Lola, California: A Novel [Hardcover]

Edie Meidav (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 5, 2011

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 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?

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This gorgeous, audacious novel goes far beyond a story of two girls, though. Lana and Rose grew up in Berkeley, California in the 1980s, and the book is as much about that town and the millennial Northern California zeitgeist as any character. Meidav is harrowingly precise in her descriptions of the place . . . Lola, California is a startling novel, as prodigiously smart as it is technically proficient. Her characters may be narcissistic zeligs, but Meidav is an American original.” —Anne Trubek, The Daily Beast

“In the tightly written Lola, California, Edie Meidav explores the concept of personal choice through the story of a polemical scientist/author, his Feminist-theorist wife, their daughter, and the daughter’s best friend . . . But it’s Meidav’s unusual prose that is the star of this book. Her style is sculptural; she chips away at the text, dispensing with unnecessary words and punctuation, making even the longer sentences punchy and rhythmic. And in the same way that the characters all dance around the main issues, Meidav’s writing evokes a linguistic rope-a-dope.” —The Hipster Book Club

“A decades-old murder in New Age-inflected Berkeley forces a reunion between two high-school best friends in Edie Meidav’s textured, disquieting third novel. Lola, California plumbs the rise and fall of a friendship, finding its terrifying resonance for the adults it produced.” —Ellen Wernecke, The AV Club

“Poignant . . . Brilliantly evoking the millennial shadows that haunt its California setting and rich with humor and heartache, it’s one of the most arresting and thought-provoking books of the season.” —The Barnes & Noble Review

“[Meidav’s] greatest gift in this novel is the element of surprise, which is a common trait among the best thriller writers but is more difficult to hatch in an artful social novel. Meidav creates a beautiful and true picture of female friendship, but as if that were not enough, she also keeps us guessing about who her characters really are, and how much weight their evaluations of each other actually hold.” —Liz Colville, The Daily

“Meidav succeeds brilliantly in creating an authentic friendship between Lana and Rose, one that is messy, captivating, and durable. The Lolas are their most powerful testament to each other, and to the writer herself.” —Michelle Koufopoulos, The Faster Times

“An intimate and lyrical look at the choices that bind friends and family together, yet also push them apart.” —Roni K. Devlin, Shelf Awareness

Brilliant . . . awesome.--Publisher's Weekly

Meidav is a rare thing, a less than well known writer who continues to publish big, dense, challenging novels with a major press. Should Meidav be better known? Almost definitely.
--The Millions, Most Anticipated Books of 2011

From the Author

Dear Amazonians,

I reached into everything I knew about California and friendship and tried to bring it forth in this book. Some have noted that this book's Vic is a distant cousin to Emile (of CRAWL SPACE, my second novel). And yet I felt I was breaking some new ground in the writing of this. See what you think, and sending you happy thoughts for your summer reading.

All best,

Edie

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374109265
• ISBN-13: 978-0374109264
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #596,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hello Amazonians!

About LOLA,CALIFORNIA, a "Best Book of 2011" -- Wormbooks (http://lnvsml.blogspot.com/2011/12/best-books-of-2011.html)

Here's a bit of a telescoped biography: I just came back from two months in Cuba, having gone there with my mate and two little daughters. I teach at Bard College, in upstate New York. You could find more of the self-flogging sort of stuff at www.ediemeidav.com.

Some useful links (see web addresses at bottom of this):

1) the new beautiful film made by Snapdragon Films in honor of the novel LOLA, CALIFORNIA is on YouTube. See it, and if you like it, share it with your Facebook or Internet masses, your crouched Twitterati longing to be free, and ask them to do the same (as I understand this is how such things work).

2) Here's my advice to you writers out there, over at Poets and Writers.

3)And in about a week, online, you will be able to download for free some of the songs which Kevin Salem composed in/around the novel LOLA -- see what you think.

4) Meanwhile, here is a piece I wrote recently about the death of my father this year and Californian legacy: "Daughter of California" at The Millions.

5) Here, too, is a piece on David Foster Wallace which I wrote for Scott Esposito's Conversational Reading.

6) An article by Nina Shengold on Karen Russell and me in Bardlandia.

7) A recent review of LOLA over at The Daily.

8) Some excerpts from LOLA up at Sundance Channel via Em and Lo.

Some useful summer pixels for your eyes, we're hoping.

To your curiosity and happy literacy,
Edie
===
1) The video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6iY2A5EwMM

2) The writers' advice:
http://www.pw.org/content/melinda_palacio_7?cmnt_all=1

3) www.kevinsalem.com/Lola.html

4) Piece about death of my father:
http://www.themillions.com/2011/06/daughter-of-california.html

5)http://quarterlyconversation.com/david-foster-wallace-a-supposedly-fun-thing-ill-never-do-again

6) http://hudson-valley.chronogram.com/issue/2011/7/Books/Sunshine-States

7) http://bit.ly/qZDzkc

8) http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2011/07/new-summer-reading-lola/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars California light and dark, July 11, 2011

By 

Michael Ravitch (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lola, California: A Novel (Hardcover)

Lola, California is the quintessential Northern Californian novel: centered around post-60s Berkeley, rebellious teenagers, new age spas, middle aged hipsters seeking health, fertility, meaning, love. It depicts America the Strange, a Saragasso Sea of all the world's religions and philosophies, bent and fractured into some democratic gnosticism of our very own. This atmosphere is observed with a sharp satiric but indulgent vision, lovingly recreated in vivid detail, recorded in intense slangy elegant prose. This is Meidav's background; she knows it as well as anyone; but she brings to the task a refined and baroque sensibility, as far from the typical California writer as possible, a Victorian poet looking with humor and horror on what the world has become.

Really what she has written is a 300-page prose poem, a mythic journey written in a continually expanding metaphorical language, always searching for the more exact nuance or the more profound correlative. The unforgettable teenage girls at the center of the novel - Lana and Rose - Lola 1 and Lola 2 - have an intense friendship, and like the sisters of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" "Golden head by golden head like two pigeons in a nest" the Goblin men are coming to destroy their idyll. Lana's father - the charismatic philosopher Vic Mahler - is like a latter-day Oscar Wilde, brilliant and doomed, knowing "Each man kills the thing he loves."

The amazing thing is how close we feel to these characters as they search for someone to guide them in a world of no fixed principles; and how nonetheless we can see them from a great distance, their carelessness and foolishness and absurdity.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lola, dancing, July 9, 2011

By 

J Carpenter - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lola, California: A Novel (Hardcover)

Books in whose company Lola, California will feel comfortable and at home: Middlemarch, Heart of Darkness, The Sound and the Fury, Manhattan Transfer, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Blood Meridian, that is, books that changed the perceptions of what long prose fiction can be and how it can be read. There has for a long time been the search for what comes after modernism, all that "post-modernist" work that wasn't. Not really. I think it isn't an exaggeration to say that with Lola, California we can stop thinking about a post-modern literature and begin thinking about a 21st Century literature.

Lola will appeal to readers across the reading spectrum. To the escape reader, it's a riveting story. To the literary scholar it's grist for theory, with its unique narrative tensions, plot lines that seem like sets of July 4th streamers shot off in all directions as if the text is saying, "This is important for the way it ends; trace this arc to where it began because that's important too." And sometimes the other way around.

And there's a pure sensual pleasure here just in the language itself. Semantically rich and syntactically disciplined, Meidav's prose alchemizes elements of memoir, allegory, slipstream, realism, and narrative poetry into fluent, liquid gold, a book to linger over and savor.

A word of caution: Don't start reading if you have something important to do. You'll never get to it.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hip Young Women Coming of Age in 80's: West Coast Version, July 8, 2011

By 

M. Cohen (, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lola, California: A Novel (Hardcover)

We baby boomers and post baby boomers have been indulged with plenty of stories of late thanks to a host of new books out about growing up in the 70's/80's: fiction, non-fiction, and autobiographical non-fiction about the lifestyles and relationships we had during our significant coming of age moments in NYC. Thanks to Ms. Meidav, we now experience a west coast version replete with hippies, cults, stoners, and Berkeleyese. With the very first sentence we are brought once again into Meidav's intrinsic medley of brain science, eastern philosophy, pop psychology, made-up words and dead-on observation about the frailty of life, love and relationships. It's also a celebration of two young women post 60's who reaped the benefits of contraception, legal abortion and sexual freedom and lived life empowered to make and be responsible for their choices. This is a great book to share in book clubs as it pleases on many levels.