Zeroville is an almost dreamlike meander through Hollywood... the neighbourhood, the business, the history, and the fantasy. Vikar, a sometimes violent, always film-obsessed, perhaps autistic young man with tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift emblazoned on his shaved head is our guide.

We follow his journey beginning on the day that he arrives in LA in 1969 amid the background of hippies and surfers and the Manson murders through his becoming part of the studio system over the next decade and a half and watching him and his contemporaries navigate the turbulent years of Hollywood studios when everything was changing quickly.

This book is a veritable feast for any serious cinephile. It is overflowing with film references, Hollywood history, and thinly veiled characters. I absolutely love the movies but I don't consider myself anywhere near an expert and I enjoyed all the references and had fun figuring out who was who and what was what. I imagine that my many film savant friends would be in heaven with that part of it.

While the novel follows a standard timeline through the years, Erickson manages to make the sum of the parts feel diaphanous and perpetual much like the philosophy of Vikar in that "all the scenes of a movie are really happening at the same time. No scene really leads to the next, all scenes lead to each other. . . . 'Continuity' is one of the myths of film."

It wasn't my favourite Erickson novel but it still had that 'bit darker, bit deeper' quality which I can count on him for. ( )

The best book I've read in at least a year - Erickson is becoming a favorite author, and this masterpiece is a treasure hunt of movies to watch and characters to discover with the smoky logic of a secret, ultimate dream. ( )

This book has literally everything I like and I still didn't like it. Very Forrest Gump-y. ( )

The trek of a reading adult is often a lonely and opaque one, only in the sense, that the course is personal and peers can only shrug and smile, but the path continues. I can say that if I could ever pen a piece of literary achievement, it would be Zeroville. ( )

Even though I didn't give Zeroville 5 stars because of its imperfections, it remains one of the most intriguing novels I read in 2008 (note: there are spoilers in the following review). I read the novel straight through over two days, a compulsion that I both enjoyed and resented. This is how I used to read when I was young and how I resist reading now that I’m older. I no longer want to be grabbed by the collar so to speak. In this case, however, I didn’t feel particularly manipulated by the novel, just disoriented and a bit weirded out from the immersion in Vikar Jerome’s cinematic (“cinéautistic”) obsessions. The novel is a continual loop of cinematic cuts, each numbered scene a “take” or a “frame.” I wonder why the novel proceeds to number 227 and then reverses itself. Perhaps I’m missing a numeric reference or symbol. Two films appear over and over again: George Steven’s A Place in the Sun starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift and Carl Dreyer’s silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. I haven’t seen either. I do remember my own enthrallment with Taylor after viewing National Velvet when I was young and then, a bit later, Giant. Vikar believes he has discovered a truth about movies (and life) in noting that there is a left profile and a right profile (shadow side, light side; good, evil, etc.) and that movies are timeless, a loop, both recapitulating their futures and predicting their pasts. Cut and paste. Splice. That Vikar moves from set design to editing is emblematic. For only a film editor could insert (and, by the same token, excise)the subliminal frame(the Biblical rock slab where Abraham would have willingly sacrificed his son to prove his faith until his hand is stayed by God)that Vikar discovers in all 500 plus films in his archive. Vikar as editor reassembles these films into a sequence of stills, of closer and closer-up shots, at the end of the novel. The end of the novel is the weakest part of the work, however. I don’t quite understand the necessity of Vikar’s death, although I imagine it has something to do with sacrificing the father (he is acting father to Zazi) instead of sacrificing the child for once (it is implied that the body on the rock slab with the Hebrew writing, once it becomes identifiable by Vikar’s alignment of close-up frames, is that of Zazi, the daughter, interestingly enough, rather than the son); in other words, reversing the tide of monotheistic, patriarchal history and myth. He remembers his father sitting on the edge of his bed holding a knife just as Abraham raised his knife (or sword or dagger) to kill his son Isaac (viz Ike Jerome). Vikar excises the hidden frames in the films in order to excise the sacrifice of the child from the dream—releasing the child from his/her cinematic nightmares.
At the point in the novel where Zazi’s mother, Soledad Paladin, dies in a quasi-suicidal accident, after which Zazi moves in with Vikar, who has always been concerned about Zazi’s welfare and who has promised her mother to take care of her if anything happens, I am prepared to be disappointed if the novel sexualizes the relationship between Zazi and Vikar. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen. Indeed Vikar remains an innocent and calls himself a virgin at age 37 since the only sexual act he has engaged in is fellatio (oral sex received but not returned as far as I can tell. He has never gone “all the way” although it is not entirely clear why he “can’t” or why his not being able to is necessary to the novel. Perhaps it is that he can’t or refuses to procreate, since he sees the Father as the child murderer and refuses to be one. He thus must maintain his status as an innocent. On the other hand, he can be a godfather to Zazi who, despite her old-beyond-her-years (at 12 or 14 or 17) perspective and lifestyle is also a virgin. He replaces the father-son dyad with a father-daughter dyad. This is a strategy without exit, however, since if to stop the child-sacrifice central to patriarchy it is necessary to remain virginal, then that’s it for the human race. Vikar (like his two-profiles thesis) is both innocent and violent. He is the ultimate body-slamming punk music wild man and also the quintessential romantic, one who might exist in a movie but not ever in real life.
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