Posted: 07/01/2014 4:41 pm EDT Updated: 07/01/2014 5:59 pm EDT
CALIFORNIA EDAN LEPUCKI
Maddie Crum
[email protected]
California
by Edan Lepucki
Little, Brown, $26.00
Publishes July 8, 2014
The Book We’re Talking About is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.
What we think:
“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,” Joan Didion wrote in “Los Angeles Notebook,” an essay using the Santa Ana phenomenon as a metaphor for California’s apocalyptic state. She continues, “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” She quotes Nathaniel West and Raymond Carver to accentuate her point, which is: California is the ideal setting for a story about the end of the world.
Edan Lepucki must’ve agreed, as she chose to set her debut novel in the sunshine state. You might’ve heard about California from Stephen Colbert. It publishes with Little, Brown next week, an imprint under the Hachette umbrella, and thus was swept up in the most recent Amazon ruckus. Colbert’s book, too, was a victim of Amazon’s decision to remove Hachette titles from their site, so he’s taken it upon himself to encourage viewers to pick up Lepucki’s title — a dystopian romp through a suddenly rural California — at an independent bookstore.
The story opens with Cal and Frida, a couple that has chosen to flee Los Angeles, one of many American cities that has fallen to shambles due to a sudden oil crisis and a slew of global warming-related natural disasters. As a result, the very wealthy have migrated to cloistered “Communities,” where they have highly coveted Internet access, among other luxuries. The rest of the country either lives in squalor in drug-addled former cities, or off the grid, as Cal and Frida have opted to do.