Arc d'X

Arc d'X (1993), by Steve Erickson, is an Avantpop novel. Upon publication in 1993 it received wide attention from other novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins and William Gibson, and it has been translated into Italian, Japanese and other languages.

The story begins as a historical novel, telling the story of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his Afro-American mistress Sally Hemings, a young woman with a "skin that was too white to be quite black and too black to be quite white." Erickson focuses on the period Jefferson spent in France at the beginning of the French Revolution (in one of the climactic scenes of the first part there is a nightmarish description of the storming of the Bastille). After "Thomas" and Sally become lovers the couple return to the United States, with Hemings remaining a slave even as her children are set free; this agreement between the lovers seems to have a powerful symbolic value for the rest of the novel, as "it was the nature of American freedom that he was only free to take pleasure in something he possessed."

An abrupt change in the narrative finds Hemings leaving Jefferson after he is elected President of the United States. In a departure from factual history Hemings travels West, reaching a territory where Native Americans have never seen black or white people. There, in a room where a murder has taken place, Sally wakes in an alternate present when the United States have disappeared; the action is set in Aeonopolis, a strange city under harsh theocratic rule and built near a volcano on the West Coast of North-America (though there is no overt indication about the exact position of the city). Sally meets an Afro-American police detective named Wade who sets her free because he doesn't believe she is guilty of the murder, though the priests want her prosecuted. After a dramatic confrontation Wade deserts the police force and hides in the Arboretum, a vast subterranean construct beyond the jurisdiction of the Church and police where the illegal activity centers on a nightclub called Fleurs d'X and Wade becomes fascinated by a dancer named Mona.