A most odd and challenging romance of risk, dream, and women unfolds in this story about a mother and her son. As soon as I have said this about Steve Erickson’s new novel Our Ecstatic Days, I am in trouble. The huge scope of the book and the shifting, palimpsest-like ground on which these imagined events take place call into question the story itself and its intricate and elusive characters.

Chapter headings ostensibly help the reader track the time frame: it extends from Tiananmen Square, Beijing, Spring 1989 (ending the twentieth century, we’re told) and 9/11 (opening the twenty-first), all the way up to 2089. A century, in short. But there is much more to Erickson’s plan than a map of revolution and catastrophe. Readers of his earlier novels will be familiar with the unsettling force of images driving his lyrical, on-the-brink narratives toward dark fable and communal unconsciousness. In Leap Year, about a 1980s political campaign, he invokes Jefferson’s slave mistress Sally Hemings to mediate the mixed racial premise of this country. In Days Between Stations, a future hallucinates arid landscapes, dry Venetian canal beds, Los Angeles sandstorms.

Our Ecstatic Days takes a deeper plunge. In the middle of L.A. there rises a huge lake that threatens a normally “droughtridden” city with, curiously, an influx of imagination and memory. Haunted by submerged and inwardly canalled buildings, plied by small boats, watched by a subdued population along its shores, the lake is the richest of Erickson’s visions to date. One night a single mother, Kristin, and her little boy, Kirk (short for Kierkegaard), venture out in a gondola and pause in the middle. Suddenly she vanishes into the lake. When she returns to the boat, she is apparently horrified to find Kirk gone.

The reader needs to know why she left him, because the Why may help us understand How things happen in Erickson’s instinctive, ceremonial world. Kristin leaves Kirk in order to plumb the lake and counteract a danger that threatens her son; her rapturous love for her son is “the ritual no mother can win.” Still “hearing his heart” as she sinks into the lake, Kristin loses him but finds herself—through our old archetype Water as Rebirth. She descends to the bottom of the lake (perhaps further still) through a “birth canal” which passes into an alternative lake.

Having lost “bits of everyone I’ve ever been,” Kristin emerges from the lake as an alter self, Lulu Blu, dominatrix oracle whose sadomasochistic disciplines satisfy men’s terrible need to be free of the power they wield on women and the world—or so we are told in quietly lurid scenes more wry than surprising, yet central for Erickson’s theme...