Lola, California
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The year is 2008, the place California. Vic Mahler, famous for having inspired cult followers in the seventies, serves time on death row, now facing a countdown of ten days. For years, his daughter, Lana, has been in hiding. Meanwhile, her friend Rose, a lawyer, is determined to bring the two together.
When Rose succeeds in tracking down Lana at a California health spa, the two friends must negotiate land mines of memory in order to find their future. In sharp episodes infused with pathos and wit, Edie Meidav brings her acclaimed insight and poetry to the hope of friendship, parenthood, dystopia, and the legacy of the seventies. Lola, California speaks to our contemporary crisis of faith, asking: Can we survive too much choice?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Meidav's third novel is a self-indulgent meditation on the grand themes of motherhood, redemption, identity, and choice. It's the 1980s, and Rose is the moth to Lana's flame. The two adventurous friends come-of-age in the shadow of Lana's father, Vic Mahler, a professor who can't open his philosophical mouth without sending life-changing shivers down the spines of followers. Meanwhile, Lana's enigmatic mother, another professor, disappoints Lana by allowing her and her friend to grow apart. Yanking the reader back and forth in time, up and down the California coast, and into a prison, an insane asylum, and a nudist spa, the author propels her narrative by withholding crucial information, such as (but not limited to) what Mahler did to end up on death row. Like Meidav's previous novels (the award-winning The Far Field and Crawl Space), this too is peopled with the hapless and unhappy, its pages overwrought with insanity, infidelity, kidnappings, and death. It's both dreadful and awesome, brilliant at the sentence level and thought-provoking in its depiction of a dysfunctional family indeed a dysfunctional American state but also frustrating.
