American Stutter: 2019-2021
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American Stutter: 2019-2021
by Steve Erickson
Zerogram Press, 2022
Steve Erickson’s latest book appears at first glance to be his most straightforward. Written in the unguarded American baroque uniquely Steve Erickson’s own, American Stutter is a diary written between 2019-2021. These, though, were no straightforward times. Written during a period when “everyone in America is a grenade with the pin pulled,” the diary becomes an urgent account and meditation on Trumpism and COVID-19, foregrounded by marital breakup, Facebook reactionaries, house fires, wildfires, and snakes lurking under car hoods.
Erickson is quick to make sure we’re not too comfortable in our expectations of what a diary should deliver. He writes: “This is not a fucking memoir. It’s not a novel, either. Everything that any reader believes to be fiction may be remembered. Everything that sounds remembered many be fiction. This is a hallucinyx.”
He defines a hallucinyx as “the literary equivalent of an hallucinogen; or: the qualities of a hallucinogen reduced to literary essence,” placing us firmly back in Erickson’s terrain, which since his 1985 debut Days Between Stations through to 2017's Shadowbahn, has been marked by warped histories, glitched worlds, rhizome universes connecting events real and imagined where even the most implausible comes to feel eerily realer-than-real. But even the most outlandish of fictional dystopias couldn’t outpace the ones bleeding into daily life in 2019-2020. Deferring to the weirder-than-fiction events taking place, he admits: “As someone who’s been trading in the cheap romance of apocalypse for years, I stutter for words no matter how hackneyed. Reality 1, My Imagination 0.”
Reading Erickson, there’s never any doubt that “politics is personal.” Astutely tracing the stress lines of the Republican Party’s changing face through Goldwater via Gingrich to Trumpism, Erickson feels the inseparable emotional and national stakes in the coming election. It’s evident on every page how deeply Erickson cares about his country and what America could have been and fleetingly was – finding its apogee in Obama’s election in 2009 and its bleakest moment in Donald Trump’s.
The heavy American promise entailed by the Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s second inaugural and Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech are carried on every page of this diary. And it has been this promise at the core of Erickson’s last three works: hope renewed in These Dreams of You (2012), hope betrayed in Shadowbahn (2017), and here hope “stuttered but not broken.” Erickson absorbs the shock of what is happening around him and isn’t glib or content enough to shrug it off. Thankfully for us, what he describes as his occasional “Nordic hysteria” finds its courage in coruscating prose. Taking aim at his enemies – of which there are many in these pages – Erickson is at his fiercest when writing about such figures as “the gilded glob” of Trump, the “oozing Kentucky kankersore otherwise known as the Majority Leader of the United States Senate Mitch McConnell,” and “the Nosferatu of American politics Rudy Giuliani.”
Giving American Stutter so much of its power is the contrast between national teetering and personal cracking-up. Rousseauian in its depth and nudity as confession, the book gives us both the big pandemic ravaging the world in real-time alongside antacids, hernias, shingles vaccinations, mediation agreements and Lexapro. We move day by day from George Floyd, the Capitol riots and fraying social contracts to personal reflections on everything from Facebook-comment hysteria, attitudes to ageing (his and his 93 year-old mom’s), his failing marriage, the forever work-in-progress of being a better father, Huckleberry Finn, transmogrifications of the Devil and - as anyone familiar with Erickson might expect - some eloquent takes on film, notably here Tarkovsky’s Stalker (whose inner-room he frequently returns to) and Malick’s A Hidden Life.
In an LA Times interview recently Erickson said, “New York publishers didn’t want the book. The word they used was ‘ferocity.’ The ferocity is going to put off readers. But that was the whole idea.” The “ferocity” of American Stutter is precisely the “disquieting provocation” Erickson questions whether the culture has the courage to “wrest back from our times.” Thankfully, Zerogram Press are equally ferocious in their mission to wrest and publish “the sort of work that is not merely sufficient but necessary”; necessary is the W-W-Word that adheres most faithfully to American Stutter.
- Chris Vaughan is a writer and artist from Whitstable, England, currently living a short jog from the "end of Europe" in Gibraltar. He can be found at https://www.chris-vaughan.co.uk/.