Zeroville

This is NOT your run-of-the mill Hollywood novels though almost every page is referential to one movie or another or one star or another. The protagonist, a loner named Vikar, is noted particularly for a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in a scene from “A Place in the Sun.” The tat is easy to see because Vikar’s head is shaved. The novel is about obsession—mostly Vikar’s with the movies and with Clift and Taylor, but also the obsession movie people have with profits, the ladder of success and the politics of movie-making. That obsession never takes over the often irrational world of Vikar whose adventures take him from Hollywood to Cannes to Oslo and other places in search, ultimately, for the original print of a silent film of the life of Joan of Arc. Along the way he picks up yet another obsession with a beautiful but suspicious actress named Soledad and her daughter, Zazi, a strange waif in her own right. This is a book about the possibility that the movies are watching us as much as we watch movies. Sort of a parallel with the theory that the world is not real, but is actually a computer program that is being manipulated by the Cosmic Geek. If that sounds somewhat bizarre, so is this novel.

It is written in very short, sometimes one word, chapters that run from 1 to 227. Chapter 227 reads: “Vikar doesn’t know it, but everything has now been reset to zero.” From there the chapters run in reverse until they end, not at all where they began.

It’s impossible not to find a fascination with Vikar. Who is he? Is he mad or is it the world around him? Does he really see the people he thinks he sees or are they figments of his imagination based on film characters? Are the movie characters more real and more meaningful than the minor players who populate Vikar’s life? We are never sure, nor need we be. That’s part of the appeal of this odd journey into a world that, face it, is all pretend and celluloid anyway. It is we, who make it real, who have to find our way back to normalcy after leaving the theater. Somehow, Vikar can never make that journey.