This Is Not Your Mother’s Apocalypse

by
Jason Hafer
Contact: haferj@wolfgangbooks.com

Book Reviewed:
Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson. Simon & Schuster, 2005. $24.00 hardcover.

   In 1989 a man stood alone in front of a line of tanks after thousands of innocents died.

   In 2001 a group of men unleashed a horrific attack on a country that led to thousands of innocents lost.

   And in Steve Erickson’s new novel Our Ecstatic Days, sometime after 2001, a lake formed in Los Angeles and eventually covered the majority of the city.

   A character in the novel who is connected to Tiananmen Square says, “We’re surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” A stranger connected to New York says, “The Age of Chaos is here.” The two events are related. The Lake is related to both of them. Our world is changing. Steve Erickson wants to know if we notice.

   Steve Erickson’s Our Ecstatic Days is as rewarding and insightful as it is sometimes difficult and troubled. Set across almost a century of fresh millennia, the novel shifts time, memory and point of view often and with very little force from the author. It is a novel of lost and second chances, a study of fear and a celebration of human love. Erickson’s prose is stylistically inventive, but never contrived and without sacrifice for his characters. The book is driven by abandonment, isolation, domination, submission and menstruation.

   You’ll have to look hard to find something like Steve Erickson at your local bookstore, because there aren’t many writers like him. His writing is apocalyptic, but not overtly religious or tucked away in Science Fiction. He writes frequently about his native Los Angeles (he teaches writing at Cal Arts), but you don’t have to live there to understand it. Erickson’s influences include Marquez, Dick, Borges, Pynchon and Faulkner. Perhaps Faulkner more than anyone else, but in a much different way than Faulkner materializes in the novels of most American writers who are enamored by him. In Our Ecstatic Days, as in most of Erickson’s novels, time frequently shifts or jumps, and Erickson has attributed this aspect of his writing to Faulkner. This is not to say that Our Ecstatic Days reads like an imitation of Faulkner, because it does not. As with his other influences, you can see the threads in Erickson’s fiction, but the final product is a unique experience. Having spent his life in Los Angeles, this makes sense, as the city itself formed in a similar way.

   There are many aspects of Erickson’s writing that defy criticism, in a sense, because his work is so unique in contemporary fiction. His books are apocalyptic, but not aggressively so. His characters change names without explanation. He experiments with form, but treats his characters with tenderness. The writing, at times, is heartbreaking and eloquent. Other time it is so mysterious that the reader will find himself flipping back through pages to see if he missed something. He probably didn’t, as Erickson gives his readers a lot of space for their own interpretation and to draw their own conclusions. Erickson’s style isn’t didactic, but he illuminates this world while writing about a world that bears little resemblance to it.

   It is difficult to discuss plot in Steve Erickson’s books, and in Our Ecstatic Days in particular. The plot in the new novel is fractured, and stories commonly drift away, diverge or connect in unexpected ways. These are always handled with grace. At times, Erickson seems to hold his plot at bay. There’s an undercurrent of military action in Our Ecstatic Days. There is a resistance movement that can’t remember if it is fighting during Tribulation II, III or IV. Moreover, this movement holds Wang, one of the novel’s main characters, as its reluctant yet exalted leader. As the leader of this Tribulation group, Wang visits Kristin, the main protagonist of the novel, so she can help him interpret strange signals intercepted in the night. These signals have their roots with another character in the novel. So three characters are directly tied to the resistance, if not actively a part of it.

   Yet, the resistance is never fully described. With many writers and in many books this would be a problem. Not so with Erickson and Our Ecstatic Days. It is a masterful technique in its way, because the resistance itself doesn’t need explained. A battle scene or more tactical meetings (there is one, of sorts) would not add depth to the novel. In fact, a more detailed description of the resistance would take away from the novel, because the reader would have no choice but to deepen his involvement into that aspect of the story. The resistance itself is only a backdrop. Erickson only needs his reader to know that there is a resistance, and that his characters have to live through it. 

   Even so, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Erickson’s plot is only window dressing. It is simply too layered to condense into a brief synopsis. Our Ecstatic Days is similar to a short story, in a sense, because recounting the events of the novel would practically require retelling the whole novel without Erickson’s careful prose. The ways that his characters live within the plot is one of the most interesting aspects of Our Ecstatic Days, and with Erickson the characters are always as important as the world they live in, even though his setting or speculative future provide the basis for most critical pieces. I will get to the characters in Our Ecstatic Days shortly, after a brief digression.

   It is not uncommon to read a review of a book and see the reviewer use the phrase “may or may not.” So and So may or may not be a villain. One character may or may not come back in the end. The writer may or may not pass judgment over his or her characters. When “may or may not” is used, it is implied that the reviewer is holding back from revealing the story. There may be a particular twist that allows the reader to see that So and So is, in fact, a villain, and to reveal that he is a villain in the review would require revealing the twist as well. Soon enough, the intrigue of the novel would be lost based on ten minutes spent with a review while the book remains on the bookstore shelves. “May or may not” in these instances translates as “I’m not going to tell you, but you will know.”

   In pop fiction, this approach may have a place, but it does not speak well for the writing contained between the boards. In fiction that is published with the expectation that the book may still be read five years down the road, this device is only a reflection of the reviewer’s kindness and their attempt to let the reader experience the novel in a natural way. “May or may not” speaks largely to the plot of a novel, and plot is not enough to make a novel memorable. If I presented a copy of Jane Eyre to a friend and told him that it was a great novel, ahead of its time in many ways, and not nearly as dry as he might think, certainly worth his time and energy for such an important novel from the Nineteenth Century, but also at a certain point in the novel it is revealed that one of the main characters keeps a madwoman in his attic, then the book would still be worth reading. The same idea applies to The Sound and the Fury, perhaps more so. If I gave a copy of Faulkner’s novel to the same friend and said, “Quentin Compson may or may not be a deeply troubled young man,” or if I said, “Quentin Compson eventually kills himself,” it wouldn’t matter. The novel is still worth his time. Quentin’s suicide is a difficult and important part of The Sound and the Fury, but knowing that it takes place detracts very little away from the experience of reading it. It does not matter whether or not a reviewer chooses to expose elements of a novel’s plot or characters, a well-written novel will not suffer.

   This digression is intended to prefigure a look at the characters in Our Ecstatic Days. Erickson’s characters change frequently as time passes or changes, often taking on different names. With this in mind, I will address characters by the name they have when they are first encountered in the novel. I should say, though, that the name changes are important and representative of Erickson’s message.

   I think the best way to discuss Erickson and his characters is to state the very clear fact that in Our Ecstatic Days, Bronte, star of the second half of the novel, may or may not be the daughter of Kristin, the novel’s central protagonist. With this claim, I am withholding nothing. There is no twist that will define the relationship between the two women. It is simply unclear, and those who have read Erickson understand the way that clarity often floats throughout his novels and often never lands. It is one of his strongest qualities. With other writers, the ambiguous nature of some character relationships (among other things) may read as if they were unfinished or that the author doesn’t have the capability to tie his literary shoelaces. Not the case with Erickson.   

   This device can be difficult to work through, but once it becomes clear that the relationship between Bronte and Kristin will not be resolved, it allows Erickson to define their relationship in a different way. In the book, we learn about Bronte, or the possibility of Bronte, long before we meet her character. She is part of Kristin’s memory, but the two had never seen one another. At the onset of the novel, Kristin is a young woman caring for her son Kirk. Kirk is a bit older than a baby, able to speak, but not to comprehend the scope of the world. I’ll get to Kirk in greater depth shortly. While pregnant, Kristin had expected to give birth to twins. That’s what the doctors told her, so Kristin prepared herself for two children. When only Kirk was born, Kristin created the idea of Bronte in her mind. She longed for and wondered about Bronte before she slept and in her dreams, while she cared for her son in the best was she could. So the idea of Bronte enters the novel early on, while Bronte herself doesn’t enter the novel until about half way through when she literally swims to Kristin (who at time has a different name). Kristin is without Kirk at the time, and she makes her way in the lake-covered Los Angeles as a Dominatrix Oracle, the best of each in the city. Bronte becomes somewhat of an apprentice, and eventually takes over the Dominatrix business while the Oracle business is no longer relevant.

   The relationship between Kristin and Bronte develops as a mother-daughter relationship would in a traditional novel. Kristin watches over Bronte, trains her and advises her when Bronte needs it. The Dominatrix business, run out of the abandoned Chateau Marmont Hotel, operates in a way possibly similar to the way a mother-daughter beauty shop would run. Kristin and Bronte are the only two employees. If there were taxes to be paid, Kristin would take care of that, while Bronte tended to the customers. But Erickson avoids defining their relationship in any specific way. There is a point where the two women acknowledge the possibility of their relationship. Kristin is sick, perhaps dying as her ability to reproduce (her monthly cycle is very important throughout the novel) fades. Kristin has also developed an addiction or at least a reliance on the Erickson-created drug Lapsinthe, meant to induce amnesia on the user. Bronte comes to ask advice, as she has been put into a unique circumstance, about which I will only say that it is a situation that could only come about in an apocalyptic world full of abandonment, isolation and longing. They exchange words, with Kristin speaking in a whisper.

   “What kind of life?” she whispers.
   “Shhh.”
   “For a mother to give a daughter,” she says.
   “Go to sleep.”
   “What if I was your mother?”
   “You are.”

   Erickson works in shades. Whether or not Kristin is Bronte’s mother is of little importance, but the idea of this type of relationship is important. The Age of Chaos causes these relationships to work in different ways. Kristin assumes the role of mother and Bronte assumes the role of daughter, because both women need those relationships complete. In the Erickson’s Age of Chaos, the distinctions of relationships may change, but the necessity of them does not. Kristin even names Bronte when the young girl is swimming out of the lake. Kristin recounts their first encounter, the first words passed between them after she rescued Bronte from the lake.

   “Bronte?” I said to the dark, in the doorway. When she didn’t answer, I said it again. “Bronte?”
   “Yes,” a small voice answers.

   Again, Erickson works in shades. The lake represents birth, and Bronte emerges from the lake naked and tired. Kristin, assuming the role of the naked and tired girl’s mother, names her new child. Bronte’s past is filled in as the book moves along, but Erickson’s reader cannot definitively say that Bronte is or isn’t the daughter of Kristin. It’s a unique device Erickson is working with, and it’s amazing that it doesn’t require resolution. What is important is the way the characters perceive one another, and that they need to perceive each other the way that they do to make their way through a dark time.

   While the nature of Kristin and Bronte’s relationship is ambiguous, the relationship between Kristin and Kirk is not. Kirk is Kristin’s son. Kirk, short for Kierkregaard, is the driving force of Our Ecstatic Days, even though he remains the novel’s most undefined character. Kristin’s love for her son guides her through the narrative and is the catalyst for most everything she does. We learn, from the beginning, that Kristin is overwhelmed by the love she feels for her son. The first section of the novel, set in 2004, begins in Kristin’s voice. It begins, “Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him.” Then, “He calls me from his bed in the middle of the night and, you know, I can’t resist.” A few sentences later, “In my heart he opens the flood to this vast terrain of fear.”

   Once Kirk is born, Kristin is not only overwhelmed by the love she feels for Kirk, but she is surprised by it. The pregnancy was not something she particularly enjoyed, and, in dark passages, we see that she thought of it with a certain degree of scorn. But once Kirk is born, Kristin’s world changes in more ways than she might expect. “How have mothers down through the ages survived their love for their kids?” Kristin wonders. This question not only defines the novel, but it also defines Kirk. Kristin develops an idea that the lake in Los Angeles has been caused by her, and that it is coming for her son. Kirk is her “Bright Light,” and she won’t allow anything to take him from her. At the breaking point in the novel – that is, the point where it all changes – Kristin dives into the lake to swim to the source (she knows where this is from a prior experience) with the idea to stop the lake. By the time she gets back to the boat, Kirk has been carried away by owls.

   Kristin can’t be blamed for Kirk’s abandonment, but she is the cause of it. This is different from the parents who leave their children in shopping malls or on the steps of orphanages, though the affect on the child is similar. Kirk remains a character in the novel despite the fact that he has been taken away from his mother. Not in a pop-thriller way though, where we might read intersecting chapters of the terrified child in the hands of kidnappers. This is an easy trick, and one of the cheapest ways to generate a response from a reader. Erickson walks this line carefully. We know that Kirk has been abandoned, and we see the nature and consequences of his abandonment. The dark, damp basement that would house a kidnapped child in a thriller is here replaced with the world at large. In this sense, Kristin caused the thing she was trying to avoid – the Age of Chaos took her son, though not the lake (a product of the Age) specifically. 

   But Kirk does not disappear with his abandonment. We see him in various stages under various names. He is a boatman on the lake and later a prisoner. He is a guide and a bodyguard. He learns of human death, and realizes it differs from the death of an owl. He is distinctly aware that something is missing, and wants to figure it out. He spawns cults and leads people to oracles. Kirk does these things, sometimes with no acknowledgment of his role in them. After the first part of the book when Kirk is a child in his mother’s care, Kirk enters the book the same way he navigates the lake – softly and quietly underneath the radar. Erickson’s reader often doesn’t realize the role Kirk plays in things until well after those things are first encountered. Kirk rests underneath the novel like the pulse of blood under the wrist. Always there, but rarely experienced in his physical form.

   Erickson handles Kirk’s youth with enough effectiveness to allow Kirk’s later life to remain developed. Or at least as developed as Erickson wants him to be. The details of Kirk’s childhood and of the young boy’s relationship with Kristin are enough to frame the character through the novel, and his actions through time resonate his great loss. Kirk is the thread that connects all the events together, but Erickson accomplishes this with Kirk’s existence rather than his actions. And everything Kirk does is a result of Kristin, beginning with his early childhood and continuing on in various ways and through various ages. The nature of their relationship is much clearer than Kristin’s relationship with Bronte. In the end, in the Age of Chaos, you play the cards you are dealt. Abandonment. Discovery. Rebirth. These things come to Erickson’s characters, and they must work within their situations to discover the one thing that may or may not save them all.

   There are other characters, of course. Some are only archetypes – the loyal general, the Euro-trash john and his meaty bodyguards. Erickson is wise to place these characters around his novel, as they are immediately recognizable and help ground the reader. But there are other characters that are fully realized even if they only walk through the novel for a few pages. Following the chaotic family of Kristin, Kirk and Bronte, there is Wang. Like Bronte, we understand the idea of Wang prior to his physical entrance in Our Ecstatic Days. Also like Bronte, the idea of Wang is centered around Kristin’s experience, although she does not know who he is in the first part of the book. It is appropriate to say that they have a great effect on one another and that their paths cross in different ways throughout the book. It should also be known that Wang is the man who blocked the tank in Tiananmen Square. Erickson writes that he ended “an Age of Reasoning.” Wang, though, along with the implications and mystery of his character, are best left to be experienced by the reader.

   In Erickson’s novel, the end of an “Age of Reason” brings forth a new age. Time passes, but a man “crashes an airliner into a building,” and “begins an Age of Chaos, in which the sky melts to earth and becomes a lake.” The Age of Chaos appears to be now. One of the tenants of speculative fiction or social fantasy is that the future is often used to frame the present, or at least to warn the reader of the potential scope of the contemporary world. Erickson distorts and expands on this convention, and instead allows the past to serve as his template.

   The Age of Chaos leads to Erickson’s apocalyptic world. One reason that Erickson’s particular apocalyptic vision may not spawn a cult of its own is that there are no answers in Erickson’s vision. The age of chaos is coming – the age of chaos is here – and there is no getting out of it. There are no escapes. The characters in Our Ecstatic Days can retreat, surrender or fight, but they’re in the world, the apocalypse spawned by this age of chaos.

   But this isn’t a call to avoidance. Erickson takes his readers into the apocalypse without outlining the steps they can or should take to avoid it. The idea of the Christian Rapture never manifests itself in Our Ecstatic Days, but Erickson names the resistance  “Tribulation,” even if the characters can’t figure out what stage they are in. At the end of the novel, the reader can’t feel warm knowing that he won’t have to deal with the apocalypse, that this is something only the damned will experience, nor will he understand the ways he can change his life now to save himself later. The explanation for the roots of the Chaos is also troubling, as it isn’t attributed to a higher power. If anything, the roots of the Chaos lie with the world itself – either with specific characters or pieces of history. In fact, God only figures into Our Ecstatic Days a handful of times and neither time is He in a position to directly unleash hell. The themes of submission and domination run deeply in these cases, as Kristin’s encounters with and prayers to God provide her with little resolution or satisfaction. 

   Erickson uses his apocalyptic world as a setting the same way Steinbeck used the Salinas Valley or Twain used the Mississippi River. The apocalypse is simply the place where Erickson’s story takes place, and while, like Steinbeck and Twain, he writes about his setting with an insightful credibility, the setting is the place Erickson allows his characters to experience their lives and the lives of others. Rosasharn feeds a baby, Huck realizes Jim has a family and Kristin dives back into the lake to swim to its source. It is against this backdrop that he reveals to us a basic humanity and all that comes with it.

   There are two notable stylistic achievements of Our Ecstatic Days that bear mention. The first is a single line of text that begins on page 83 and runs through the rest of the novel. The text following the line is spaced around it, that is, the line literally cuts through the following 230 pages of the novel until the two are connected. The line is effective in that it ties alternate stories together, while it also provides a buttress for the scope of the Age of Chaos. The other important stylistic innovation in Our Ecstatic Days comes about halfway through the book with the Hotel of the Thirteen Losses. The Hotel is covered by the lake, and Kirk, along with a passenger in his gondola, passes through it. The text is laid out to mimic the floor plan of the Hotel, and the reader can literally feel the water beneath the boat. The Hotel of the Thirteen Losses is one of the most powerful and insightful passages of Our Ecstatic Days, and Erickson’s stylistic innovation allows it to shine.

   Erickson has said that he thinks his readers often think too much about his novels. When confronted with a book like Our Ecstatic Days, it is impossible to avoid. For all that Erickson gives his reader, he withholds just as much. Somehow, though, that works, and Erickson has crafted a fine novel that this reviewer hopes expands the author’s readership. When reading Erickson, it is probably best for the reader to fall into the novel and consider the author a guide to a world that may or may not be his own.

   In the end though, Our Ecstatic Days is a novel of love and fear. Love is all Kristin has in the Age of Chaos, along with the fear that it brings. She searches for her lost son across the book, after the fear becomes too much. She may or may not find her “Bright Light.” Please read for yourself.