Erased Book

Jim Krusoe is one of my favorite contemporary writers. His books are hilarious, wild rides. Every time I read "comic novel" in a book review, my lips thin and I wonder, "But is it as funny as Jim Krusoe's work?" His narratives are oddball detective stories, surreal adventures worthy of his namesake, Robinson Crusoe.

Erased is the second part of an almost completed three-volume trilogy, published by Tin House books. The previous book in this series, Girl Factory recast the Bluebeard myth in modern times. Its narrator, Jonathan, finds several beautiful girls suspended in acidophilus underneath the yogurt shop where he works (yogurt shops are one of Krusoe's favorite haunts, and he mentions them in nearly every story).

Just as the floating women are in-between life and death, Theodore, the narrator of Erased has a mother sending him postcards from the afterlife. I saw Jim read from this at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, and he said the genesis of this novel was very personal. One night, his mother called saying she didn't feel well, and the next day she died. He said he wondered what that halfway time was like for her…did she know death was just around the corner?

Yet this isn't exactly rumination on what happens when we die. The death of the mother is a MacGuffin, a device to set the plot in motion, something to let Theodore observe the wonders of Cleveland. These observations are what make this and all of Krusoe's books so fun to read. The same lake that his mother apparently drowned in has a "coffee-with-not-enough-cream" color. The residents of Cleveland, where most of the story is set, are all artists. Even Ted is continually working on the nostrils of a sculpture.

At times, Erased feels a bit unanchored. In all of Krusoe's fiction, the narrator isn't someone who acts with conviction so much as he falls in with convicts, such as Ullene, a biker-chick who takes Ted from one place to another in this novel. Ted (and Jonathan before him) are Forrest Gump types, going from one place to another, following the thinnest of clues which, later, turn out to be the right paths.

At Skylight, Jim also said that his books represent a slowing down of plot. I can't tell. And in fact, I would only want him to keep going faster, because his books are wild rides. Like Robinson Crusoe, whose head was "filled very early with rambling thoughts," let's keep the adventure going.