These Dreams of You

I picked this up from one of the “New Books” stands at the public library and borrowed it on the strength of the blurb from Pynchon on the back and in spite of the American flag on the cover. Erickson writes the whole novel in a series of paragraph-bursts, much shorter than chapters, which seemed to be a clever way of trying to make the sometimes dense and difficult more palatable and engaging. The story is told in a sort of circular and self-referential way that was enjoyable and not pretentious – history repeating itself and fiction unknowingly reflecting real life, past and future, things reacting to each other and cancelling each other out versus creating something new. A number of (mostly) unnamed public figures were described in ways that made naming them apparently unnecessary, perhaps only for older American readers, but being a twenty-something Canadian I struggled a bit (I got Obama and Bowie easily enough of course but the others were more difficult), but not enough to distract me from enjoying the book. Parts of the story didn't make sense and probably weren't intended to make sense but nevertheless did distract me if only slightly from enjoying the book. I have to confess that it is strange for me to enjoy a book with politics and race as two of its major themes, but there you have it – I am still capable of surprising myself.