These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

Overview

“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609450632
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/31/2012
Pages:	309
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Steve Erickson is the author of eight previous novels including Zeroville and Our Ecstatic Days, as well as two nonfiction books about politics and popular culture that have been published in ten languages around the world. Currently he's the editor of the national literary journal Black Clock, which is published by the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches, and he is also a film critic at Los Angeles magazine, for which he's been nominated for the National Magazine Award. He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Editorial Reviews

Erickson (Zeroville) follows middle-aged Caucasian Alexander “Zan” Nordhoc’s adoption of a four year-old Ethiopian girl, beginning on the eve of Barack Obama’s election and leaping back 50 years and forward to a newly cross-cultural world. Daughter Sheba’s arrival coincides with Zan’s family’s personal recession (soon joined by the nation’s). A former professor of pop culture and former novelist, Zan broadcasts underground blues radio from his home in L.A. while his wife, Viv, searches in vain for photography work. “The little girl who talks like she’s twenty” brings issues of race and identity to the center of this family. In danger of losing their house, they are soon dealing with charges of human trafficking and illegal adoption. While Zan ferries Sheba to London for a rare paying lecture gig, Viv goes to Addis Ababa to try to sort out the adoption. But when Viv and Sheba both disappear, Zan is forced to examine his youthful mistakes and misconceptions and confront his dissonant reality. Told in a series of short, punchy sections, Erickson expertly weaves together themes of music, politics, and idealism in a modern story where preconceptions are outdated. Agent: The Melanie Jackson Agency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for These Dreams of You

"I am astonished at the emotions this book let flood through my head and heart."
—Susan Straight

"As unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced."
—Jonathan Lethem

"One of the most important writers of his generation. Erickson's work feels like right here, right now. Against it, most new fiction read like it was written by stenographers."
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Erickson is a gambler, one of the fabulous mythmakers who are needed in these times of deprivation of the imagination."
—New York Times Book Review

"Marked by familiar coordinates but always in fantastic light... Erickson's writing seems both heroic and necessary."
—The San Francisco Chronicle

"Steve Erickson has that rare and luminous gift for reporting back from the nocturnal side of reality."
—Thomas Pynchon

"There's no one in the world writing like Steve Erickson."
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Over his entire career Erickson has challenged readers with a fiercely intelligent and surprisingly sensual brand of American surrealism."
—Washington Post

"It's simply impossible to explain the intent and direction of this funny, disturbing, daring and demanding novel—Erickson's best. The set pieces in Zeroville are particularly breathtaking."
—The New York Times

"Erickson has established a reputation as a daring, lyrical writer with a strong following among other novelists and a distinctive brand of cultural taste: West Coast, genre-bending and earnestly experimental."
—LA Times

"With this book, set against the backdrop of Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency, Erickson weaves a complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity."
—Kirkus (starred review)

"Told in a series of short, punchy sections, Erickson expertly weaves together themes of music, politics, and idealism in a modern story where preconceptions are outdated."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

"Erickson has established a reputation as a daring, lyrical writer with a strong following among other novelists and a distinctive brand of cultural taste: West Coast, genre-bending and earnestly experimental."

LA Times

"Over his entire career Erickson has challenged readers with a fiercely intelligent and surprisingly sensual brand of American surrealism."

Washington Post

Los Angeles novelist Zan Nordhoc begins this novel in trouble: he is broke, his house is underwater and on the verge of repossession, and he hasn't completed a novel in years. Life, he learns, can get much worse: his wife disappears in Ethiopia, and his adopted daughter vanishes with a babysitter in England. Throughout his compounding crises, Zan manages to compose a novel in his head in which a man is beaten in Berlin, finds a copy of Ulysses, travels in time, and encounters a woman who worked for both Bobby Kennedy and David Bowie. The characters in Zan's imagined novel overlap with people in his real life, including himself and the biological mother of his missing daughter. Somehow, Erickson (Zeroville) pulls these implausible elements together and creates an intriguing book about the past, politics, and the nature of fiction. VERDICT With family drama and cameos by the famous to keep readers' interest, this imaginative hopscotch through modern history will appeal to fans of contemporary literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/11.]—John Cecil, Austin, TX

Library Journal

In Erickson's (Zeroville, 2007, etc.) latest, the lives of Zan and Viv have imploded in the wake of their adoption of Sheba, an Ethiopian toddler "supernaturally cognizant beyond the span of such a short life." Alexander Nordhoc--Zan--is a novelist, but he's written nothing new for years. Instead he teaches and works as a disk jockey at a pirate radio station. Viv is a gifted photographer, one whose most prominent work was plagiarized by a celebrity poseur. Viv is indifferent. The Nordhocs are also too broke to sue. In fact, they face foreclosure on their California home, a house that's also, and symbolically, rat-infested. Into this mess comes a missive from J. Wilkie Brown, occupier of the J. Wilkie Brown Chair of the University of London, and Viv's one-time lover. Brown offers Zan £3,500 to lecture on the "Novel as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century." Too little to rescue them, the money is also too much to refuse, especially since Viv, white-angst guilty, wants to accompany Zan to England and fly on to Ethiopia and find Sheba's mother. Chapter-less, a stream of interconnected vignettes, Erickson's narrative segues toward surrealism while mimicking the chaotic interior emotions of real life. Threads and characters serendipitously stumble through a missing-link chain of coincidences, with mazes and labyrinths both real and imagined. Erickson even references Mussolini's use of mu­stard gas and a pizza-delivery mugging evoking Do the Right Thing, all while Zan dreams in parallel of a novelist who plagiarizes the future. The story is dense with cultural references and there's a beautiful, elegiac remembrance of Robert Kennedy, his campaign and assassination, from Jasmine, a grey-eyed Ethiopian woman whom RFK met while in London. Later, Jasmine will work for a Bowie-like rock musician, during which time she becomes pregnant with Molly, who becomes Sheba's temporary nanny during the Nordhoc's sojourn. With this book, set against the backdrop of Obama's ascendancy to the presidency, Erickson weaves a complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity.

Kirkus Reviews

Viewers have proved quite capable of processing the overlapping narratives and complicated timelines of movies such as Crash. But almost a century after Ulysses, any novel that plays with multiple points of view or challenges strict chronology is still slapped with that off-putting label, "experimental." With his exuberant ninth novel, These Dreams of You, Steve Erickson wears the label proudly…His jagged, jazzy voice is his own, as are his saucily surreal urban settings…the novel's energy more than compensates for its occasional lapses.
—The Washington Post

Lisa Zeidner