Great premise and opens like a shotgun blast. I was with him for the first first character shifts, but after a while it seemed like he was doing it just for the hell of it. I couldn't care less ebout Etcher, Georgie or Erickson, and the book sort of meanders past the point with clumsy allusions to History Slavery and Sex. The writing is also quite purple at time. You can only call someone's cunt her 'vacancy' for so long before I have to chuckle. I give it a three for the great writing that is there and the story's originality. It's kind of like one of those albums where the concept is perfect, the guitar is fine, but the songs are weak. Arc D'x I think is still one of those examples where it is not because something's missing, but because there's too-much there, that keeps the book from being a masterpiece. Frankly, the Georgie scenes were so fucking heavy-hand, whispering AMERICA all the time, it brought down the rest of the book. Without these 50 or so pages, the Erickson and Berlin scenes, it would have been a much better book. I mean, the concept is pretty heavy-handed as is, but sometimes Erickson writes like an art-school bumluck, preposterous attempts at figuring his already pretty obvious allegorical idea--history re-written, American as a melange of dark (pun) and light, etc...---that he loses track of the novel's greatest positive: it's narrative thrust. I'll probably always think of this book like how I view Dark Side of the Moon: A LOT of great things and those three bad songs that drag the album down. Unlike an album, however, I can't skip a tune.3.5/5.
Bringing the whole bag of weird and eerie goodies back into the Eighteenth Century, which means identity slippage and evaporation, heated sexual trysts with hierarchies of dominance and submission that dematerialize under close or extended observation, powerplays and pursuits, ghostly resonances that emerge like flickering fireflies to wreak their time-enchained destinies upon semen-sown reincarnations, and—most excellently of all—working in Mr. Deist himself, Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and a Whole Heaping Pile of All Fucking That, and his tricky dickwork with domestic slave Sally Hemings, a heated racial love affair that casts glistening motes in other's eyes and sets events to glide along the pathways of Erickson's surreal myth-making with deftly enigmatic wordsmithing. One of the strangest of the author's moirescapes, all world-shimmery, time-slippery rippling that spreads its inky tendrils into the stories that abut it in both their composition and their setting.
What do You think about Arc D'X (1996)?
From Library JournalPowerful but at times difficult, this book begins as a historical novel but soon becomes surreal and startlingly visionary. In Paris as the French Revolution seethes around him, Thomas Jefferson is torn between his lofty ideals and his undeniable passion for the quadroon slave Sally Hemmings. Sally's spirit reappears with dire consequences in Aeonopolis, a grim totalitarian city outside time because it sits beyond "the X of the arcs of history and the heart." Erickson's idiosyncratic myths are troubling but palpably real. His complex plot and unorthodox chronology may puzzle many readers, but the persistent recurrence of Jefferson's phrase, "the pursuit of happiness," provides a unifying thread. Erickson skillfully shows that for those in such pursuit, the impulses of freedom and love are frequently in conflict and ever so occasionally harmonious. Recommended for most collections.
—Nate
