Word: jeffersons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This brilliant, desperate, sheet-soaking nightmare of a novel begins in what seems to be the clear air of rational narration, as Thomas Jefferson, living in Paris at the outset of the French Revolution, beds his mulatto slave girl Sally Hemmings. Whether the historical Jefferson actually did so is unprovable; he denied it, perhaps because of social necessity, and modern assertions on either side of the question are clouded by the racial politics of tradition vs. revisionism. For author Erickson, the power of his theme's dark vision sweeps away argument. Jefferson was the giver of America's creed...
...BOTTOM LINE: Magic realism veers into toxic gray as Thomas Jefferson's guilt haunts an alternate America...
Erickson's Jefferson leaves Sally, and the book's pages, with the words "I'm elected." She tries for a year or so to keep his dwindling plantation running, then, roiled with love, passion and implacable hatred, sets out on foot to find him. The journey takes her west to Indian country. But it is longer than that; she and the reader have passed into a region of what, if this were a Latin American novel, would be called magic realism. But here there is no green, sun-shot jungle life force, only the fogged, toxic gray of brutish, dying...
Sally is arrested for murdering a white man, perhaps a lover, perhaps a rapist, with a carving knife (once, Erickson has it, she had tried to stab Jefferson). The cops have a patrol car and a radio, so this is the 20th century. Sally is, or is not, somewhere else, someone else. A huge black cop, Wade, searches obsessively for Mona, a woman he met years ago at a strip joint called the Fleurs d'X. She may be Sally or a daughter, or not. The city is Aeonopolis, and it could be San Francisco, much decayed, if San Francisco...
...like Blade Runner handle atmospherics of this kind easily. It takes a gifted sleight-of-mind artist to work such phantasmagorical effects in a novel without fuddling or exasperating the reader. Erickson manages the trick expertly. But why the priestly Gestapo of "Church Central" in this alternate America? Because Jefferson was an anticlerical deist for whom a theocratic nation would have been a shaming defeat? Maybe, but trying to decode word-for- word meaning here won't illuminate much. Aeonopolis, the author tells us, is almost impossible to leave: thus a waking nightmare of reason paralyzed, of civility blood-cursed...