false 5 1 false false Thu Jul 03 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Jul 03 11:56:35 -0700 2008 Thu Jul 03 12:00:50 -0700 2008 By NICK MOORE
www.laweekly.com/special/la-people-2008/...

“I don’t even think of Zeroville as a ‘Hollywood novel,’” Erickson says, unassuming and barely audible under the ArcLight sound system, which is blaring Bernard Herrmann from its impossibly high ceilings. “Hollywood novels tend to be about the movie business, and although there’s a bit of that, Zeroville is about loving movies, or being obsessed with movies.”

Zeroville is a book so enamored with film that it reads like one — quick scenes that cut, characters that reappear implausibly, dialogue firmly rooted in place but captured like a dream. Erickson’s books are postmodern in execution, not necessarily in message. For all of their tricks — his time lapses; his miraculous lakes that bubble up from nowhere to submerge Hollywood; and his inclination to suddenly break from the story he’s been telling for hundreds of pages to tell another, unrelated one — his novels are romantic, emotional and unabashedly human.

“In my books, when I do anything that might be regarded by others as experimental, it’s because I think that’s what’s going to serve the story. I hope I create this reality in my books that the reader will feel compelled to give him or herself over to. I’ll do whatever I need to do to create that.”

Click here to read all of LA Weekly's profile of Erickson:
www.laweekly.com/special/la-people-2008/...
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