Lola, California: A Novel

by Edie Meidav

Overview

The year is 2008; the place, California. Vic Mahler, famous for having inspired cult followers in the seventies, serves time on death row, awaiting his execution in ten days. For years, his daughter, Lana, has been in hiding, but her friend Rose, a lawyer, is determined to bring the two together. Yet when Rose succeeds in tracking down Lana at a California health spa, the pair must negotiate land mines of memory in order to reconcile the past and face their futures. A story infused with pathos and wit, insight and lyricism, Lola, California "matches metaphoric wit with an American state that defies summary....A hypnotic and suspenseful tale, tightening toward an irresistible end" (Elizabeth Rosner, author of The Speed of Light).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250007674
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/07/2012
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Edie Meidav is the author of The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon and Crawl Space (FSG, 2005). Winner of a Lannan Fellowship, a Howard Fellowship, the Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman, and the Bard Fiction Prize, she teaches at Bard College.

Read an Excerpt

As the global economy emerged in the post war period, the colonial system disappeared. Old colonies became new countries, some of them with very odd shapes and geographical positions. With no history of self-governance as nation states, they struggled to find their way, economically and in terms of stable governance. India created the world’s largest and most complex democracy—a modern miracle. China turned to communism, adopted the centrally planned model of economic organization, and made very little measurable economic progress for 29 years, but perhaps sowed the seeds of its future rise by educating the vast majority of its people. It dramatically changed direction in 1978 and became the largest (in population) and fastest growing country in the history of the world.

What no one saw clearly was that in the post war period, the economic party that had been running for 200 years in a small subset of the population was about to spread to much of the rest of the world.

The implications of this new convergence are profound and extensive. The costs of things will change. Goods and services that require human time and effort will become relatively more expensive, an inevitable consequence of the eventual decline of low cost underemployed labor in the global economy. Economic forces and incentives will try to make them less expensive by allocating more capital to labor and hence reducing the labor input required. But there are limits to substituting capital for labor, though these limits are moving as technology changes the art of the possible. The abundance of underemployed labor in the world economy has in a sense delayed the arrival of labor saving technology. But this will end in the current century.

Editorial Reviews

[A] gorgeous, audacious novel . . .Meidav is an American original.” —Anne Trubek, The Daily Beast

“A clock-ticking thriller and a maximal social novel.” —San Francisco Weekly

“Meidav captures the self-indulgence of adolescent friendship and the tension underlying familial bonds, languidly teasing out the surprising secrets of the past.” —The New Yorker

“Edie Meidav makes sentences perform like a snake charmer's snakes in this meditation on friendship, parenthood, and of course California.” —Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

“Edie Meidav treats the West Coast's counterculture and the lives of young women with a steely regard, and does so in prose as faceted and illuminating as a flashing diamond. It's that artistry, and the wisdom of her novel, which make the story's shocking conclusion all the more profound.” —Oscar Villalon

“A page-turner in the moment; a thought-provoker that lingers in the mind.” —Meredith Maran, author of A Theory of Small Earthquakes

From the Publisher