photographs, that he wears enough hair for three men his age--for which I salute him from the shiny top of my Louis C. K.-like middle-aged baldness. After finally getting around to Erickson's weird Hollywood novel Zeroville (the one about the idiot-savant-like genius film editor with a two-shot of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor tattooed on his shaved head--yeah, weird), I found myself enjoying the book despite (or because of?) its overreliance on Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, despite (and certainly not because of) its third act regression to now-gray-haired postmodern novel clichés, and even despite its dire predictability. Instead of that surreal sense of 'anything can happen' expertly achieved by Erickson in his very impressive debut, Days Between Stations, Zeroville gives us exactly the elements we expect in a postmodern Hollywood novel. It's a good example of a kind of ultrahigh genre fiction in which hyperliterate, hyperintellectual clichés substitute for the pseudoliterate, pseudointellectual clichés that inform the works of, say, Dan Brown. So yes, while I enjoyed Zeroville, I enjoyed it the way I enjoy some of Quentin Tarantino's movies: as highbrow cheap thrill rides. From Steve Erickson, I expect more.