California, Unbound

AboutTown, Winter 2013
Hudson Valley Bookshelf

A REVIEW OF
Lola, California
By Edie Meider

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover, 452 pages, $28

Lola, California by Edie Meidav, writer in residence at Bard College, is unwieldy and brilliant. Meidav came to Bard in 2006 as the Bard Fiction Prize recipient for that year and this is her third novel, following The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (2001) and Crawl Space (2005).

Lola, California attempt nothing less than an encapsulation of the rapturous dystopia along the western coast of our nation; Part parody, part bildungsroman, the book strains at its seams as it attempts to distill the essence of California and navigates its characters through a world overflowing with choices but lacking any meaningful values with which to chose from among them.

Set between Berkeley and Los Angeles (“Ellay”), with forays to the seedier parts of the eastern seaboard, Lola recounts the tale of two girls, Lana and Rose–collectively “the Lolas”– as they trip, Lolita-like, into adulthood, through a vertiginous series of flash-backs whirling us between 1988 and 2008: “The girls have been stretching into the luxury of high-school summer between sophomore and junior years…When in the car’s model temple, they dedicate themselves to hedonism or exhibitionism, busy tanning their legs out the car window”… Maliciously grinning, Oz-like, over each page of this book is Lana’s father, Victor Mahler, and erstwhile professor at Berkeley with an ego larger than the State itself: “… When in a motel they go giggling in polka-dot bikinis to soak up chorine in a motel pool while Vic, on various shaded lounge chairs, wears reading glasses and peruses journals, rolling them up only to kill mosquitoes drawn to the tight cordon of his professor legs.”

“Professor legs” Mahler is a pompous fraud who has made a profession of amassing groupies and preaching a New-Age-like brand of Promethean self-empowerment. Meidav conveys this with a sly wit. As Mahler intones to his disciples at one of his legendary Berkeley events": “This is not to say that, in terms of the pop psychologist, you are condemned like a slave to server your bliss, or that like some child despot you alone create your reality, but rather that endless hope remains for those of us who believe they have been locked into some dusty Freudian legerdemain…there is not time like the present to understand all the selves feasible in your own lifetime, not to mention the vestigial selves locked in your metaphysical DNA.”

Whether or not one comes to feel that Mahler’s out-sized narcissism in itself warrants the electric chair, Mahler has, in fact, committed and actual crime the nature of which is not revealed until the end of the boo. He wastes away throughout the 430 pages of Lola, Califormia at a maximum security prison somewhere east of “Ellay”.

Lana Mahler is the very embodiment of Mahler’s religion of indulgent entitlement. The choices she makes are at best foolish and puerile, and, at worst, are infected by the same chilling self-justification that fuels Mahler’s capital offense? If only the moral construct is the one given to us by Mahler, we’re all, as Lana’s mother says of Lana, socio-paths in the making.

Together, the eponymous “Lolas” represent the many faces of their sur-name. Like California, Meidav’s world is not entirely vacuous and unprincipled - it is also gloriously, heartbreakingly, full of promos. In this, Meidav’s language is so evocative that it reaches off the page to stroke and unsettled soul. Describing Lana’s children, Meidav writes: “One held his hands as if still tickling the inside of the womb’s walls, a bent bird-wing, while the other’s new strained against an invisible collar. For this long moment she held each before placing them down, patting them in, covering them with her fleece, hand steady on their bellies in a rush of pure stavism. Never had she been around anyone so young, anyone whose promos was still so much a question: you had to wonder how responsible the world would be towards such perfect creatures.”

One feels at times that Meidav believe herself consigned to death-row, writing as if her life depended upon it – memorializing in Lola, California every description, every moment, every thought, every theme – as if there wouldn’t be time or occasion for another book. But if Meidav’s crime is one of exuberant over-load this is perhaps the price she pays for carrying more of the world on her shoulders than anyone could hold. Let’s hope that Meidav’s sentence is commuted – that she has many more years to work through her extravagantly luminous prose, and continues to help us define and describe the world we live in with clarity and grace.