These Dreams of You

By Steve Erickson

“Set against the backdrop of Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency . . . A complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
 
At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory.
 
One November night in a canyon outside Los Angeles, Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country’s first black president, Barack Obama. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife, and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little girl’s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past.
 
Sweeping from 1960s London and ’70s Berlin to twenty-first-century California, and the beginning-of-civilization Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a twelve-year-old boy readying himself for what the years to come hold.
 
“Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Drama filled with exuberance.” —The Washington Post
 
“The four Nordhocs who provide the messy, vibrant heart of These Dreams of You make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up.” —The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781609459062

Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson is the acclaimed author of several novels, including Arc d’X, Rubicon Beach, and Days Between Stations. Regarded as a central figure in the avant-pop movement, Erickson has been compared to J. G. Ballard and Don DeLillo, and praised by Thomas Pynchon, for his deeply imaginative fiction. In addition to his novels, he has published two works of nonfiction about American politics and culture and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is presently the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and editor of the literary journal Black Clock. 

Book preview

Reviews for These Dreams of You

[blanderson-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ugh. Another Erickson novel that begins brilliantly, moves fluidly, has that great page-turning suspense, and then falls apart in the end amid a slew of lame 'trippy coincidences' that we all saw coming a mile away, a weak conclusion, and lame cosmic platitudes. The last 1/4 of the book drags it down from a solid 4/5 into 3/5, in the same damn way as Arc D'X, and with some of the exact lame platitudes, as if Erickson becomes afraid at the end of his books that his reader could not follow his fairly obvious themes through all the narrative's temporal and character shifts.

Here's one such example triteness: 'What would a room at the beginning of time sound like?'

'Zan will think to himself how music plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession.'

Jesus Christ, it sounds like what Eckart Tole might write if he was trying to be Thomas Pynchon.

Having read three of Erickson's books, he seems to follow the same MO: 1) Establish an ethereal plot and theme (usually pop culture-heavy and focused on identity and time) 2) build a fast, intriguing story 3) Establish a heavy-handed theme (music as lifeblood/culture, dark versus light as race, movies as imagination) 4)shift timeframe radically, go to some other place that seems vaguely connected (usually a mysterious female character---here it is sheba's mother) 5) WOW! The plot arcs converge in some phantasmagorical way! 6) The book peters out in a field of lame platitudes.


It's really too bad, because I always get through the first half of his books in a day, believing it to be one of the greatest things I've ever read, and they always fall apart when he tries too hard to be deep or mystical. Maybe he needs an editor with the balls to say, 'Pull it back, steve, your hand is so heavy right now y

Once again, the parts are better than the whole. Too bad because this had real potential...