8.2 /10 1 Votes8.2
Country United States Publication date 2007 ISBN 978-1-933372-39-6 | 4.1/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 329 Originally published 2007 Page count 329 Adaptations Zeroville (2016) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (hardback & paperback) Genres Fiction, Speculative fiction Similar Steve Erickson books, Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Review zeroville by steve erickson
Zeroville is a 2007 novel by Steve Erickson on film's upheaval in the 1970s. It has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and other languages. It was named one of the best novels of the year by Newsweek, the Washington Post BookWorld and the Los Angeles Times Book Review among others, and in winter 2008 was one of the five favorite novels of 800 novelists and critics in a poll of the National Book Critics Circle. The novel was also shortlisted for the Believer Book Award.
Contents
Plot
Ike Jerome, a 24-year-old architecture student inspired by the few films he has seen, rides the bus into Hollywood. Jerome is initially portrayed as violent and short tempered, his social ineptitude is slowly revealed as borderline autistic. With a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor as they appear in The film A Place in the Sun on the back of his head which he keeps shaven. His appearance is anachronistic and jarring to most of the people he encounters in 1960's LA. He gets his first job in the industry as a set builder during which time he meets an aging film editor, nicknamed Vikar, whom he befriends and begins a dreamlike journey into the world of films that eventually ends in tragedy and almost horrific discovery.
Themes
Zeroville discusses the supernatural power of films over people and how films become like gods in our worship of them. Vikar's bizarre discovery of the frame found in every film ever made confirms this.
Zeroville is partially a critique of the ways movies and Hollywood changed in the 1970s, as the old studios are taken by young renegade filmmakers (symbolized by the veteran editor Dotty Langer). Vikar laments on the disappearance of film from Hollywood: "'I'm in the movie capital of the world,' Vikar says, 'and nobody knows anything about movies'".
Zeroville's plot is woven with two older stories or myths, that is, Abraham's sacrifice and the legend of Perceval.