Lepucki_CaliforniaDespite the fact that a certain television personality brought this book to the world’s attention, creating a publicity gold mine, I was already thinking about reading it because of my own interests in the end of the world. Sad as that may sound, my interests are warranted, because finding good stories about how it all will end is worthwhile. The Road set the bar impossibly high when it comes to post apocalyptic visions of the future, a story that leaves a mark on you like a gruesome tattoo. I warn people who haven’t tackled McCarthy’s masterpiece, that you can’t unread that book. Marcel Theroux’s Far North, which I read before California, put me on a fast train to find the best voice for this kind of writing. After reading Ms. Lepucki’s ridiculously compulsive and addicting novel, I believe the world won’t come to an end, but there will be a new beginning. The country will collapse, water will run out, or gas, something elemental that is blended deep in our fibers, and the strong will survive before the world resets. It’s how you make it through the reset that will matter most.

At first Ms. Lepucki creates a Garden of Eden and it seems like the last couple will be the first family. Cal and Frida tell their stories in alternating chapters, Cal a little cynical, but Frida has hope because of her own little surprise. We won’t know that secret, which hinges the book, for a few chapters. There is an immediate suspense and terror of living on the land, in a wilderness/desert just outside Los Angeles, and the voice is firmly naïve, plain and simple. Slowly we grow with this blissful couple into a safely intellectual space, that it is hard to notice how quickly you are being sucked into an exciting story. Cal and Frida live off what is left of the “grid”, the world collapsed because of a long slow decline; loss of natural resources, super storms, climate change, take your pick. It isn’t about how they got under the bridge, but how they will get out.

Along comes a wily man named August, the local traveling salesman, (I thought Twilight Zone), but not before Frida retells a story about another family that they bump into while doing laundry in the river, and they’re important, so pay attention. Cal and Frida live frugally, no power, hot water, food is grown, clothes are made, and they have dirt on top of their dirt. For reasons I will let you discover, (and please stop what you’re reading and pick this book up, I beg you) Cal and Frida are alone again, but not before a little bit of information is passed to Cal. At the edge of the wilderness he has heard news of a structure called The Forms, which as it turns out is a gateway to a settlement called The Land. But he doesn’t tell Frida right away, which is the first of many lies.

Frida and Cal met through Frida’s brother Micha, when Frida visited Micha at the college he and Cal attended; a place called Plank. Micha is an extreme believer in his dream of making the world take notice of him, and his cause, which seems to be slightly misguided. Micha is willing to risk it all to get anonymity, and restart a life where he is in charge, and I bet if he stayed around long enough he would go the Jonestown route. I really can’t tell you what Micha means to the story. If you’re familiar with a college that concentrates on farming, how to grow food, and live prosperously without much help from the rest of the world, then you will know this place called Plank. There is a school in Vermont called Putney School that does the same thing as Plank (sort of), and I went to summer camp in Nova Scotia (a camp a lot like The Land) run by a family that helped found Putney, and that camp changed my life. The Land is a place that looks like an old west outpost, a faded image on a post card, rutted streets for wagons, broken down homes, and dusty people living with their favorite pile of dirt. Cal and Frida learn so much in this place, they meet people they thought were dead, and discover that there is a paradise on the horizon, and that living through the reset was the hard part. What the world had become while they were “roughing it” is a tidy military state with shopping malls, fenced in office plazas, community, all inside a gated community.

Back to The Land; what is this world that Ms. Lepucki has created from the ashes of our current state of the nation? A place where everything ends slowly and people move out of the cities because they are not worth living in. The world has gone way down hill, and there is only bad just to warm you. But at the end of this world we discover a blissfully good, solid, regenerative quality to the way Cal and Frida are living, and it is the returning to the human world that dooms them. The problem with the earth has nothing to do with the land, or the way we’ve built it up on it, covering it with pavement, and squeezing it like an orange for all it’s juice. I often have to remind myself to never underestimate the other guy, especially if he is your brother. The Land is a place I would not want to visit, even if I were interested in living off the grid. The food sounded terrible, and the people are vigilant at the very least. Nothing is forever, not even the dictator at the center of this fantastic novel. I wish it were possible to get amnesia so I could read California again and again.