In the Heart of the Valley of Love

- read for the February Book-a-Month Challenge 2008The setting is Los Angeles about 50 years in the future. The government rations water and gas. Pollution and sickness are rampant. Loss of loved ones to death or the police is quite common. Yet, despite the gloom, we see how people still find hope through the main character, Francie, a teenage girl on the brink of adulthood. She, her family, her friends, and her boyfriend still seek love and friendship in the midst of chaos and desolation. I am most impressed by Kadohata's ability to juxtapose hope and despair in the same sentence.

I loved this novel when I first read it back in the nineties, so I decided to re-read it after reading The Floating World recently. Although I enjoyed the novel this time around, it, alas, does not stand up entirely to time’s harsh accounting. Kadohata sets her novel in a near-future Los Angeles (the novel ends in 2052) and therein lies her problem. Much that she describes seems quite credible: isolated and guarded Richtowns; an ethnically and racially hybrid majority population; environmental, social and economic decay; rationed credits for gas and water; scavenging as a primary occupation; ubiquitous violence; universal gun-toting; disappearances and secret prisons; continual drought; skin diseases (black pearls!), a 70% cervical show more cancer rate, etc. Where the author falters is in her failure to imagine the media/ information/ image-making structures that would dominate or at least precede such a world. Written just before or during the infancy of the World Wide Web and the cell phone, Kadohata can’t be blamed for not foreseeing how these networks would restructure society, entertainment, communication, politics, etc. That said, the fact that the world she does describe is still one dependent upon newspapers, classified ads, etc. just doesn’t ring true for readers now almost twenty years closer to the novel's not-so-distant future setting. At one point Kadohata does mention the return to many 19th century habits, such as eating apple cores. This, in and of itself, might be credible. However, she doesn't describe a "return" to newsprint, etc. since she hasn’t imagined that they might have ever been superseded. The strength of the novel lies in its quirky characters, a group of in-fact or for-all-practical-purposes orphans, chief among them Francie and Mark, the lovers of the title. show less

I had it in my head that this was post-apocalyptic fiction when it is really a view into a future that is pretty much here.

This is part of a series of California fiction published by University of California Press which I’m slowing making my way through. So far I like Carolyn See’s Golden Days the best.

A teen in a future time finds her place in life despite water rationing, hard-to-find jobs, midnight arrests.