Days Between Stations – Steve Erickson

Vintage
1985
I first heard about Steve Erickson’s writing in a long artist-resurrection article by Brian Evanson in The Believer (one reason why I love the magazine). It was an examination of how Erickson was labeled the “next Pynchon” after the success of his first novel, and what happened to him since (quasi-obscurity). It was much later that I found his first novel in a used store for a dollar. Can’t say better than that. It wound up being my read over the two weeks spent in Taiwan this November, so the novel and the country are strangely mixed.
Perhaps Erickson would want it that way, for “Days Between Stations” is all about dislocation, not just of place, but of character and place. There are several characters in the novel, which begins in modern day (the 1980s) and jumps back to the 1910s, but I got the sense that essentially we were meeting the same three people in different guises, whether or not they turn out (later in the novel) to be related through the decades. There are love triangles between Lauren (the first person we meet) her philandering husband Jason, and her mysterious downstairs neighbor Michel. But Michel could also be a version of Adolphe, a wunderkind who grows up to be an Orson Welles of the silent era, audacious and revolutionary in film as D.W. Griffiths. He’s in love with Janine, the star of his film on the French Revolution, who also may be his half-sister, but she is “owned” by a unscrupulous rich bloke called Varnette. Janine, in turn, may be Michel’s mother. Or maybe not.
This is not a straight-forward novel, and when we meet Lauren and Jason, they live in a Los Angeles that is turning into a large sand-dune, battered by desert storms. Later, we learn that the Mediterranean has receded so far as to run Venice’s canal’s dry. There are also time loops and mysterious fogs and experimental films and unfinished masterpieces and a cold snap that almost leads to the immolation of Paris. It’s like Sci-Fi Romanticism, without any explanation how these events are happening. Erickson doesn’t care how it happens, he cares what happens to the people it effects.
In the end, some of these questions are answered, some not, and the great romance that’s promised remains tantalizingly out of reach.
As for reading, the opening takes some bearing-getting, but once I got to the silent movie sequence, I was hooked.