As he wrote, after the 2001 terrorist attacks and during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he saw parallels between English foreign policy of the 17th century and America's in the 21st. "This sense of exceptionalism, that we are the moral arbiters, that we know better than they do."
Brushing up on disaster
SOMETIMES the impetus for this kind of book is more idiosyncratic. Chris Adrian, 36, was a medical student in the years he conceived of his well-reviewed "The Children's Hospital." "It started out as a story about being stuck in a hospital day and night and not being able to get out. Sort of a typical story of residency," he said from his home in Cambridge, Mass.
"But after 9/11, a lot of new ideas moved in."
He was forced to rethink the book's tone, and his approach also became more concerted.
"I knew I couldn't set a story during a second flood without knowing something about the first one; I'd never read the Bible before." He found himself digging in deep to get what he calls a background in apocalypse. "There's a lot out there besides Revelation. Most of them involve a person who's had a vision that's mediated by an angel."
For a culture that doesn't like to talk about death, he said, the apocalypse may be a way to discuss the subject indirectly.
Adrian went so far into both mainstream and apocryphal books of the Bible that he's now halfway through divinity school at Harvard. "Though the difference between those books and mine," he cautioned, "is like the difference between a real mouse and Mickey Mouse."
The trick for a literary writer is to avoid the obvious, which may be one reason 9/11 has taken so long to show up in the serious novel.
"I think we're just sort of figuring out how to talk about it," said Erickson, whose next novel, "Zeroville," comes out this fall. "It's all so immediate it risks becoming a cultural cliche before we even know what to do with it.... It took a while to write about Pearl Harbor, I think. James Jones' 'From Here to Eternity' didn't come out until 10 years after the attacks. The culture has to process these things."
Erickson himself felt the lure of apocolypse back when he was writing his first novel, in the early '80s, which he recalls as "a scary time" despite today's Reagan nostalgia. " 'Days Between Stations' started out as a love story. And suddenly, about a quarter of the way through, I was burying Los Angeles in sand. I hadn't planned on doing that, and for about half an instant I resisted it, because I thought it was the kind of thing that happened in fantasy or science fiction."
