Book Review: “California” by Edan Lepucki
At the End of the World
I’ve had my copy of Edan Lepucki’s dystopian novel California for nearly 10 years now. I was scheduled to review the novel for a popular U.S. webzine, but somehow the book got double-assigned to another writer. Since this book’s author was a relative unknown (California was her debut novel), I wound up being the odd man out. Only one review would be published, and my assigning editor went with the other writer — who probably had had fewer books on their slate to review. That’s how I’ve had a copy of this book on my To Be Read list for almost a decade, but I decided to get around to reading it now to see if the novel still holds up — and does it ever! Since this is a volume about what life would be like at the end of the world, California is perhaps more relevant in 2023 than when it was first released, especially since we have all endured the COVID-19 pandemic and also the continuing challenges of climate change. Lepuckki was quite prescient when she wrote this, as though she had access to a wormhole, and peeked into it to see how society would play out.
The book’s setting and period are a bit muddled, but it seems as though it is largely set in rural California in the 2050s. Essentially, society has broken down, and those humans who remain live in urban enclaves of a sort or have escaped into the bush country. Frida and Cal, a thirtysomething married couple, have chosen the latter route of living — having fled from a crumbling Los Angeles. They live in the wilderness in a makeshift house made by people who had died in mysterious circumstances. Frida, at the novel’s outset, suspects that she’s pregnant and she and Cal (short for Calvin but also short for his nickname, California) decide to leave their piece of safety and see if they can find others who can help Frida give birth. They stumble on an encampment of sorts, run by Frida’s brother — who they had suspected was dead. Both Cal and Frida must prove that they’re worthy of living in the settlement, but the longer they stay, they find out more and more hidden secrets that may jeopardize their safety and that of their unborn child.
When California was released, it came with a boatload of hype: the book was blurbed by hip authors such as Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Dana Spiotta, and the novel seems to have been caught in some kind of feud between Stephen Colbert and Amazon that might have helped generate book sales. However, I do remember reading a handful of reviews of the novel that were lukewarm at best. And that’s probably the best that I can say about California — it has its pluses, and it has its minuses. Its main asset is how creepy it was in predicting the future. While society hasn’t entirely broken down, it has been damaged by years of pandemic life. And, to that end, the book can be eerie in just how it portrays where society might be going if we don’t do something to curb natural and man-made disasters. The book is particularly dark, especially at the outset, and there’s a sense of loneliness and a lack of meaningful community that pervades the text. However, there are some liabilities to this read, too: Lepucki is a writer of the tell, don’t show variety, which means that large pieces of the plot are info dumped into dialogue. As well, it turns out that life in the apocalypse can be rather tedious (which the author even admits to in the text of this book at one point, perhaps as a bit of an in-joke that even she can’t believe how boring life after doomsday would really be like). There’s not a heck of a lot of action to be had here, just a lot of hard labour being done to keep the colony going and various politicking between characters. While things sort of do pick up in the last quarter of the book, reading California can feel sometimes like a chore.
Still, with the scales pretty evenly balanced between the pros and cons of this read, there might be something in this book for someone who likes dystopian science fiction. At the very least, the book is creative in terms of how it frames the breakdown of society and how individuals live and interact within gated communities of a sort. California can also have its moments of cleverness: a band of marauders that people live in fear of is called Pirates, but the name of a college that most of the characters attended at one point in the past is called Plank. (Think about it for a moment, if you need to.) Even if some of the dialogue is stilted and ham-fisted from the fact that much of the book’s plot is placed within it, the book can be of interest to those looking for something a little different from their usual diet of SF. Whether you should read California is a matter of how interested you are in post-apocalyptic societies, but if you are then there might be something here for you. Certainly, this is an important piece of fiction that has its place still in the year 2023 and is a notch above your usual escapist fare. This at least attempts to be literary in some sense, so SF snobs who insist on blazing action a mile a minute will not be delighted with this. But those who can appreciate the book’s atmosphere and the storytelling of ideas may enjoy it. As the cliché goes, I suppose this is worth a look as long as the subject matter is up your alley. I can only wonder how I would have thought about this book had I read it and reviewed it as originally intended in the year 2014, when it was first published in hardcover. The scales would have been probably tipped to one side or another, and would have eschewed the middle ground taken here.
Edan Lepucki’s California was published by Black Bay Books on July 7, 2015.
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