The Last Days of California: A Novel by Mary Miller
My rating: 4/5 cats
i had heard great advance praise about this book from people who are in charge of discovering great new writers, and was thrilled to get my hands on a copy of my own.
it’s a coming of age story about jess, a fifteen-year-old girl whose family: mother, father, and secretly pregnant seventeen-year-old sister elise are on a meandering family road trip from alabama to california, passing out religious tracts on their way to the scheduled second coming. despite their “king jesus returns!” t-shirts and purity rings, elise and jess just aren’t feeling the religious fervor and impending rapture of their father, and while they follow the facebook posts of other people preparing for the apocalypse; giving away their money and throwing open their doors in all-or-nothing displays of faith, they are treating it more like a passing entertainment and are more preoccupied with the shedding of their american girlhoods for the novelty of boys, independence, and self-examination.
this is jess’ story, but like any story of sisters, elise is never far from jess’ mind. elise is older, beautiful and wild, and jess loves her fiercely, but also resents the ease with which she goes through life, and the casual way she treats her physical and social gifts. jess herself is not popular; she is socially awkward, doesn’t understand jokes, and shies away from contact:
I wanted to text someone but no one was expecting to hear from me. I had friends but they were mostly school or church friends. We didn’t play with each other’s hair or tell each other our deepest secrets. It wasn’t at all what I’d thought junior high friends would be like – I thought we’d be sleeping in the same bed, shopping for clothes. I thought we’d tell each other everything. I knew it was my own fault. When someone lightly touched my arm or leg while we were talking, I flinched. I didn’t know how I could want things so badly while making it impossible to ever get them.
and even though her religious faith is waning, she wants to be a good person. she tries to engage strangers in conversation, gives money away to those in need, tries to encourage those who look lonelier than she is, and she wants her family to be stable and prosperous, but there’s nothing like a road trip to really emphasize the cracks in what’s holding a family together: unspoken pregnancy, unspoken unemployment, regrets. jess tries to smooth the path, she is very sensitive to perceived awkward pauses, being so awkward herself:
“Van Horn’s coming up,” our father said, walking up behind us. “We’ll stop there.”
“That sounds like a good place,” I said for something to say. So much of what he said required no response, but if no one said anything, his words just hung there.
her inability to register emotions makes her an excellent chronicler, but also a very sympathetic character. after witnessing a death:
“I’m sad,” I said. I didn’t feel sad, but i thought saying it might help me feel it.
jess wants desperately to be loved, to feel something that seems to come so naturally to other people, and she is filled with emotional and sexual confusion, like most young girls, but hers is more pronounced by her emotional anesthesia.
There was something about the face-painting woman that made me feel achy. It felt a little like love, though I’d never been in love and couldn’t say for sure what it was. I wondered if it would always feel like pain.
it is entirely familiar.
the story travels through the most desperate and blighted portion of the american landscape – a parade of waffle houses, gas stations, run-down motels, with deadening scenery and people struggling to carve out something for themselves. and jess is also struggling, trying to leave her mark on the world even in the smallest ways:
The woman shrugged. I fake yawned, hoping she’d catch it, but she didn’t. It worked best if you yawned just as you were passing someone, if the person hardly noticed you at all. I liked the idea that I could pass it to someone and they would pass it to someone else and my yawn could travel, cross state lines.
as they make their way across the country, jess is also experiencing a sort of emotional road trip of her own: prickly and jealous, placating and dutiful, aching to change, to be something memorable, wanting to come into her own and revising her ideas about adulthood and love and responsibility and culturally-ingrained standards of beauty.
Maybe I wasn’t unattractive. Maybe I was only unattractive in Montgomery because everyone already had ideas about me there. If I moved to Arizona, I might be popular. I might be on the dance team, kicking my legs in tall boots at pep rallies. I hadn’t made the dance team in Montgomery and didn’t know if I was going to try again. It seemed better to accept the one failure than to try a second time and fail, like I hadn’t learned my lesson.
it’s beautiful and real and haunting. a pure and believable coming of age story in which each member of the family is shown at both their best and their worst. it is sad and smart and lyrical, and i suspect it is going to be a book that touches chords in a lot of women, who will want to tell jess it’s going to be okay someday.
He gave us the coins from his pockets and we threw those in, too, but after a while I realized I’d stopped wishing and was just throwing.
just a lovely book.
