AMERICAN STUTTER

What follows is a brief excerpt from David L. Ulin's 4-6-22 LOS ANGELES TIMES interview with novelist Steve Erickson. The interview focuses on Erickson's latest book, AMERICAN STUTTER:

Steve Erickson’s “American Stutter: 2019-2021” is a howling yawp of a book, a diary that becomes a work of witness and of reckoning. “This is not a … memoir,” Erickson writes. “It’s not a novel, either. Everything that any reader believes to be fiction may be remembered. Everything that sounds remembered may be fiction.” Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a hallucinyx, which Erickson defines as “the literary equivalent of a hallucinogen,” before admitting — or does he? — that this is an invented word.

In many ways, the slipperiness tells us everything we need to know.

Erickson has long eclipsed boundaries; “Leap Year” (1989), his account of the 1988 presidential election, incorporates elements of the fantastic, while his recent novels “These Dreams of You” (2012) and “Shadowbahn” (2017) engage histories real and imagined and fictionalize the author’s family. The same characters — or their counterparts — appear in “American Stutter.”

In more basic terms, the book is an impassioned argument against the chaos of the Trump presidency and its hateful politics, the collapse of civility and common cause. For Erickson, such breakdowns coincide with creative challenges and the breakdown of his marriage, which he addresses through a searingly personal lens....

To read the entire interview, click HERE.