“This is one of two books I've recently read that I didn't care for enough to finish, but weren't exactly terrible so didn't want to include them in my snarky "Two Awful to Finish" series of essays. And indeed, the premise behind Steve Erickson's Zeroville is a compelling one, which made me want to pick it up in the first place -- it's the story of a magically strange seminary student in the 1960s who gets exposed to movies late in life, immediately falls in love with them, quits the seminary and moves to LA (after first getting a giant tattoo from a classic film tattooed across the top of his head), realizes that all the so-called "mavericks of the new school" are mouth-breathing morons with no sense of film history, and ends up in Forrest-Gump style accidentally stumbling into a high-paying career as a script-fixer and film editor for all of them. Ah, but then I started actually reading the book, and realized that Erickson is one of them high-falutin' academic writers, and I confess that I have a low tolerance for so-called academic writers and their delicate award-winning novels. Oh, you know what I mean: "Look at me! Look at all the big words I know! Everything's so droll and terrible! Look at all the metaphors I know! We're all miserable! Hooray! Okay, wait, now I'm going to insert a mini-essay about some obscure movie from the 1930s most of my readers have never heard of! It's meta! It's meta meta! Look at me! I have a Master's degree! Give me a National Book Critics Circle award now, please!" Bleh. Like I said, not necessarily bad, just certainly not my cup of tea; buyer beware.
Out of 10: 5.0”