Book Review: California by Edan Lepucki and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

If anything distinguishes this era in literature, in the way that ennui amidst opulence marks the works of the Jazz Age or restless rambling marks the Beat Generation, it would be the fear of the collapse of civilization.  This fear has spent the last several decades permeating all of popular media, bleeding over from the front page of the newspaper to our books, our movies, and our television.  Can you still call it entertainment when what we read and watch stokes the fires of fear within us?

I have days when I think that we are really done for - that climate change (or war, or disease, or whatever) will hit a tipping point and then right and wrong, right and left, and even science and politics, will no longer matter, just the floods, the fires, and the famines.  Then I think, Pshaw, we'll figure it out before all that happens.  Then I think, But what if we don't.

Perhaps the best realization of these fears in literature and popular culture are the zombies, who are essentially us killing us to stop us from killing us.  Colson Whitehead's Zone One captured this fear perfectly, and somewhat humorously, in his depiction of a last-ditch effort to contain the evil we create within ourselves, an evil that gradually externalizes and envelopes humanity in death.  But sometimes the zombies aren't zombies, though they engage in that darkest taboo, cannibalism, as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  If humanity makes it long enough to look back on this era, we will look back and herald McCarthy as the one who gave us a singularly unsurpassable portrait of post-apocalyptic survival and what it means to those who figure themselves (as we all do) the "good guys."

Two recent novels, California by Edan Lepucki and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, carry that dark fire onward.  The works bear some striking parallels: both switch back and forth between the survival and pre-apocalyptic periods, both are more about what happens to relationships under strain than simple survival methodologies (two traits they share with The Road, and in which they differ from other popular stories in the genre).  Both feature prophet figures (unlike The Road).  And both hold up moral ambivalence to the light, turning it about in the hand like an object picked up on the shore, some strange object one tries to identify and comprehend.

Reading these works, I have to keep reminding myself that they are actually about how we are now, rather than how we will be in some poorly defined future (the apocalypse in Station Eleven comes by the "Georgia flu," which we need to know is highly contagious and incurable, and remains - again, as in The Road - unspecified in California).  Not in the future, but now we are killing each other for convenience.  Not after the apocalypse, but now we are simply surviving without really living.  Not someday, but now we are destroying relationships with the people closest to us.

So all the zombie-slaying fun in popular culture misleads us, these works reveal.  The apocalypse is now.  The apocalypse will be televised.  But it's not the Launcelotish romp with machete and rifle of a century hence we imagine, rather, it's the Quixotic foolishness of today.  Looking at how these works end provides several insights as to whether we should hold out any hope for humanity.  Whitehead finishes with imminent destruction; McCarthy with a small kindling of promise for those who "carry the fire."  Station Eleven provides minor revelation and a slow shuffling on.  But perhaps California is truest to human nature.  Its heroes end up selling out, compromising themselves to death, a sort of carbon credit-trading of the soul.  Is that where we're headed as a species?  Maybe.  But Lepucki is not so much concerned with that landscape.  She's saying that we are already there now.