Aegis 2015
70
Book Review >>> Byron Brenneman
California Lupucki, Edan. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 400 pp.
With our world plagued with economic uncertainty, wealth inequality, political turmoil and unrest, it isn’t surprising that dystopian fiction seems to the popular choice amongst readers, especially young-adults. It does appear that we are a generation that loves to read about the peril and doom of the not-so-distant future. This is especially apparent after seeing the great success of Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games trilogy, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, novels that paint a picture of a very bleak future. Edan Lupucki’s debut novel, California, is yet another work of fiction that has latched onto this great wave of pessimism. Where The Hunger Games focuses bluntly on the malevolent conventions of wealthinequality and social-caste systems, others take a less political route, instead focusing on the effects of a post-apocalyptic world on interpersonal relationships, like that of The Road. California is a novel that attempts to take the middle ground, making a statement about wealth and inequality in our society, as well as focusing on the complexity of relationships, human emotions, and how secrets and anxieties can easily unravel seemingly steadfast personal bonds. The story paints a very morbid picture of a United States in certain and steady decline after a series of economic and environmental catastrophes mixed with social unrest finally broke ‘our perfect union.’ In the meantime, the wealthiest of citizens escape the ruins of the cities to live in places called Communities, walled little bubbles of upper-class suburban utopia that somehow manage to escape the destruction. With the wealthy, skilled and mobile having fled the cities for Communities, communes or forest homesteads, an urban climate of poverty, helplessness and despair is thus created. The story opens with the main characters, a young couple named Frida and Calvin, who have left the ruins of Los Angeles—a city which is now rife with “people starving on the sidewalks, covered in piss and crying out” (12). Seeing this as a bleak way to live, they decide to try a survivalist lifestyle, settling in a shed in a remote part of the Southern Californian wilderness. But they soon find that they are not alone, meeting the Millers, a family of four living not far from the couple. The elation of having someone to share in their desperation is sadly cut short when the Millers—without warning—are found dead in an apparent suicide by poison. Once again finding themselves completely isolated, Frida and Calvin are able to live for a year in near bliss, aside from the daily marital spats and bouts of loneliness that border on the edge of cabin fever. Their mundane woodland life is uprooted when Frida discovers that she is pregnant. The discovery of the pregnancy, mixed with the menacing feeling of constant isolation since
