The Sea Came In At Midnight (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
I expected the book to be about “In the final seconds of the old millennium, 1,999 women and children march off the edge of a cliff in Northern California, urged on by a cult of silent men in white robes. Kristin was meant to be the two-thousandth to fall. But when at the last moment she flees, she exchanges one dark destiny for a future that will unravel the present.” I mean, since I copied and pasted that from the “blurb,” it’s a reasonable assumption, right? Let me spoil the first 25 pages for you. One night this 17 year old, Kristin, wakes up and decides to find a dream. Literally, figuratively, a dream. Literally, she has never had a dream when she sleeps; figuratively, I’m sure she’s looking for some dream to chase/pursue. After waking, she goes to the only hotel in her small island home, finds a random guy passed out drunk in his room, and then she fucks him. Of course he had an erection because “a man has an erection when he dreams,” and she wants this dream because “a dream is a memory of the future” (12). Next Kristin travels over to mainland California and “there [she is] standing by the road somewhere north of Sacramento, with only the clothes on [her] back and [her] books—Bronte and Cendrara and Kierkegaard in a cloth bag—when the whole emigration comes around the bend” (16). And so because this suicide-lemming cult of women has lost one of the perfect 2,000 members along the way, Kristin just joins up. When they make camp at night, she again sleep-rapes one of the male priests thanks to his dream-erection. The next day when the women are led off the cliff by the priests who have scythes, Kristin is the only one quick enough to outrun them. Sure she escaped, but now she’s stranded. Luckily a pair of lesbian murderers picks her up and brings her to the penthouse of the guy they murdered. After stealing their car and high-tailing it out of there, she finds herself in LA with no money. She considers prostitution, but that might upset her sense of “morality or aesthetics” (25.) Either way, she has no problem answering a creepy ad in a newspaper from a guy, only ever named as Occupant, to live with him and be his meat-hole (I know, a disgustingly vulgar term, but that’s really all she is and all he wants). And that’s the end of the cult aspect, which I thought would be a major plot point.Got all that? Good because that’s the first 25 pages. The remaining 225 are pretty similar, just with different characters: the Occupant is obsessed with creating a new calendar all based on the dates of random acts of tragedy; a woman gets into porn with her husband, sleeps with her brother, and creates the first snuff film; a girl runs away from home, becomes an escort, is almost murdered, but escapes when she recognizes “it was clearly a chair for an execution,” (112), leaving me to wonder what the hell did that chair look like?. Of course, all of these people are connected in the most bizarre ways, most of which they do not know about. In that way, it’s a poor man’s Cloud Atlas, devoid of the verbal flourishes and lacking developed characters for the reader to actually care about. Of course, it’s definitely more a book to be read for theme rather than plot. But when characters say things like “Make me do what I can barely bear to do…something nearly as depraved as I am” and then meet up with “a debauched couple who had nothing but money and looks and antics” (91) it becomes more of a poor man’s Pahlaniuk (or, to be fair, on par with anything Pahlaniuk has written recently). If one of the themes is that we live in a nihilistic age where morality is just another debunked grand narrative, the bizarre lunacies and depravities of the characters are just too…bizarre? Over the top? Uninteresting? Boring? I guess I’m trying to say that a good theme would be revealed more subtly, and the “in your face” nature of this actually disinterested me. Finally, another primary theme causes me to liken this to a poor man’s White Noise (although since I wasn’t really all too fond of that, for me it’s just a regular White Noise). Much of the “bad faith” that comes in this current “age of chaos,” really an age in which each individual has his/her own “private millennium,” is related to the loss of memory. (Get used to all that mumbo-jumbo if you’re gonna read this.) “The flow of Western memory had been tainted lately, the pure grade-A stuff being cut with something unidentifiable but particularly toxic” (158). Okay, so maybe it’s just the fact that every reviewer’s blurb declares Erickson to be a new Pynchon/Delillo coupled with the word “toxic” in that sentence that forced my mind into that connection. Speaking of reviewer’s praise I must add, “Excuse me, Wall Street Journal, but Erickson does not ‘approach the heights’ of Nabokov.” In fairness, reading that in the cover flap may have annoyed me from the outset. If I were to write a five star review of this, however, it would sound something like this. This is a postmodern masterpiece. Erickson captures what it is like to live in an age collective truth has been replaced by chaos and true faith has been supplanted by each individual’s private millennium of isolation, solipsism, and grand quest for meaning. This is brilliantly symbolized in scenes such as the Occupant being locked in a room for seven years and a naked girl being bound, blindfolded and suspended, thereby being forced to find the only meaning that she can in the recesses of her mind. Erickson sums up the human tendency, no human need, to ascribe some meaning to the events that unfold around us, especially those that are most tragic. While one character’s obsession with senseless, world-wide tragedies illuminates the utter chaos and lack of meaning that governs—(or does not govern at all)—life, Erickson manages to instill a ray of hope. The various, brilliant inter-connections amongst the characters suggest that there is some grand design or fate or god or purpose that, like the characters, we just can’t see; it suggests that maybe the postmodern era is actually one of clandestinely ordered chaos. But that's for you to decide because what it all boils down to is the stark truth that “Everyone is his own millennium. Everyone is his own age of chaos. Everyone is his own age of apocalypse” (234). Powerful stuff. Some Crappy Lines -“Louise pulled away from Marie, who was looking at her with great sadness. ‘Stop looking at me that way!’ Louise said. ‘Stop looking at me with great sadness!’” (140).-“But then he noted that all the numbers of the code that preceded the coordinates were prime ones, which is to say numbers that could be divided only by themselves” (184).
The Sea Came in at Midnight, will leave you feeling the irresistible pull of the ocean, leave you wanting to return to the shore of time, memory and tide again and again and also set out across the sea and chart new experiences. ”Like a midnight tide, abandonment rushed in…” Erickson attempts to anchor core senses of identity that are adrift in his characters in a sea change of randomness of the new, and of everything in-flux. He does this through giving his post-modern, time-woven, apocalyptic tale a fable like quality that wants to resist change for the sake of making meaning.She would have to be a big point misser to believe anything ever really has to do with coincidence.Ericson wants to harpoon the past and cement it on individual meaning making moments. He does this through creating a character called the Occupant who creates a quasi-metaphysical calendar in which he tries to analyze time-lines that pinpoint a turning point in which the current age entered Chaos as a time period. Chaos is a time for Erickson in which memory has become a commodity and dreams are lost. He gives us an incredibly fitting metaphor for this finding an island of meaning within Chaos:Wait a minute hadn’t I seen this one (on screen image) before – until suddenly realizing it was the most profound hidden memory of all, tucked away so many years ago and now unleashing a personal millennium like a gunshot (something once done that can’t be undone)Like the shot heard around the world that changed the world forever to begin the first of the Great Wars, Erickson signals to us the importance of the global game changer that he is describing to us. Without memories and dreams, which he implicitly says are less present than they were before, he indirectly asks us to look hard and answer for ourselves, “Who will we become as humanity without them?”Erickson basically says that we will not be able to hold back and hold the dam or dike from flooding. That our human spirit will not be contained and will find a way for expression.Erickson writes with a poetic complexity, giving us sound bites of gritty reality. Here are my favorite passages:Perhaps they believed the open palm of the cosmos would catch them in mid-air.The girls of chaos were crawling the Lower East side with a thousand anarchic anniversaries and a thousand nihilistic holidays in their throbbing little wombs.Because I valued my existence more than my soul, I had no need of my memories…autumn colors of death and rouge, snow and semenThe newspapers full of deadly new statistics, desire’s new mortality rateThe residents of LA began to realize their sleep was now utterly drained of dreams. With the tide of memory rising from the street, the zero of the fog closes in.The only one thing he knows for sure, … is that if there’s to be a Moment in his life that is a passageway through his memories, it isn’t light but a black gaping pit.Let’s say I didn’t think so damned much. Let’s say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breathsOne of Erickson's techniques is to overlap coincidences with halfway meetings of characters, leaving echoing waves that shatter the illusion of mere coincidence, whose aftereffects reverberate throughout time.Erickson also reflects on the reader writer relationship as the audience of spectacle: This reminds me of the reader response to Catcher in the Rye. JD Salinger wondered at the impact it had had on the youth and whether he had a role in the consequences. Salinger also received blow-back for having written such a so-called dangerous work.Erickson seems to say with the above quote, that the author is not isolated in his/her influence on the world community – that responses gain a life of their own and push hard against behavioural boundaries – self-perpetuating. This is the first example I have encountered in fiction writing that addresses the concept of memes.This is a book that records moments in time within tidal currents, and analogically distinguishes the individual from the masses.My strongest negative response was the sexual content, but then I interpreted it as an examination of the idea of sexual consent and perhaps to both examine and quasi-parody the trend in some fiction to portray women as enthralled by mild 's and m' content. Those who are of the vanilla extraction should avoid this book. lolThe Sea Came in at Midnight,is a wonderfully written book that does offer us another version of how to not hold out against the tide but re-immerse oneself in the ocean 4.75 The ending I found too symbolic and too much like an appeasement to female readers by attempting to describe an incredibly personal feminine experience in a do-over capacity - that I think is not the way women really would integrate this type of loss. I understand the magical realism quality of it though just didn't like the gender assumptions that went along with it.
What do You think about The Sea Came In At Midnight (2000)?
Oops, looks like I'm the only goodreader who hated this pretentious male fantasy. How many more edgy, slightly SM or even completely SM relationships will we be presented with by male authors, in each of which the S part of the relationship is the man and the M part is the woman, and the man remains clothed and the woman is mostly unclothed, and the man is older and the woman considerably younger? By contrast with all this Blue Velvet, Last Tango in Paris, Secretary-style art, porn is blazingly honest.
—Paul Bryant
Wow.This is one of those rare books that is short in pages but unending in its impact. It's a book that seems easy, until you realize it only seems that way because its more difficult ideas are so inaccessible to you that all your mind can do is try to avoid them, and then of course Erickson will not let you avoid them forever; a book that seems predictable, until you realize that you don't understand chaos, and then of course that you never can or will; a book that seems to be saying one thing until you realize that you're a short-sighted idiot, and then of course that the things it is saying don't really have a beginning or an end.The deceptively complex and interwoven narrative follows a number of people around the world, recounting their seemingly random connections to one another and the void that exists between them in spite of these inexplicable bonds, and by extension exploring similar voids that exist between us (the people of the non-fictional world) and our own coincidental encounters. As a narrative it succeeds above and beyond expectations. As a study on time, memory, dreams, chaos, order, coincidence, love, identity, and emptiness-- an exceedingly ambitious handful of big ideas that might come across as trite in another author's voice-- it soars, swells, explodes in brilliant light and comes to rest somewhere above us, where we can see it and try to understand it, but never touch it. Where another author might trudge through these ideas heavy-handedly, relaying to readers the obvious that had probably already occurred to them, Erickson's strength is in the many words he does not say about the ideas. The negative space, so to speak, where for him these ideas reside.I might be waxing poetic here, but there is such a grounds for it. This is a remarkable novel, unfortunately out of print. I'd gotten it for Christmas years back, having asked for it blindly after reading the synopsis, and only recently did I discover that the bit which drew me in was just the beginning. Do yourself a favor: find a copy of this book, any way you can. The effort this will take will render the experience even more profound when you read it.Note: Only do the above if you are eighteen or older. Anyone who does it younger does so at their own risk. This is not a "soft" book.
—Chrissy
If you have kids, u may not wish for them to read this book. It got pretty dark. But if your okay with letting your kid hang out accepting their uncle sandusky's invitation watching Goonies in his dungeon which is his favorite Steven Spielberg flick, then go right ahead. You may ask how I know his favorite flick? Leave it up to berg making a movie about a group of boys chasing after one eyed willie's treasure the whole movie. Did I just make you like this movie less? I digress, what's good is to the author plotting this story in Japan. A lot of characters are shaken up in this story. Author makes the story flow well. Not a big snuff buff, I like to recycle.
—Fee
