A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit
..........(Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006) .....

From the publisher:

"In three penetrating essays, novelist, critic, and teacher Eric Larsen describes an increasingly desperate situation. "America's citizens are plagued by despair and frustration. Our political and social cultures are riven by issues morally complex and yet presented with simple-minded hostility. Can it be, in the sixty years since World War II—when America stood at the pinnacle of national honor, strength, prestige, and power—that a dread transformation has taken place that's changed the very nature of America socially, culturally, and politically? Has even, perhaps, changed the very nature of the American individual? If so, what caused this change? What's the matter with Kansas? What has happened to the once proud leader of the free world? How secure is our future? Does the republic stand, or have we lost it already?"
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FICTION:

.........."I first recommended [for my book club discussion] one of my all time favorites, Eric Larsen's dazzling diptych, An American Memory and I Am Zoë Handke—but the books are sadly out of print. Hunt them down and read them. Immediately."
..............................—Virginia Holman, author of Rescuing
..............................Patty Hearst, in The Durham North
..............................Carolina Independent Weekly,
..............................September 10-16, 2003


(A Note on Chronology in the Novels:

The tetralogy of novels that begins with An American Memory and goes on to I Am
Zoë Handke has as its third part The End of the 19th Century. Like most of An
American Memory, that novel is "told" by Malcolm Reiner, and it functions both
as a prequel to his earlier book (it goes back farther both into family history
and into Malcolm’s childhood than An American Memory did)and as a sequel—
it also comes farther forward in time, going as far as 2010, the year that Malcolm
supposedly "narrates" it. In the case of the fourth book, The Decline and Fall of the
American Nation, the span is even greater (and the voices more mixed, though
Malcolm’s remains the central one). This last of the four books goes into the
future all the way to 2147.

Here is a list showing the span of time, in one way or another, covered by each
of the novels. It might be helpful in orienting people who want to read the excerpts,
especially those from the unpublished books:

An American Memory: 1922-1974
I Am Zoë Handke: 1859-1981
The End of the 19th Century: 1855-2010
The Decline and Fall of the American Nation: 1853-2147)


An American Memory
..........(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1988)

From the publisher:

"In An American Memory the past is the enemy. This haunting first novel is the scarred history of three generations of the Reiner family—descendents of Norwegian pioneers—whose portraits are sketched against the vast spread of the Midwestern plains. Seen through the eyes of the third generation, An American Memory captures the land’s pulsating rhythms and a boy’s isolation. The boy, Malcolm, lives in a sparsely furnished house on a half-abandoned farm near the town of West Tree, Minnesota. He is a quiet child who grows up listening."
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I Am Zoë Handke ....................
..........(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1992)

From the publisher:

"At the end of Eric Larsen’s prizewinning first novel, An American Memory, the hero, Malcolm Reiner, married. And, as Malcolm, whose upbringing threatened to cripple him forever, reported, 'We have agreed to marry and leave the Midwest.' Now I Am Zo‘ Handke, Eric Larsen’s extraordinary portrait of the strange, grave, elegant girl Malcolm married, completes the story of a deeply dependent marriage."
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The End of the 19th Century
....................(Unpublished)


The study of place and character that began in An American Memory continues with The End of the Nineteenth Century. Set again in West Tree, Minnesota, the events in this story sometimes take place earlier than those in Larsen’s first novel, although at the same time the whole extends a considerable time beyond the ending-point of An American Memory, going, in fact, into the future. In this climactic third in the tetralogy of novels, what Malcolm Reiner sets out to do is create what will constitute, essentially, his own intellectual autobiography, putting himself in the ancient tradition of self-explorations from St. Augustine onwards.
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The Decline and Fall of the American Nation
....................(Unpublished)


The collapse of the American nation took place at the end of the Late Ultimate (2037-2041). For some eighty years following that event, what came to be known worldwide as "the Larsen Papers" lay undiscovered under the rubble of New York City, or, more exactly, under the rubble of Non-Presidential Hall of The Actaeon College of Institutional Analysis and Social Control, The University of New York (New York, New York, United States of America). It was this institution, after all, in which Eric Larsen still continued to struggle as a doomed member of the faculty as late as the Middle and even the Late Ante-Penultimate Periods of the Collapse—as late, that is, as the years approximately 1996 through 2006. Vol. 16 of the 21st Century’s magisterial and most indispensable work of historical scholarship, The Decline and Fall of the American Nation, as every reader knows, consists entirely of these Larsen papers...
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