Amnesiascope: A Novel

A washed-up novelist navigates the dreamscape of a cataclysm-ravaged Los Angeles In the apocalyptic Los Angeles of Amnesiascope, time zones multiply freely, spectral figures roam the streets, and rings of fire separate the city from the rest of the country. The narrator, a former novelist, lives in a hotel and writes film criticism for a newspaper whose offices are located in a bombed-out theater. Viv, his girlfriend, is a sexually voracious artist, and together the two are collaborating on an avant-garde pornographic film. But in this world, what’s real and what’s merely the conjuring of the protagonist’s imagination—obsessed with dreams, movies, sex, and remembrance—is far from clear. At once outrageous and hypnotically lyrical, Amnesiascope enflames the reader’s memory.From Publishers WeeklyA postmodern flaneur in a spectral, futuristic L.A., the narrator of Erickson's foggy, metafictional fifth novel is a former novelist known only as "S." Self-absorbed, verging on paranoid schizophrenia, S delivers a sustained, often hypertheoretical monologue on the nature of cities and memory, on the compulsion to write and have sex and on particular movies and people who may or not be figments of his imagination. S's L.A. is a surreal city of ruins, divided into dozens of time zones and lit in concentric rings by official "backfires" meant to separate it from the "new America" to the east. S lives in a dilapidated art-deco hotel and works for a newspaper that operates in the bombed-out Egyptian Theater, but spends much of his time with his girlfriend, Viv ("my little carnal ferret"), trolling the bohemian demimonde-a fanciful realm of voluptuous prostitutes, tortured artists, drug addicts, strip joints and bookstores. What S ultimately seeks is love and redemption; yet he's trapped in a kind of psychological Mobius strip, as the city itself, the fires that consume it and the people who walk its streets appear to be nothing more than projections of his own musings on entropy and lost identity. Haunted by imagery from Erickson's previous novels (Arc D'X, etc.), this book's ravaged apocalyptic lyricism is finely tuned. Yet the futuristic scenario remains sketchy, and the plot, more a solipsistic slice of life than a full-blooded story, doesn't sustain enough urgency or novelty to make up for its lack of closure. Rights (except electronic): Melanie Jackson. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalSet in apocalyptic post-earthquake Los Angeles, this new novel from the author of Arc D'X (LJ 3/15/93) is a study in contrasts: science fiction without the science but with the philosophical and time-defying bent; cinematic but highly experimental; and simultaneously lyrical and graphic-"I love the ashes. I love the endless smoky twilight" is in the same paragraph with "Viv, my little carnal ferret, devours me on her knees." Cynical, sentimental, hypereroticized, and romantic and driven by style, incident, and humor rather than plot, Amnesiascope is recommended where quality fiction-from-the-edge is popular.Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.