It’s really not a novel in which (snore) A and B do X, Y, Z.
This is too bad, since “Shadowbahn” is 9,000 times less hokey and more gratifying - more provocative and challenging - than this summary suggests. I wouldn’t be surprised if people reading only the flap copy are put off by its synopsis: The twin towers reappear intact in the Dakota badlands 20 years after their fall, inhabited only by Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin brother, now an adult, who is traumatized for being the one who survived.
Others will find their footing in Erickson’s supremely engaging interest in the landscape of American music. Some readers will be confused by its “plot” until realizing there’s little point trying to figure out what exactly is going on. It’s sad, and it’s droll and sometimes it’s gorgeous. Steve Erickson’s 10th (10th!) novel is: compassionate, weird, unpredictable, jaunty. And there’s the sense of being held captive-in the best and worst ways-to the author’s obsession with the perfect playlist.SHADOWBAHN By Steve Erickson 300 pp.
Each chapter is a page, and each page leaps and loops through a garbled American landscape dotted with the Velvet Underground, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, John Lennon, new states and territories, and endless music trivia. Shadowbahn is a widescreen novel with a sense of lightness and invention I hadn’t encountered before.
Meanwhile, Elvis’s stillborn twin brother roams the mid-twentieth century, rewiring history. “As the crowds arrive over the following days, the families and loners, the footloose and motor-bound, the drivers and passengers and hitchhikers, the cards and RVs and trailers, the shuttles and buses and private jets, the news vans and military jeeps and airborne surveillance, the constituents and pols and advance teams, the graphic designers and Hollywood scouts and novelists who can’t make up anything anymore, the systems and cynics and juries-still-out, the Towers loom from the end of what becomes a long national boulevard.” In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers reappear in South Dakota, wholly intact and without explanation.
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