These Dreams of You: American dreams deferred by the economy

Steve Erickson once again explores America's unfulfilled destiny and tangled relationship with race in this Great Recession novel set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.

The election of America's first black president, Barack Obama, is closely mirrored in Steve Erickson's These Dreams of You. Justin Sullivan / AFP

Erickson has been pondering the tormented history of the United States, and its tangled relationship with race, since his 1993 novel Arc d'X, a lavish fantasia on themes of slavery and freedom, in which slave Sally Hemings murders her lover and owner Thomas Jefferson, and sets the future of the country – and of the idea of liberty – atilt.  Jefferson is a symbol of America's forked heart, "habitually tormented about his slaves, whose ownership he could barely give himself to accept but whose freedom he could not bring himself to give". So is Sally, who dreams of freeing herself simultaneously from the bonds of slavery and love in one swift cut: "I've been owned by this one and that one my whole life. And the biggest thing I ever did was to free myself."

The divergent plots of These Dreams of You begin to intertwine, doubling and splitting and recombining like a half-remembered reverie.

Here, it is the battered copy of Ulysses that makes its way from Zan's story to Zan's life, with a stop along the way in David Bowie's recording studio.  Characters are, to pilfer a phrase from a Bowie song, always crashing in the same car – treading in the same footprints left by their predecessors, believing themselves to be inventing when they are always unconsciously recombining what has come before them.  Dislocation and separation are the common heritage of all human beings, and yet the promise of redemption – of that song we all sing together – hangs in the air, unfulfilled but pregnant with possibility. "Everyone is his own age of apocalypse," one character observes in The Sea Came in at Midnight, and the same could be said for all the figures – historical and fictional – that populate These Dreams of You.

Zan is hired to deliver a lecture on "The Novel as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century", and it is that sense of the exhaustion of the form that perversely animates this wickedly entertaining excursion into, and undermining of, the historical past. The novel is dead, allowing Erickson to remix its familiar melodies until it pleases his own ears. These Dreams of You, like Arc d'X and The Sea Came in at Midnight, bounces between past and present, between Zan struggling to keep his family together in an unfamiliar Europe, and the unfamiliar terrain of the past.

Without warning, Erickson thrusts us in other times, and other places: an impossibly weary Robert F Kennedy taking an impromptu walking tour of London, preparing himself for campaigning as “an act of penance, the lashed slog from one station of the cross to the next”; or Bowie, licking his wounds after being accused of making a Nazi salute, retreating to Berlin, “attached to the rest of the western world by a thread of track and highway, like the balloon on the end of a string, isolated, besieged ... Divided down the middle – like me”. All these characters – men and women, Americans, Europeans, and Africans, those alive and those relegated to historical memory – share a single mantra, voiced by Kennedy: “I don’t know how much time I have ... to become the person that I hope I am.”

Erickson makes so bold as to acknowledge his own takings, and claim his right to them: "In a sense writers always are plagiarising something, albeit unconsciously, things they've read or heard or seen that they re-manifest in some singular fashion that's the only true measure of a writer's originality." This is what Erickson has always been up to, from the imaginary film criticism of 1996's Amnesiascope, to the unlabeled historical markers of The Sea Came in at Midnight. These Dreams of You is remix literature, with Erickson helping himself to a lavish helping of history and recombining it in the manner of the president whose aura infuses this book.

Saul Austerlitz is the author of Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy.