The Ghosts of the 1988 Presidential Campaign : LEAP YEAR <i> by Steve Erickson (Poseidon Press: $18.95; 185 pp.; 0671-67134-0)</i>

Steve Erickson, a surrealistic novelist based in Los Angeles, traveled 7,000 miles by train and auto in 23 states tracking the 1988 presidential election.

He was in Atlanta for the Democratic convention, but mainly bagged the event by television in his hotel room. He was in New Orleans for the Republican Convention, but split before it began in order to take in the music and bars of Austin, Tex., as well as a UFO belt in the Panhandle. He was periodically hounded by Sen. Albert Gore and his wife Tipper--they kept showing up either wasted or demented as Erickson hallucinated his way across the landscape of the United States. This was not a surprising event in Erickson’s world. After all, a frequent companion in his travels was Sally Hemmings, the late Thomas Jefferson’s black slave and, for almost two centuries, the whispered companion of Jefferson’s nights and mother of his children.

Hardly Teddy White’s “Making of the President”? Well, no. But considering the boredom of the ’88 campaign, and the barrenness of the making-of-the-President-style of coverage in the hands of White’s journalistic descendants, dumping this structure is not much of a loss.

The fundamental problem with the genre of campaign books is that we haven’t cared much about recent presidential races. Erickson solves this problem by using the election and its players as props in his discussion of what’s gone wrong with this country. And his novelist’s feel for language is a relief from either the dead newspaper prose or poli-sci jargon that lurks in election books. He takes a gamble, and sometimes he wins, and sometimes he loses, but it is fun watching him play his cards. This is not gonzo journalism--there are no Hunter Thompson-style interviews with real presidential candidates in the men’s room. In fact, it’s not journalism at all. Erickson does not report, he imagines what it all means.

“Leap Year” (the title plays with the calendar fact of 1988) insists on some distinctions and ideas Erickson has hatched. One is the big difference between the United States, a clattering heap of people, government and shopping malls, and America, the idea behind the physical reality of the country.

“I’m not looking for America,” he announces early on. “It’s not that. Enough people over the years have done that, they looked as far as the sun illuminated their line of vision, until they couldn’t follow that light any further. I’m going against the light.” But of course he is looking for America, since he finds it far more interesting than the artifact-strewn presence of the United States.

Another idea that fascinates Erickson is “the nuclear imagination,” a state of mind he finds exemplified by Gary Hart and Pat Robertson. Einstein was probably the first person afflicted with this perspective. “By nuclear imagination,” Erickson explains, “I mean that poetry that Einstein conceived and compelled us to accept in the face of empiricism. . . . People with nuclear imagination not only conceive of the abyss and confront it, but are liberated by it; everything they do is infused with the blood of an Armageddon with no god, a judgment day in which the guilty and the innocent are damned with equal cosmic merriment. They dance along the edge of the abyss to banish their dread of falling over, relishing the view that their position on the edge affords, daring the ground to shift beneath their feet.”

In short, people with the nuclear imagination are turned on by the sense of ice cracking beneath their feet, and say pretty much whatever they want to say as a way of mocking the gods, since, of course, everything might go to ruin at any second.

A lot of this book consists of just such musings; how a reader reacts to them depends on one’s appetites and expectations. For my money, I think Erickson misses as much as he hits, but I kept being sucked in by the risk of it all, kind of like watching those old tapes of Lenny Bruce in action as his manic raps spun off into space with no safe destination.

Just how do we react to the fact that this deathless black woman has been traveling around our country with a knife, slashing Americans for more than a century and a half while searching for her lost lover? Whenever Sally’s thoughts appear they are in italics and presented in a severe English that rings like the judgments of God and whose meaning is often biblical in its vagueness. When she locates Jefferson in 1988, he is living in the pueblo of Walpi on the Hopi Reservation. “ . . I decide,” Sally reflects, “I’ll pretend to be asleep . . . I’ll pretend not so to fool him, since there’s no more fooling him; I’m not sure who I’m fooling, who I’m pretending for. It may be myself. As the hour before daylight has almost passed, in the last moment before daylight when I believe I’ve finally fooled them all, I have a vision.”

Like all good ghosts, Sally Hemmings never quite spells out this vision. But then Erickson never quite does either. Amid the debris of his road trips, the problems back at home with his family and cats, the random insights gained in topless bars, the asides on rock ‘n’ roll, various candidates, and, of course, the autopsy of the United States’ Darth Vader, Ronald Reagan, Erickson does not so much wrap up the election and the nation in a nice tidy bundle of theses as keep probing where it all went wrong.

“There I am left,” he decides, “with the dreadful crushed fact which is that it isn’t the United States that I love, it’s America.”

Don’t we all. Just ask Sally Hemmings, who lived as a slave but still can’t shake her passion for the idea behind the word.