We also discover that the stillborn Presley twin in this alt-America is not Jesse but Elvis, leaving Jesse G. In Shadowbahn we meet an embittered Brit called Winston who finds himself peddling an obscure 45rpm in a plain white sleeve from behind a counter in the record shop where he works. The underlying jubilance in These Dreams of You is overwhelmed in Shadowbahn by a pervasive threat-a metaphysically airborne menace-to the survival of that dream. Half a decade later that expression has turned on itself. Obama’s election allowed Erickson to explore a “country expressing itself, beyond what it’s ever allowed itself to express,” as he put it to Michael Silverblatt in 2012.
Kennedy and Bobby during the Democratic 1960 primaries-only in Shadowbahn’s America JFK has just lost to Adlai Stevenson in the Democratic primary-and JFK laments to his brother, “The only argument for making me president is because we’ve never lived in times like these and no one like me ever has been president before.” Quotes like this have an eerie prescience, because Shadowbahn is a book of fear that contrasts devastatingly with the promise and optimism that powered Erickson’s previous novel These Dreams of You (2012). In a brilliant set piece in the middle of the book, we are privy to a conversation taking place between John F.
To give you a taste of the central character Zan’s politics, here he is reflecting on the responsibility of parenthood (another important theme): “he held a laissez-faire philosophy on certain things, that he felt it was up to his son and daughter to find their own way on smaller matters such as the existence of Satan or Republicans.” Erickson doesn’t shy away from politics, though.
It’s inaccurate to say his new book is a political novel, if only because that label sticks to just one side of what’s a multifaceted work of art. If Hilary Clinton had won in November Shadowbahn still would be a profound precautionary tale, but Donald Trump’s election lends it a portentousness Erickson himself couldn’t entirely have seen coming. This is an extremely timely novel, as much by unfortunate accident as by design. A persistent theme in Steve Erickson’s new novel Shadowbahn is the accidental nature of epoch-defining moments.
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