American Stutter: 2019-2021

by Steve Erickson

As Jonathan Lethem put, Steve Erickson's journal of the last 18 months of the Trump Presidency "sears the page." Erickson, one of our finest novelists, has long been an astute political observer, and American Stutter , part political declaration, part humorous account of more personal matters, offers a particularly moving reminder of the democratic ideals that we are currently struggling to preserve. Written with wit, eloquence, and a controlled fury as events unfold, Erickson has left us with an essential record of our recent history, a book to be read with our collective breath held.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

170 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2022

About the author

Steve Erickson is a distinguished American novelist known for a visionary, dream-fueled style that blends European modernism with American pulp and postmodernism. Raised in Los Angeles, he studied film and political philosophy at UCLA, influences that permeate celebrated works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, and Zeroville. Critics, including Greil Marcus, have labeled him "the only authentic American surrealist," placing him in the lineage of Pynchon and DeLillo. His most acclaimed novel, Shadowbahn, was hailed as a masterpiece even prior to its release and was later adapted for BBC Radio. A "writer’s writer," Erickson has published ten novels translated into over a dozen languages, consistently appearing on best-of-the-year lists for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is the recipient of the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award. Erickson served for fourteen years as the founding editor of the journal Black Clock and is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read that is nicely impolitic and furious, melancholy and amusingly naive, as well as being, at times, knowingly shallow. It's a journal after all, so don't expect complete arcs (though we all live under the one arc of history of 2019-2021), but plenty of broken ones. What happens to Viv, his wife, then soon-to-be ex-wife? Or the children, Parker and Zema (who has a nice touch for good lines, such as, at age seven, saying to "her playmates, 'Don't even get me started on Paul Ryan!'")?

"Right now," Erickson writes on August 21, 2020, "everyone in America is a grenade with the pin pulled." Not solely because of COVID-19, of course, but because of the former president of the u.s., "a sociopath with authoritarian tendencies" -- "tendencies" was written in the more innocent days of February 2020 --and the divisions that he embodies (and to some extent both causes and thrives on), as well as, to a lesser extent, "the rot that calls itself Mitch McConnell." He's no easier on the Democrats -- Biden is portrayed as being like Fred MacMurray, which is delightfully cruel (mostly to Fred MacMurry) -- though Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris receive praise.

The sardonic nature of the prose touches all topics (writers are for the most part left out, a welcome change from many memoirs). "Resenting all the attention that Viv and Zema's African odyssey has gotten lately from friends & family, today Parker & I decide to do something dramatic & flee a fire. This is the first time living in the canyon 20 yrs that we're forced to evacuate." On his mother, in her early nineties, who he's come to live with for a while: "So I hope no one thinks I'm spying on a defenceless old woman when in fact that's exactly what I'm doing, and I hope no one thinks I'm turning her into writing fodder when that's also what I'm doing."

Erickson dislikes himself while admitting he's "the most fascinating person" he knows. August 16, 2020: "I've gotten in touch with my inner Robespierre looking very smart in my powdered wig & bloodstained hands" as he counts the names of those he would drop into the sea from an airplane that includes DJTJ and "the Alabama legislature." Apart from views of his mental landscape, there are exterior episodes involving a snake, a car crashing into his home, and, par for the course, social media scandals that cost him friends and have him confronted with cancel culture.

Everything is entertainingly told, deeply told in some cases, and compelling. It's indicative of a life lived in chaos that Erickson can say, only once, "Today is the single strangest entry in this journal b/c not a single strange thing happened."

It's revealing that the contents of this book first saw light online. "I began this journal two years ago at the intersection of manifesto & confession, notwithstanding fearful New York publishers advising 'its ferocity stands in the way of attracting readers'." We shouldn't be surprised by this gutlessness or the perceived sub-branch of readers who might be termed hothouse flowers imagined by... by whom? The first suspect is marketing people. Pick up this book to agree, disagree, or to delight in the mordant, exaggerated images and for the sheer fun of watching someone let it all go.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've said before that Steve Erickson knows a secret truth about America, about the 20th century, about human nature.

What that secret is becomes glaringly, desperately apparent in these sociopolitical aphorisms masquerading as journal entries. It's not a secret most of us want to know, but it's a secret we need to face. It's not that Erickson predicted where America would be today, in February 2025, exactly -- but he did, and the truth he's identified is simply that we are our own mirrors.

This isn't hopeful in the sense that it will leave you inspired and believing democracy has a snowball's chance of making it through the next decade -- but I, at least, have never felt as seen as when I read Erickson, and this was no exception. Read it, to have some threads of Trump's first term untangled, and to understand the vitriol we need to feel right now.

Buck up, buttercups. It's gonna be a hell of a 21st century.

[Steve]

Recommended for Erickson completists only.

https://www.journaloftheplagueyears.i...

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically, this book is Steve Erickson journaling July 2019 thru Jan 2021. I honestly thought this would be a little more interesting than it was, however, he does try a few little tricks to get one over on the reader, but overall, as far as Erickson's writing goes, this is pretty bland. Perhaps what's most interesting, actually, is the stuff leading up to and the start of the pandemic. In fact, I wonder if there won't be some kind of genre borne out like this of a time capsule kind of journal that captures the world as it turned so dramatically in March 2020 (not that it hadn't be dramatically turning in the preceding few years with all of Trumps disruption, but you know what mean--the pandemic fundamentally changed every aspect of how most people existed). Authentic views of the world immediately before the pandemic. They often read kind of like horror novels where there's vague mentions of a mysterious virus on the news, until one day, it's the subsumed all life.

Anyway, as far as Erickson's political musings and perspective, it was pretty much like just reading an average guy's thoughts on the news, which wasn't super interesting, or super interrogative. There's some cathartic rage spewed out towards the scum fucking fascists, but not really anything unique or particularly insightful about Erickson's thoughts here, sadly. I can see how writing it was probably a comforting and necessary thing as chaos ate the world around him (including personally), so there is something interesting in this as artifact of the novelist at home.

All that said, I would mark this one for completionists only.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a passage near the end that sounds like the Erickson who floored me with his first novel and every published work up til Zeroville. The past fifteen years have been hard on this man and his family.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

How refreshing and good for the spirit it is, sometimes, to hear from someone you don't know but who sees things--especially in this fervid time-- a lot like you do.

[Ashley Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

An American Poet in Hell
This is a book that channels Goya’s Black Paintings through a horrendously contemporaneous American prism in which Saturn Devouring His Son is depicted as Trump Devouring His Country. Meanwhile the Everyman, in this case Erickson himself, traverses his own Seven Circles of Hell attempting, and seemingly achieving, a self-flagellating honesty in the process. Writing this from the comparative political safety of Australia, but having spent considerable time in the USA, I could only grit my teeth relating to all too much of Erickson’s personal, and yet frighteningly universal, ‘memoir’ of the years 2019-2021. At times American Stutter seems utterly surreal, written as it is in what one commentator described as Erickson’s ‘American Baroque’ style. And having read all of Erickson’s books I can attest, even at his angriest, his most appalled state of mind, he remains an American poet of the utmost grace and honesty.

[Sara Gerot · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We're left to resolve the fuliginous rank venom that flows thru some deep blistered vein of our body politic . . . then we're left to resolve whether we see ourselves in the context of our country or see the country only in the context of our worst selves where no America deserves to exist," (pg. 158).
Erickson writes the book composed in the format of journal entries with such honesty that I could cry from relief. So much of what has churned inside me for the last few years that I can't even say. Because I live in the middle of the blistered vein now. And to be honest, in many cases, about how I feel about the things he shares in the book, would ruin my life. This book made me sit down, and read in reverence, and laugh, and tear up, and remember a piece of myself that has gotten very small and quiet. Excellent book. What a writer to be able to employee the casual format of the journal and within 163 pages still bring you to your figurative knees.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very niche market book. Hopefully you've read Erickson's fiction and maybe his other nonfiction as well.

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love his novels - didn't think I'd choose to relive 2019-2022 in journal form, from a guy with personal issues on top of pandemic, climate and fascism, but it was all there and harrowing. Whew.

[mai-linh nguyen · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was nice and very heavy, especially with the state of america right now. the journal style was also very intriguing. not for me though

[Enry Ravaglini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this the first great American trump era novel? Quite possibly.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe not quite "one for Erickson completists", but definitely not one for starting any Erickson journey (suggestion: maybe just read them in original release order).

Erickson continues to blur personal fact and fiction to the extent that I just don't know what's true or not (biographies and interviews offer few clues). But what is real is his incandescent rage at what America has become. His burning anger proves that he is the real patriot.

[Beth von Behren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my gateway Erickson. It's an easy, short read, full of personal stories in parallel with and contrast to the turbulence of the two-year period this semi-memoir covers (2019-2021). He is intimately open about his personal issues (while admitting frequently that he may not be describing them completely honestly) while also providing a kind of daily (diary) witness to events, starting midway through Trump's presidency and finishing during the pandemic. There's a lot to cover in that short period and he does it eloquently and righteously, offering up both rage and hope. I love this book and have read it twice (and since then have read three of his novels as well). I had not heard of Erickson until another writer I follow on Facebook mentioned "Stutter." He is referred to fairly often as a writer's writer, and that may be true, but it's a shame.