Shadowbahn
Steve Erickson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Shadowbahn
Steve Erickson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
It's the novel of now — this moment that just passed and the one just around the bend — the first novel of the Trump years, of tatterdemalion America, the starless stripes, as one of Erickson's chapter headings has it. A novel for 'a defiled century and whatever defiled world inhabits it' The Towers rise again, displaced, in a country riven by conflict, hostility, disputed territory, secession. It's the return of a history so repressed that it is all on the surface — a national imaginary so Towers-haunted, so Confederate-flagged, that tragedy must manifest physically as farce in order to reveal just how little anyone understands.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Steve Erickson’s 10th (10th!) novel is: compassionate, weird, unpredictable, jaunty. It’s sad, and it’s droll and sometimes it’s gorgeous. Some readers will be confused by its 'plot' until realizing there’s little point trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Others will find their footing in Erickson’s supremely engaging interest in the landscape of American music.
This is an extremely timely novel, as much by unfortunate accident as by design. If Hilary Clinton had won in November Shadowbahn still would be a profound precautionary tale, but Donald Trump’s election lends it a portentousness Erickson himself couldn’t entirely have seen coming.
I can’t help but think of his new Shadowbahn as the best kind of experiment: provocative throughout, alive with laughter and surprising in the ways it stirs the heart.
This is a book in which the vastness of American ambition and dreaming can take your breath away and then, only a few lines later, make you tremble with the sense that we are always living a hair’s breadth away from catastrophe. Shadowbahn filled me with exultation and terror.
...[a] complex, multi-perspective novel of looping realities.
This is an inventive, challenging, rewarding, and sometimes frustrating book, even by Erickson's standards. It is both preposterous and hilarious, marked by structural diversions, metaphysical flourishes, and long ruminations on 20th Century music. Nobody does what Erickson does. He is one of a kind. Also, I think he might be a wizard. I promised myself I'd never do this, but...Shadowbahn isn't the novel we deserve, it is the novel we need. The novel we need to Save American From Itself..