On the map, their destination had been a stretch of green, as if they would be living on a golf course. No freeways nearby, or any roads, really: those had been left to rot years before. Frida had given this place a secret name, the afterlife, and on their journey, when they were forced to hide in abandoned rest stops, or when they'd filled the car with the last of their gasoline, this place had beckoned. In her mind it was a township, and Cal was the mayor. She was the mayor's wife.OK, see right there in the book's opening paragraph? The world is going to crap -- California isn't set in the post-apocalypse so much as in the time after the disintegration of systems following a series of natural disasters and attendant disease; there's government collapse and people are sequestering themselves into patrolled communities that are either for the very rich or the anarchists, leaving ordinary people to decide whether to seek the shelter of groups or to strike out into the wilderness; I've seen this considered "mid-apocalypse" -- and a young married couple makes the bold decision to leave society behind, and in this brave new world, a township of two, Frida thinks that her husband will be the mayor and she can be the mayor's wife.
According to author Edan Lepucki, "My goal at the outset was to write a 'post-apocalyptic domestic drama' -- that is, I was most interested in depicting a marriage against this larger, high-stakes backdrop." And I did not believe this marriage for one second. Cal and Frida lie to each other and keep secrets from each other constantly, and although they have plenty of great sex -- often out in the open forest -- they have nothing in common. I totally understand why in a survivalist situation labour should be divided by skillset (I don't care if Frida does all the laundry while Cal makes snares), but the character of Frida will make a comment about how Cal should help her forage on one page, and on the next, will be amused that she can fill a sack with roots and berries in the time it takes Cal to find four shrivelled mushrooms. California is filled with feminist tinged musings (Frida insists on carrying her own backpack to prove she isn't helpless, Frida wonders why armed guards are never women when holding a gun requires no particular strength, Frida wonders why a group has an exclusively male council making all the decisions), but in every situation -- from the all-male college that Cal attends in the beginning to the glimpse into one of the super rich communities at the end (where women are all expected to be stay-at-home Moms while the menfolk work in offices) -- I am supposed to believe that in the near future, as society collapses, all of these California-raised women are going to revert to Leave it to Beaver-era gender roles? Every one of these women, in whatever living situation they find themselves in, would be content to be "the mayor's wife"?
There were many other things I found frustrating or poorly written in this book:
• Early on, Frida says that she often narrates her life as it's happening-- as though she's still a blogger like she was as a teenager -- she demonstrates what she means and then that never happens again.
• We're in a post-something world, and no one wants to talk about how they got there. There are references to an earthquake in California and a killer snowstorm in Ohio and a deadly flu in Florida, but no real details are given, and no explanation is given for why the government collapsed. Everyone wants to forget about the past (and so we readers don't get that information) and even when Cal and Frida meet another couple in the woods and Cal says, "We never thought we'd meet anyone else here in…", the other man cuts him off saying, "We prefer not to talk about where we are". So, while we might assume they're in California (since the couple started in L.A.), that's not confirmed, and as for the title? "California" was the nickname that Frida's brother had given to Cal at school. Why make all that so muddled? If Lepucki was aiming for some universality to the setting, what's with the title?
• Every time there is some slightly intriguing detail (Why are people afraid of the colour red? Why are there no children on the Land? How does August get his trading goods? What happened to the Millers?), the explanation is teasingly deferred until you just don't care anymore and then, when given, is eye-rollingly lame.
• All of the real action happens off of the page -- Frida remembering suicide bombers and Cal learning of future attacks -- so that there is zero sense of urgency right now. This couple is never starving or freezing or struggling to survive, and as they whine and bicker and then make up again in a perpetually repeating cycle, it's hard for the reader to root for them.
• ** this is the only real spoiler**: Micah is a taboo subject because he blew himself up, but wait he's alive and in charge and gave all the Land's babies to a Community to cement trade relations so he can infiltrate their capitalist pigdog society and blow them up. Aargh.
And I don't understand Lepucki's constant use of generic labels. She's basically writing a fantasy, where anything can be called anything, and she goes for:
• Devices: Never described, but presumably the one future object that will replace all iPhones/Blackberries/tablets/laptops. Remembered but useless by the time of the story.
• Plank: The all-male college where students are being prepared for an uncertain future with equal parts animal husbandry and humanities, creating a cabal of philosopher farmers (and yet, graduate Cal can't recognise edible berries or remember how to make a rabbit snare).
• The Group: The subversive group of performance artists and suicide bombers trying to hasten the end of society.
• Communities: The gated communities built for the super rich.
• Spikes: The spikey structures (terrifyingly covered in objects like dolls and orange construction cones) meant to keep out pirates.
• Forms: What the builders of the spikes actually call them.
• The Land: The area protected by the Spikes -- er -- Forms.
But as terrible as all this is, we shouldn't feel sorry for Edan Lepucki: Not only did California get the "Colbert Bump" when he used this book as an example in his anti-Amazon campaign, but both Lepucki and her husband gave it straight-faced five star reviews on goodreads. Obviously, our society's status quo is considered unsustainable and climate change could well lead to natural disasters that lead to a further gap between the haves and have-nots that precipitates an all-out civil war, and while a book that considers these issues seriously might be a significant and timely read, California is not that book. All it left me wondering was, if the end times descend, would Lepucki be content to let her husband be "the mayor"? Would she be content to play "the mayor's wife"?
