These Dreams of You

"This was the great test, whether there was a song the country could sing in common. Instead, more than ever it's a country of many songs all of them noisy, without a single melody that anyone cares about carrying. The country is a babel of not just melodies that no one shares but memory; and as Babel fractured language into thousands, the country is the sum total of a memory fractured into millions, not one of them a memory of the country as it actually has ever existed."

Steve Erickson is a hero of American fiction, and I just read his new novel, These Dreams of You, which is incredibly graceful, dreamy, ambitious, and so perfectly of this moment. Definitely recommended.