Welcome to the ‘age of chaos’

Steve Erickson sits in padded splendor in the lobby of West Hollywood’s storied Chateau Marmont, the patio doors open to the morning breeze. A waiter in black places two vintage-shaped $5 bottles of Coke on the table, and on the other side of the room a meeting has just ended involving someone connected with Los Lonely Boys, Grammy winners from the night before -- the man’s cellphone then rings the band’s single, “Heaven.”

None of this could be happening in Erickson’s latest novel, “Our Ecstatic Days,” a rambling hallucination in which the top floors of the hotel, renamed Chateau X and shifted southward a bit, become a man-made island in the middle of a geology-defying lake that floods the L.A. Basin from a birth canal partway up Laurel Canyon.

It is the “age of chaos.” Time marches to its own arrhythmia while a vague North American war rages among Islamists, Chinese rationalists and “occupied Albuquerque.” Musical water snakes glow and hum. Buildings sicken and sometimes die, diagnosed by a doctor who senses their ills. Reality consists of overlapping dimensions, or maybe it’s all loosely connected dreamscapes in which fathers are absent and relationships between mothers and their children are ruptured.

Woe to anyone who seeks to find order within Erickson’s fictional world. Or, for that matter, traditional symbolism and meaning in work that even its creator finds mystifying. “I try not to figure these things out too much,” says Erickson, 54. “I think the point where I start psychoanalyzing my own writing, I think that gets dangerous.”

Erickson has been writing since, as a 7-year-old, he penned a tale about some boys who build a spaceship and fly to meet the man in the moon. “I was already staking out my literary territory,” he jokes. Erickson teaches creative writing at CalArts, edits the new literary journal Black Clock and writes about movies for Los Angeles magazine.

Those jobs help pay the bills -- literary novelists tend not to sell many books and none of Erickson’s five previous novels have made it to within shouting distance of a bestseller list.

But since 1985’s “Days Between Stations,” he has built a reputation among critics as a highly imaginative writer exploring universals -- love and sex, history, identity, memory and moral redemption -- set against shifting landscapes of bleak excess. A brothel in Paris. A black-tree swamp. An island in a river with only one bank. Vienna from which Hitler’s American pornographer escapes with the elderly despot to occupied Mexico -- the Nazi blitz had defeated England and, after Winston Churchill’s live on-radio suicide, the war moved to North America.

Always too there’s Los Angeles, re-imagined in unimaginable ways, and a persistent chaos that defies Erickson’s own orderly existence.

“Personally I don’t handle chaos well at all,” says Erickson, who lives in Topanga Canyon with his wife, Lori, a painter and director of TV commercials, and their 7-year-old son. “If the sink is full of dirty dishes, I have to wash them before I can start writing. I do think [the chaos in his novels] is part of the times we’re living in, and maybe part of the experience of growing up in a place where the landscape changed almost by the moment.”

He was raised in the San Fernando Valley around Granada Hills in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a period of vast and rapid development. “It was somewhere between what the Valley is now and what the Valley is in ‘Chinatown’ -- lots of orchards and ranches and something bordering on rural,” Erickson says. “That changed completely during my childhood. I grew up in a house that was built when I was 5 and was gone by the time I was 17 because the Simi Valley Freeway took it. So the neighborhood I grew up in was born, lived and died in the space of my childhood.”

Erickson, a UCLA grad, moved to New York and then Europe between 1975 and 1982, and when he returned the familiar had become strange. He realized “what a chaotic and ephemeral place Los Angeles is, both in urban terms and in psychic terms.” The city’s “lack of civic identity,” he thinks, can fertilize an artist’s growth in ways that cities with more defined senses of place, their own uber-personalities, cannot. “If you know what you want to do, L.A. can be a great place to do it because it doesn’t impose itself on you at all the way a real city like New York or Paris, say, does,” Erickson says. “But if you don’t know what you want to do, don’t know who you are, because it’s a city that almost insists on reinvention, I think it can make you crazy.”

Erickson doesn’t draw the parallels himself, but his own disintegrated roots reflect those of many of his characters, who roam Erickson’s imagined world as vagabonds.

Elements, even characters, emerge and disappear from book to book. Banning Jainlight, Hitler’s pornographer, dies at the end of “Tours of the Black Clock.” He appears again in the new novel as a corpse, a bit character whose death draws another bit character, his daughter, from real Los Angeles to real New York only to return to the flooded version of L.A. In a further blurring, Erickson’s personal e-mail address includes the name Jainlight. “In ‘Arc d’X,’ I kill off a character named Erickson,” he says. “I don’t know what that’s about, either.”

In “Ecstatic Days,” the lake has transformed Los Angeles’ landscape. The Hollywood Hills are waterfront property and squatters fill tall buildings whose upper floors remain dry. The color blue inexplicably seeps from the visible palette, leaving a grayish hole in the color scheme. The plot itself defies summary, or a clear trajectory. Kristin Blumenthal, a survivor from an earlier novel, gives birth to a son, Kierkegaard, whose twin sister Bronte seems to disappear from her womb.

Kristin fears the growing lake is seeking out her son so she loads him into a gondola and poles to the lake’s source, then dives to the opening, seeking clarity. When she resurfaces, the boy is gone, carried off by owls. What she doesn’t realize is that she has emerged in a parallel Los Angeles, where she eventually becomes a dominatrix-seer to rich and powerful men including a Chinese war hero who faced down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. She ages and becomes stranded at a remote desert hotel with her daughter, who has somehow emerged full-grown from the lake to join her as a dominatrix understudy. Eventually, they return to L.A.

Through the last two-thirds of the book, Kristin -- the through-the-looking-glass version -- is a constant presence in an uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness sentence threaded through the text that rejoins the main story in the last few pages, closing the circles of time, reality and human connections with a jolt that, if not encompassing understanding, at least brings the sprawling chaos to an end.

There are no object lessons or deeper meanings to the work, at least none that Erickson can define as he sits on a Victorian-styled sofa here in the Chateau Marmont, itself the scene of countless alternative realities of the Hollywood type. A hammer falls with annoying repetitiveness, unseen and unexplained. Outside, fragrant plants weave in the morning breeze near the bungalow where John Belushi died, and somewhere upstairs is the room where Jean Harlow and Clark Gable began an infamous affair.

Time overlaps here, as it does in Erickson’s novels, where the minor keys take over the song and the discordant becomes music and the dreamscape reality.

“I’m just a big believer in the role of the subconscious in writing fiction and I’m just a big believer in listening to what the story tells you,” Erickson says. “All of my books begin with a story. They don’t begin with a theme. They don’t begin with a concept. They begin with a story about a young single mother with a kid and a lake appears in the middle of L.A. and she sees it as evil coming to take her child.”

It’s up to the reader to try to make sense of it.

*

Steve Erickson book signing

Where: Barnes & Noble, the Grove, 189 The Grove Drive, Los Angeles

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday

Contact: (323) 525-0270