The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 13 December 2024
by Alexandra Kleeman
In the coming decades, it will become clear that fresh water will be the most precious, scarce, and valuable natural resource. As Global Wierding proceeds unchecked, we are watching extreme weather events all over the planet. One day, it's a thousand-year flood, just a few weeks after the last thousand-year flood. The floods break the thousand-year drought. California grows so parched that people are buying water from treatment plants so they can water their ridiculous lawns. It can be imagined that some techno-corporate wags would manufacture something that is like water, but not quite water, to keep things hydrated. Is it plausible? Not really. Nothing like that could be manufactured at the scale we're talking about. But that doesn't mean they won't try. Things that are like water but not quite water are already all over the market. Is it because people are bored with water itself? People will learn quickly just how precious plain old water really is, when the only alternative is a five-dollar bottle of "Hint". It is within this frightening context that Alexandra Kleeman places her novel, with its echoes of fiction ranging from Octavia Butler to The Day of the Locust.
There's a a subgenre of fiction that sets out to lay waste to California. It seems that the state, so much the fantasy of global dreams of beauty and wealth, is also the first place we imagine the affects of global collapse to come down the hardest. The state is a symbol of success, but also of excess. Its extremes invite us to imagine it as the first to go down when it all goes down. In this novel, for example, the hills around Los Angeles are perpetually ablaze, casting a pall over everything. Eventually, one of those blazes inches down a hill into Malibu, threatening the home of one of our protagonists. Is it really a coincidence that, as we write this, a real life blaze is raging uncontained near Malibu? These fires are so inevitable as to be expected. But we get ahead of ourselves.
Patrick, our hero, comes to Hollywood as a book he wrote is being adapted into a movie, starring former child actress Cassidy Carter. But that is just the beginning of the long slow slide into dissolution and post-apocalyptic visions. The production company is not necessarily what it appears. The characters are quirky and erudite. The very water he drinks isn't even water. It is better than water. And it seems to be the source of all that is going wrong, rather than the fresh water that is supposed to be the source of all life. California is out of water, and the place is collapsing under the certainty of its own hubris and blithe dismissal of nature's requirements. The book is an odyssey around Los Angeles of the not too distant future, both familiar and horrifyingly prophetic. Kleeman's prose is beautifully descriptive, almost lovingly caressing the frightening story she is telling. Strange, quirky, literary and sad, this book is to be recommended.
[See also: Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins ]