At night I lie prostrate listening to the dry wind weave through the brittle grass outside the window. The fan exhales hot, humming air, more sound than substance, from where it sits by the door. Down the hill, a lone sprinkler, spindly atop its tripod base, emits a low, stuttering hiss of water. When I step outside at six thirty in the morning, the weight of an incendiary, furious heat threatens to puncture the thin clear membrane of blue cool that hangs over me, and by ten, the leaves on the oak trees are waxy in the pale light, fluttering as gusts of pure heat twirl through the branches. “Wow,” someone next to me says, “I sure can feel that sun.” This is a California summer, characterized by the dry heat which all Californians speak of obsessively, fondly, even as its cauterizing, shimmering power increases over us year after year after year.
Alexandra Kleeman’s 2021 novel Something New Under the Sun examines California’s summer season the same way I do, with an unending fascination for the alien beauty of the landscape we inhabit and the strange psychological sensations that accompany it. Kleeman’s protagonist, the writer Patrick Hamlin, moves to Los Angeles to work as a PD, where he carts around actress Cassidy Carter and her contract payouts of “100%” bottled water, a luxury relative to the chemical compound WAT-R that drenches fires, floods swimming pools, and quenches thirst (but only kind of) through a newly privatized irrigation system. Kleeman’s writing operates within a decidedly postmodern and menacing mode, but it isn't too far from Joan Didion’s 1960s writing on California from the Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Both women fixate on water, the lack of it, how it shapes Californian living like nothing else, and how the region itself is amorphous and forever in flux — how, despite its fantastical history of opportunity, endless sunshine, and forever warmth, the true California is the hardest thing of all to pin down.
But Didion writes that the "city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself" in "Los Angeles Notebook," so early in the novel, Kleeman of course situates Hamlin in the midst of this image. As a spray of WAT-R douses a large hillside burn, he observes
the vapor resembles a scale model of the sky-sized smoke clouds overhead: rising from the blistered dirt, a wall of thick, pale translucence, it billows and folds and curls over itself like a body protecting its soft underside. With its frail opalescent blue tint, it is more beautiful than it should be: if it were ordinary, you would not stop to watch it. But it drifts like a dream on the hot fire-borne wind, a gauzy shadow passing across the unburnt scrub, changing shape from cloud to mist, casting its almost imperceptible blueness on the unburnt oaks crouched tight at the base of the valley.
Kleeman’s prose here is so lovely and utterly weird, pushing granular details to the forefront and then sliding so far backwards that detail starts to coalesce. Juxtapositions like “thick, pale translucence,” “like a dream on the hot fire-borne wind,” and “a body protecting its soft underside” enhance the looming feelings of un-nature and danger. Readers have the unsettling, unnerving sense that something is off, that because things are “more beautiful” than they should be, they are not what they seem, a sinister forewarning of the destruction to come. In “Los Angeles Notebook,” Didion also writes that “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.” Kleeman agrees — the end, in her novel at least, is near.
By the final chapters, after it becomes increasingly apparent that WAT-R is wreaking serious devastation on life forms of all kinds, Hamlin and Carter spend weeks, or maybe days, tracing spies and conspiracies and factories, only to end up like everyone else — unsure of where they’re going, where they’re from, haunted by the deadly vision of a gray suited man (presumably a personification of the Earth-killing capitalistic system). Kleeman writes scarily, but peacefully, of the death of our characters and their environment: “Only this time all does seem to be truly, irrecoverably lost. The strange rain sloughs through the desert floor, carving channels where they never existed before. Loneliness is a blue mist tinging everything it touches. Slender branches shudder under the weight of the sky.” There is a great tenderness in the physicality of this passage. For such an undeniably damning piece of climate fiction, even the illustration of the California landscape’s atypical, post-apocalyptic renewal is hopeful and tender. There is nothing and there is newness at once. In “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Didion remarks, “All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.” But Kleeman here offers that California's reappearance might be the more important thing.
While Didion remains emphatic about California’s intangible, inconclusive essence (“It should be clear by now that the truth about the place is elusive, and must be tracked with caution,” from “Notes”), she turns finally to the water for clarity: “I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.” Kleeman does the same, looking at rivers as the past and the future of California, where we come from and where we are going. In two sentences pulled from deep, intimate pockets of time, she speaks of a stream from the “long before,” ending the novel with a broken, gorgeous memory, perhaps a prophecy for an age beyond the white-hot burning of our current day, one marked by a return to the enlivening power of water, and one brimming with lightness and feeling: “You could wade shin-deep into the running and gaze down at your own two feet, pale as cave fishes in the morning bright. In the cold, every muscle of the foot felt as if it was outlined in pure, sweet light, the pain like the ache of too much running, too much life. With your eyes closed, you stood there growing colder, growing numb, until the cold was gone and your body was absent too, the feeling of nothing, the feeling of movement, the feeling of being river, of keeping the cycle, of rushing downstream to the open sea.”
Cover: Detail of "Hollywood" (1968) by Ed Ruscha
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