Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson
My rating: 4/5 cats
in the realm of things that make no sense, allow me to submit the following: why is the sequel to one of the best books i have ever read in print, but not its predecessor?? seriously harpercollins, give up the goods! if you don’t want to print it anymore, give it to simon and schuster so i don’t all the time have to be telling people, “yeah, it’s good, but you should read The Sea Came in at Midnight first. really.” that’s just losing sales for poor s&s, but i stand by it, in the interests of Making Readers Happy.
i remember the heart-shaking anticipation with which i curled around this book—hoping to recapture some of the first-kiss excitement that The Sea Came in at Midnight rocketed through me. alas—no thigh-quivers, but still a book better than most. and all y’all recently bitching about foer’s gimmicks would be well-advised to stay away from this one. i don’t mind gimmicks as long as the author has the skills to contain them and avoid letting them run the show. but there’s nothing wrong, to my thinking, with novelty, playfulness, innovation, as long as it’s not all flash with no meat. karen likes meat. (sorry, foer) this book will have its fun; its quicksand plot, its shifting plateaus, its peekaboo characters. it’s a fractured lynchian book with character-doubling, shifts in location/time/reality, and a sentence bisecting the prose from page 83 to 315…it’s far more confusing than SCIAM, but it is more of a mood piece; primarily the tender precariousness of new parenthood and the apprehension and selflessness it requires. it’s a wonderful followup to sea, but i cannot express how essential it is to read the first one. trust me, you will send me valentines for this recommendation.
a taste?
And as they grow closer to the door, the song becomes louder. As they reach the plain unadorned door it’s so distinct now it frightens her, and she’s about to cry out to the boy and tell him to stop when he takes the door knob in his hand and opens it. Out of it roars a music that’s more than pain, more than anguish, more than desolation, more than sorrow, more than grief. Out of it roars the greatest of all losses, the loss that can’t be endured. It’s not a loss that one truly survives let alone surmounts, it’s not a loss that one out-exists let alone outlives; it’s the loss that breaks your heart and it never mends. It never mends. It calls into question everything, so that it entails in some way all the other losses: home is lost; fortune and livelihood have no more meaning; love not only has no more meaning but becomes a kind of emotional treason; faith becomes a kind of spiritual treason; dignity becomes a joke; the soul is forever in the terminal grip of a psychic cancer; health is an affront; the loss of a parent is the perverse twin of this loss, like the reflection in the mirror of a funhouse; freedom is a curse; life is torture. Memory is worst of all. From the doorway of this tiny closet or pantry one would almost gladly flee, if possible, to the Suite of Lost Memory, or failing to reach that, perhaps even the Suite of Lost Life. This is the Unendurable Loss because it involves the one thing that one loves more than one’s own life; and no meaning that one strives to give her own life; however great or good, can ever truly compensate for what’s been lost, will ever be truly convincing in any scheme of things that in the heart of hearts one believes. This loss is the essence of the universe’s impossibility, it’s the one thing for which a benevolent God never has a persuasive answer, and which a malevolent God holds over the head of humanity.
it’s a scootch purple, but i love it.
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