Alexandra Kleeman

Patrick, the protagonist of Alexandra Kleeman's "Something New Under the Sun" has left New Jersey for a job in propitious California and worries in absence about his wife and daughter taking lodging at an Earth consciousness commune in the woods. Did they unintentionally join a cult? Meanwhile, Patrick is employed on the crew of a Hollywood horror movie, the script reinterpreted from his autobiographical novel, but is the movie even for real or just a money laundering scheme for some show more surreptitious enterprise? In this California of 20-minutes-into-the-future, the people in Patrick's new coterie talk obsessively about tabloid celebrities, conspiracies theories, the meta-subtexts of a canceled kid's TV show, and comparing the pleasures of buying and consuming to an LSD trip. Most significantly in the novel, every Californian's brain is washed in the cultural ubiquity of a synthetic substitute for lowercase water called WAT-R, a monopoly commodity seeking to shortcut climate change while also insidiously contributing to further environmental destruction. Are these mass obsessions cults? In Kleeman's great debut novel, "You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine", defining cult seemed simpler. A despondent woman was willingly kidnapped into a secret religious society where bedsheet-ghost cultists subsisted on Twinkie-like nutrition and followed instructions to misremember their previous lives. Non-fiction linguist Amanda Montell in her book "Cultish" defines cult behavior not as a collateral of NXIVM-style brainwashing, but the product of fanaticism, loneliness antidotes, and us vs. them ideologies edified and enforced by language. Montell says power aligns an out group into a community through rhetoric: euphemisms, redefinitions, codes, mantras, buzzwords, hashtags, speaking in tongues, or even persuasive silence. In "Something New...," Patrick's family has surrendered suburban norminess for a life of daily eulogies over the dying planet. But in California, at the Wat-R Super-Center a newcomer asks, "Why is there a whole store for water?" A member responds, "' It's not water. It's WAT-R'" the "last half of the word with a harsh, downward intonation, vaguely robotic." Secretly investigating the secret racket of the movie production, Patrick inveigles a VIP tasting with the manager at a WAT-R finishing facility who describes, "the rarest, product from the purest part of the process... Our premiere cru," and toasts, "To Mother Nature, who sends us her rough drafts so we may perfect her grammar." A cult then might be defined as a fad, following, or fetish that draws people to its business by employing carefully programed words to build commonality, teach collective values, choke debate, and sometimes encourage self-destructive behavior in the name of its ideology. Fads in this novel too demonstrate the power of careful linguistic tactics to falsely promise detached people attention, belonging, money, spiritual fulfillment, and connection to inner being. Ultimately, what we and Patrick will learn, spoiler alert, is that the only thing not a cult is unmediated, power-purged, effortful human-to-human connection. Cultism is, in Montell's words, "semantically murky." In Kleeman's "Something New...", religion can be anything. From a long distance, Patrick suspects his family is being indoctrinated into a cult. Is it also happening to him? Could it happen to us? In the modern world of influencer internet, it probably, against our intent, already has. show less

Strange book. 65% of it was really good, but the rest of it was just high-fallutine filler. The last 50 pages were simply skimable. The main nut of the story was really good, but the author didn’t seem to know where to go with it. A lot of side meaningless characters. If she had stuck with Cassidy and Patrick and the water mystery, it could have been tight. A sub plot about the wife’s climate crisis angst might have worked then. The writing is good. But too many words that don’t amount show more to very much. show less

Possibly even better than her debut You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, this uses the same haunting language to analyze modern life (which, like her first book, is distorted into a satirical sci-fi near-future full of disturbing trends) and the decay of humanity and nature due to capitalist consumerism.

In this story [minor spoilers ahead] the droughts on America's west coast have lead to the creation of WAT-R, a synthesized version of water with disturbing properties (it doesn't move or act show more like water or often really like any actual worldly fluid) that is sold back to the populace at constantly inflating prices while the ultra-wealthy hoard real water and profit from their investments in WAT-R. A novelist arrives in LA to find that the screenplay adaptation of his most personal novel has been bastardized into a hackneyed horror story with a washed up starlet attached. From there things get simultaneously deep and disturbing and funny and touching. My main complaint was that it felt like after a really methodical and in-depth build up, it started to race toward the ending, although maybe this was a stylistic choice given the subject matter of worlds accelerating toward a chaotic ending, so I will let it slide. show less

Possibly even better than her debut You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, this uses the same haunting language to analyze modern life (which, like her first book, is distorted into a satirical sci-fi near-future full of disturbing trends) and the decay of humanity and nature due to capitalist consumerism.

In this story [minor spoilers ahead] the droughts on America's west coast have lead to the creation of WAT-R, a synthesized version of water with disturbing properties (it doesn't move or act show more like water or often really like any actual worldly fluid) that is sold back to the populace at constantly inflating prices while the ultra-wealthy hoard real water and profit from their investments in WAT-R. A novelist arrives in LA to find that the screenplay adaptation of his most personal novel has been bastardized into a hackneyed horror story with a washed up starlet attached. From there things get simultaneously deep and disturbing and funny and touching. My main complaint was that it felt like after a really methodical and in-depth build up, it started to race toward the ending, although maybe this was a stylistic choice given the subject matter of worlds accelerating toward a chaotic ending, so I will let it slide. show less