These Dreams of You

Los Angeles novelist Zan Nordhoc begins this novel in trouble: he is broke, his house is underwater and on the verge of repossession, and he hasn't completed a novel in years. Life, he learns, can get much worse: his wife disappears in Ethiopia, and his adopted daughter vanishes with a babysitter in England. Throughout his compounding crises, Zan manages to compose a novel in his head in which a man is beaten in Berlin, finds a copy of Ulysses, travels in time, and encounters a woman who worked for both Bobby Kennedy and David Bowie. The characters in Zan's imagined novel overlap with people in his real life, including himself and the biological mother of his missing daughter. Somehow, Erickson (Zeroville) pulls these implausible elements together and creates an intriguing book about the past, politics, and the nature of fiction.