Christina reviewed Zeroville by Steve Erickson
Review of 'Zeroville' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
"A really bad or really good movie has no comfort level." Enrapturing and brilliant novel about Hollywood. Vikar Jerome is a young ex-divinity student, detached and prone to violence, with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, "the two most beautiful people in movies" on his head, haunted by a cryptic vision. His arrival coincides with the Manson murders, marking the beginning of an era when a kind of anarchy in film-making set in. Vikar meets two people who become his mentors, and a young girl he desires to and eventually becomes a father-figure for, as he rises from set production worker to prize-winning film editor.
Classic Hollywood gives way to "nuclear" Hollywood, as oil companies buy film companies, the production studio created by four artists in 1919 dissolves, and the major motion picture studios are run by people who do not understand and love motion pictures (people living …
"A really bad or really good movie has no comfort level." Enrapturing and brilliant novel about Hollywood. Vikar Jerome is a young ex-divinity student, detached and prone to violence, with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, "the two most beautiful people in movies" on his head, haunted by a cryptic vision. His arrival coincides with the Manson murders, marking the beginning of an era when a kind of anarchy in film-making set in. Vikar meets two people who become his mentors, and a young girl he desires to and eventually becomes a father-figure for, as he rises from set production worker to prize-winning film editor.
Classic Hollywood gives way to "nuclear" Hollywood, as oil companies buy film companies, the production studio created by four artists in 1919 dissolves, and the major motion picture studios are run by people who do not understand and love motion pictures (people living outside the system: call girls, worldly punkettes, armed guerrillas, and burglars are more insightful about movies) and who are creatively bankrupt. At the exact midpoint of the book, "everything is reset to zero" which Vikar eventually learns, through an odyssey that takes him to Madrid, Cannes, and Oslo, as the chapters and the picture-making apparatus of memory unspool.
