Hieronymus Posh

Erased
by Jim Krusoe
2009, Tin House Books


A good friend of mine doesn't really like to read. He has been known to, like myself, attempt a Thomas Pynchon book once every couple of years. (This is in contrast to my other friends who don't like to read who pick up The Kite Runner or The DaVinci Code as their once-yearly novel of choice.)

About two years ago, this friend of mine kept bringing up this book he read, something called Girl Factory. I wrongly assumed it was a nonfictional account of Warhol's Factory or the Chelsea Hotel. (I think I had it confused with the film about Edie Sedgwick starring Sienna Miller.)

When pressed about the book, my friend repeatedly said it was "weird" and not much more. There were no thumbs, down or up, or star. He wouldn't even say if he recommended it or warned against it. It was just "weird" and it kept coming up in conversation.

Recently, Tin House published the next novel by the author of Girl Factory. Remembering our conversations about it, I signed up to check it out from the library. The book was published over the summer but the condition of the book was horrifying. There was a different-colored substance smeared on nearly every page.

So with the book held a good foot from my body at all times, I flew through this 250-odd page novel in two days.

Erased begins mysteriously with a son describing his last phone conversation with his previously-estranged mother, who is accused by a passing man of being dead without knowing it.

As if taking the stranger's suggestion, the mother promptly disappears, packing up and moving back to Cleveland and shortly dying.

Her son eventually receives mysterious postcards from her beckoning him to Cleveland and he follows.

The narrative becomes increasingly weird as Cleveland is portrayed as a city of smiling, helpful, artistically gifted citizens who are content with their lives. Inspired, the narrator takes up sculpting as he begins his not-especially-thorough search for his mother.

Some truly weird episodes ensue. Two that stand out in particular would include: a string of murders throughout the country involving artistic gardening implements that the narrator sells through a mail-order catalogue, which begin as a boon to sales and conclude with congressional hearings on the culpability of mail-order catalogues in such events; and a city-wide rat hunt prompted by an infestation of infanticidal rats throughout the city. The latter is conducted by concerned citizens signing up and then executing the rodents and culminates in a delightfully funny rat-on-mob stalemate.

All at once, as if at an invisible signal, they began a high-pitched, almost musical squeal that I took as either a battle cry or a cry for mercy. All of the rats[...] making this as-musical-as-it-may-have-been-to-them, earsplitting-to-me sound, as if to say: "What now? What are you accusing us of that you would yourselves not have done?"

This imagined dialogue spools out into a diatribe indicting humanity's affection for squirrels (because of their tails) and carelessness with musical instruments. The narrator ultimately decides, by the way, not to participate in the massacre of the rats. It does, however, continue on without him.

His search for his mother proceeds in this dream-like fashion, punctuated, for example, by periodic visits to women's auxiliary clubs like the "Lion's Rotary" and the "Christmas Tree" clubs.

Much like in dream logic, characters and places have their doubles and reoccur in slightly-altered forms.

The narrative is interrupted by transcripts of people discussing (in very choppy, tin-eared dialogue like "A good question, Warren, and fortunately the answer is both.") near-death experiences that set the stage for the plot's conceit that the narrator's mother could somehow traverse the tunnel-like link between life and death to communicate with her son.

But while the dialogue was written with a tin ear, the prose was not. Krusoe's talent for fresh, funny turns of phrase are evident throughout the book. For example, in observing his kitchen, the narrator remarks, "On my kitchen counter the toaster still innocently gleamed next to a patch of crumbs like a chrome elephant amid a tribe of pygmies." Delightfully clean, mildly absurd descriptions like these remind me somewhat of Flannery O'Connor's quirkier moments (I'm thinking of the parrots on Bailey's shirt) and are peppered liberally throughout the book.

In the actual machinations of the plot, Krusoe's novel reminds me primarily of Paul Auster (I'm thinking in particular of Ghosts or Oracle Night where writers exchange identities with their characters or other writers). The psychologically complex narrator is prompted by a thoroughly contrived plot device to conduct an existential search in a mirror world populated, in some solipsistic twist, by cartoonishly flat (and occasionally sinister) supporting characters.

Where the beauty in Auster's books is the urgent thrill reached vicariously through the narrator and the increasingly implausible events, the pleasure in Krusoe's novel is mostly in the form of rat-pack-monologues and dissertation-level dissections of the Indians mascot's socio-morphological implications.

Krusoe's charmingly mad flights of fancy are what really make this novel worth reading. Yes, the themes of abandonment and of death are interesting, but it's better to think of this work as epic prose poetry.

Finally, the cover of this edition is truly perfect, a detail from "The Temptation of St. Anthony" by Hieronymus Bosch, featuring a couple riding a giant fish. This image seems to convey the same balance of humorous absurdity and poetic dream-like grace that the prose does.