This is a novel we need, even if it's somewhat predictably moved by a ghostly patriotism that doesn't dampen rage so much as bewilder it. This means he can get too mystical, trying to say more than his canvas will allow. He's a termite to Pynchon's white elephant, nibbling away at the map's edges instead of expanding them to cover the territory. He gets compared ad nauseam to Thomas Pynchon, understandably.For all his magical-mystery-tourism, though, Erickson's not a wacky writer he descends to Pynchon-level dad-jokiness only in Jesse's record review, where it works. It's the return of a history so repressed that it is all on the surface - a national imaginary so Towers-haunted, so Confederate-flagged, that tragedy must manifest physically as farce in order to reveal just how little anyone understands. A novel for 'a defiled century and whatever defiled world inhabits it' The Towers rise again, displaced, in a country riven by conflict, hostility, disputed territory, secession. It's the novel of now - this moment that just passed and the one just around the bend - the first novel of the Trump years, of tatterdemalion America, the starless stripes, as one of Erickson's chapter headings has it.
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