‘Something New Under the Sun’: A Climate Nightmare in a Burning Los Angeles
SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUNBy Alexandra Kleeman Something is burning in “Something New Under the Sun,” off in the distance, at the seam of the …
SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
By Alexandra Kleeman
Something is burning in “Something New Under the Sun,” off in the distance, at the seam of the sightline. The land is on fire, dully but durably, its condition relayed from time to time in the measured tones of the weather report. “Winds are low today, and the fires burn in place,” we are told, matter-of-factly. It’s “terrible, definitely,” thinks Patrick Hamlin, a writer “on the cusp of his 40s with a body of middling fitness and three books that no one on this coast ever inquires about,” who has come to Los Angeles for his first-and-last chance, a film adaptation of his novel with a once-bankable, now tabloid-tragic teen star. “But it’s not really an emergency,” he decides, “if you can drive around it.”
What constitutes an emergency? That is one of the questions posed, with chilly, stylish composure, by Alexandra Kleeman’s new novel, “Something New Under the Sun,” an unlikely amalgam of climate horror story, movie-industry satire and made-for-TV mystery. Its dreamy Los Angeles is a waking nightmare whose contours emerge in offhand asides. Kleeman’s dystopia reveals itself slowly, normalcy curdling in the boil. Protesters are causing traffic disruptions on the 10. Droughts have depleted the water supply. And always, elsewhere, the fire: “Somewhere beyond view, the brush is burning in the bright daylight, orange scraps of flame dulled by the sunlight,” Kleeman writes. “The sound of small life fleeing from the fire, scurrying toward more fire elsewhere.”
The varieties of emergency — ecological, psychological, familial, medical — are the half-hidden subject of Kleeman’s novel, burning at the periphery of what begins as a modishly detached rollick through Hollywood and its empty promises. (It’s not easy to rollick with detachment, but this kind of oxymoronic pirouette is a Kleeman specialty; one of Patrick’s other books is an “epic novella,” for instance.) Patrick has left his wife and daughter on the East Coast to come west and seek his fortune, ending up as a production assistant (“Isn’t that a job for a kid?” his wife asks, wisely) on a movie that doesn’t sound much like his book anymore, whose director disappears, whose whole setup, he thinks, “feels rickety, temporary, like it’s not put together to last.” Meanwhile, menace is seeping inevitably in. Never leave fires burning unattended.
In the maybe-present-day of Kleeman’s Los Angeles, droughts have drained the water supply. (In our present day, 85 percent of California experienced “extreme drought” in July, and experts call the current water shortage in the West an “existential issue.”) Water has been replaced by WAT-R, a commercial substitute that comes in a rainbow of flavors and sub-brands (WAT-R Extra, WAT-R Energy Surge, WAT-R Wildly Wet), an improvement on the natural element as long as you don’t mind that ice won’t float in it, or the thin blue film that collects at the top. “My buddy who’s in science told me that it happens because WAT-R is a little more ‘social’ than the old stuff,” one character explains. “It’s the same as water, just a little bit more so.”
Cassidy Carter, the bratty diva star of the film, won’t touch the stuff. Few others can afford such expensive scruples. Real water has become a luxury few can afford; Patrick, like the other P.A.s, chugs all the WAT-R the production happily supplies, and he washes with it at night at the motel where he’s put up. As the book’s aperture widens, it’s WAT-R, WAT-R everywhere: In front of homes in unprosperous neighborhoods, WAT-R pods block the sidewalk, waiting to be refilled by visiting tankers once a week.
It’s hard to stop short of spoilers when describing “Something New Under the Sun,” though the above leaves out large swaths of plot, most especially the experience of Patrick’s fragile wife, Alison, and precocious daughter, Nora, who have removed themselves to a camp in upstate New York that sounds very much like a cult: a commune called Earthbridge where every day begins with a public mourning for the species and environmental features that have perished, run by a couple who “used to work at HBO.” (Kleeman’s first novel, “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,” published in 2015, also sent a main character into cultdom.) Alison, whose panic over the devastations Patrick treats as pathological, is the novel’s moral center. But she’s a center at the sidelines, a continent away. The energy and action is all powered by the odd-couple detective team of Patrick and Cassidy, gallivanting through Los Angeles, investigating the shoddiness of the film they’re both counting on to succeed, the artificial WAT-R with its faint taste of marshmallow and the mysterious armada of green medical vans whose vigilance seems increasingly required.
Theirs is a screwball comedy in a sci-fi hellscape, a freighted parable with an antic disposition and a cool affect. But the balance wobbles. Kleeman, who is often compared to postmodern writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, can turn a beautiful sentence, but she can seem overfond of the funhouse-mirror refractions between reality, surreality and whatever middle dimension between them exists on television and film. (One reason that Cassidy Carter turns out to be effective is the lessons she has absorbed from her hit television show, “Kassi Keane: Kid Detective,” whose obsessive fans haunt online forums to perform a parallel investigation of their own, close-reading the series for clues to an ominous and hazily defined “Big Reveal.”) “Something New Under the Sun” is more plotted than “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,” which struggled under the weight of its thoughtful aimlessness, but in satirizing pop-culture ephemera, it ultimately bends to their same gravity. Its plot contrivances and stock villains are as convenient as Scooby Doo’s.
Maybe that doesn’t matter. Parody requires fidelity, at least to a degree. But Kleeman seems to lose interest in the mystery scheme by the end, anyway. Which only makes sense: Solving crimes against the environment doesn’t obviate crimes against the environment, and the novel hurtles toward a dissolution that feels both unsatisfying and apt. It is a ghost story not of the past but of the near future, a ghost story as alarm bell, one hard to leave in the realm of fiction. In July, 60 fires were raging across the Western United States, incinerating hundreds of thousands of acres in Oregon, Idaho, Arizona and California; the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection maintains an updated website of “active fires of interest,” like climatological gossip. Of the 20 largest wildfires in California since recording began, 17 have been since the year 2000, and six were in 2020 alone. That is not to discuss the record temperatures across the region, the reservoirs draining. We are living, as Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington put it recently, in a “permanent emergency.” Good luck driving around that.