They liked movies from the 80’s: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Last Starfighter, Sixteen Candles, The Goonies, The Breakfast Club. Their lives were punctuated with junk food that they considered just food and by a succession of chain restaurants whose menus they knew by heart. Their father didn’t believe in global warming. It had been made up by The Left for political gain.
What did they believe in? That they were headed from their home in Montgomery, Alabama to California…via Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to be raptured…experiencing the first scheduled continental appearance of the Apocalypse.
Some of their friends and neighbors had gone farther, giving away their possessions, stripping their houses bare. It’s like they were preparing for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road because they had been tipped off in advance that it was happening.
That’s why Jess, the youngest daughter at 15, figures her father doesn’t care that he’s maxing out his credit cards on this last family road trip. The world is going to end before the bills come due. And it doesn’t matter that he’s lost another job.
The job loss is a secret but Jess and her older sister, Elise, know anyway. So the family is traveling in denial. Does that matter if the world is ending anyway? The family will be caught up in the rapture, preserved from harm, while the less fortunate below will endure the worst.
On each daughters’ neck, threaded on a chain, are their purity rings. At purity balls their father knelt on one knee, his daughters pledging their virginity until marriage. But Elise is already pregnant, not showing yet. Only her sister Jess knows. Elise’s boyfriend Dan, back in Alabama, is probably the father, yes?
Elise knows Dan truly loves her but she can’t get him on her cell. Jess is skeptical of the explanation: that Dan dropped his phone in a lake. What lake? And why can’t he borrow someone else’s cell and make a call?
Mary Miller’s delivery is drop dead deadpan, told through the voice of youngest daughter Jess. There’s nothing strange about this story. Its dry irony is just so much background noise. As a reader you can ignore the cognitive dissonance like so much static on a radio. I hope I’m conveying how much skill Mary Miller displays in telling this story. A story of normal American family life because, for this family, this is what normal is.
It’s Jess, rather than religion, that provides a hint of the transcendence to come. Jess’ persona shifts like a kite in the wind. Blown to the left, Jess thinks like a child, gorging on junk food. Blown to the right, you sense her insightful care about the people around her.
Elise is the star sister who’s noticed: slender, beautiful, popular with boys. There’s a small incident in the book, my favorite. Jess and her sister are in their hotel room. Elise is trying to make coffee from packets that work in a small maker that only brews two cups.
Jess is watching Elise’s fitful effort and…for a moment…her mental conception of her sister as the star of the family lapses. Jess senses an ordinary life ahead for her sister, maybe a mediocre one. Jess gets a subversive hint that maybe she could be the star instead…then the notion fades like smoke.
The Last Days of California reads like a dream you’re having on a restless night. What seems bizarre when viewed from the outside looks like plain old fallible life from the inside.
Yes, I found the fundamentalist thinking bizarre. But again, no I didn’t from the perspective of being taken inside the loving family that believes it. Isn’t it marvelous that Mary Miller could leave me twisting in the wind that way? It’s a taste of American life that’s not from my side of the twilight zone. From Liveright, a division of W. W. Norton, out now. A book brother generously gave me his galley.
