I’m a lazy reader. I expect plots to move from Point A to B to C in a linear fashion, time to flow in chronological order, and the narrator to maintain a consistent voice throughout.
Edie Meidav (pictured right) chooses to eschew such conventional literary devices in her new novel, Lola, California (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28). It’s a confusing presentation that at first verges on incoherent but ultimately converges into an engrossing character study, the most significant of which may be the narrator.
Lana is the only child of Vic and Mary Mahler, he a professor of neurobiology and she a professor of ethnology at Berkeley, a “town inhaling during the corset of the Reagan years,” and where “no household lacks its bedside copy of Gibran’s The Prophet.” Vic became something of a celebrity guru when he “slid into philosophy and finally social punditry and edicts heeded by a swelling mass of followers.” The Mahlers refer to the followers as the “shaggys” because of their unkempt appearance; they worship him, camp out on his front lawn, and follow him around like love-sick puppies. It’s a difficult existence for Lana, being the only child of two overachievers, and in the midst of a trove of sycophants vying against her for her father’s attention.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2011.