The last days of California : a novel /

JUST AS ARTHUR PHILLIPS'S "Prague" follows a group of Americans living not in the title city but in less trendy Budapest, Mary Miller's terrific first novel, "The Last Days of California," never quite makes it to the Golden State. And I don't think it's giving anything away to say it doesn't turn out to be the last days, either. This is a story about beginnings, not endings. Jess Metcalf, the 15-year-old narrator, is road-tripping with her family from their home in Montgomery, Ala., to the Pacific Ocean, where they hope to witness the rapture; or at least some of them do. Dad is the driving force behind the trip and Jess hands out the occasional brochure about the end times - mostly to give herself something to do when she's overcome by shyness - but her older sister, Elise, wants nothing to do with religion, and Mom mostly plays mediator. Spending four days in a car with teenagers who don't want to be there sounds like a recipe for literary disaster, but Miller's pacing is so sure that we feel Jess's claustrophobia without experiencing it. She and Elise sit in the back seat bickering, eating junk food and gazing out the window; they stop at motels in various stages of fleabaggery where they put on bathing suits, dodge their parents, drink and flirt with whatever boys happen to be around. Jess is so busy trying to figure herself out that the end of the world feels like an afterthought. She wonders why they aren't staying in nicer hotels since her father doesn't think he's ever going to get another credit card bill. Her parents barely register: "I mostly felt nothing and couldn't think of anything to say to them," she says. The only person who really exists for Jess is Elise, whom she watches, studies and compares herself with. "Elise dug around in her purse and pulled out her lip gloss," Jess notices after lunch at a Waffle House. "She smeared it on her bottom lip and top lip and pressed them together. It was almost obscene, watching her put on makeup. Boys frequently told me she was a knockout and then waited expectantly for my response. Of course there was nothing to do but agree. She was a knockout and I wasn't. What was there to say about it?" Miller crawls so deep into Jess's skin her own voice almost disappears. The short stories in her previous book, "Big World" (2009), are also told in the first person, but there you can find Miller in the distinctively looping sentences that seem to amble along, heading nowhere in particular, and then end with a bang. Here's the narrator of "Leak," who lives with her father, describing their annual trip to Florida: "We stayed in a house on the beach and ate seafood and went to the outlet malls, but my father wouldn't let me go in the water because once I got caught by a riptide and almost drowned and after that I got stung by a jellyfish and after that my mother died." The sentences in "The Last Days of California" take their time, too, piling up clauses and veering into detours, but they never call attention to themselves like that - which is appropriate, since Jess doesn't like to call attention to herself, and the book is perfectly shaped to reflect her observant sensibility. Jess is always looking at other women and trying to make herself feel better by picking out their flaws: a waitress whose teeth are too far apart, a woman with ugly feet in the next stall of a truck-stop bathroom, a girl with big hair she decides must be a prostitute. Elise is the only woman who isn't turned into a grotesque worthy of Jonathan Swift's scabrous poem "The Lady's Dressing Room," though she and Jess do spend more time in bathrooms than the main characters of any novel I can think of. Jess even manages to have romantic interludes in the bathrooms of two different hotels with two different boys: Gabe, at a rundown dump in Van Horn, Tex. - "This is the kind of place people kill themselves in," Elise says - and Brad, at a surprisingly nice casino resort in Arizona. Maybe she's not as unattractive as she thinks. Miller is at her most strikingly precise as she shows Jess learning to talk to boys and realizing that some of them might be interested in her rather than Elise, that she might have something different to offer. While there's not much in the way of big happenings during the trip, there's a lot going on under the surface. Jess discovers two family secrets, which I'm hesitant to reveal because while they wouldn't be spoilers in a review of a book with more plot, here they amount to real surprises. Other events that seem as if they might be crucial - like seeing a man killed in a head-on collision - are soon left behind. Miller's impressive control of her material occasionally leads her to hit a point too hard, as when Jess's father wants to show her a deer on the side of the road: "'Do you see it?' he asked. I knew he was talking to me, that I was the one he wanted to show it to. "'I don't see it,' I said. I never saw anything on the side of the road unless it was dead. "'Right there, at the tree line. You can't miss it.' "'I don't see it.' "'It's right there,' he said. And then, 'You missed it.'" Could that be some heavy foreshadowing about what's going to happen on Saturday, when the world is supposed to end? We didn't really need it. Sometimes the novel feels like a poem, each day on the road like a stanza repeated with slight variations and brand names used as incantations: McDonald's, Taco Bell, Target, Krispy Kreme. Miller always chooses just the right detail to illuminate life in the 2010s: When Jess and Elise can't agree on whether more frequent-seeming natural disasters are a sign of the end times or global warming, Elise says she'll "tweet Anderson Cooper for some hard stats." Most of the action could have taken place any time in the past 50 years, but the texting and Googling place it squarely in the present, and to underline the point Jess mentions her love of 1980s movies with their "ridiculous clothes and graphics, the clunky phones and boomboxes." "The Last Days of California" joins a number of other recent novels written from the perspective of children or teenagers - Karen Thompson Walker's "The Age of Miracles," Lauren Groff's "Arcadia." It's hard to figure out why some are published as "young adult" while others aren't, but why worry about labeling a book this good? Just read it. LAURIE MUCHNICK is the fiction editor at Kirkus Reviews and president of the National Book Critics Circle.

*Starred Review* Fourteen-year-old Jess Metcalf is traveling with her family across the country from Alabama to California in preparation for the Rapture. Her devout father is convinced that his family will be among the chosen ones, thus redeeming his life of sporadic employment and mounting disappointment. Jess' beautiful sister, Elise, is openly rebellious, wearing her King Jesus T-shirt with micro shorts. Meanwhile, Jess allays her anxiety about the end-time by obsessing over boys, her weight, and her appearance, and by lovingly cataloging all of her favorite foods from an endless string of gas stations and fast-food restaurants. All the while, Jess keeps up an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking running commentary on, among other things, her parents' flaws, which in no way mitigate her deep love for them; her painful self-consciousness; and her growing suspicion that the Rapture is not going to happen. In her debut, Miller captures, in a fresh and funny voice, one young teen's simultaneous desire to both belong and escape. Sending up religious extremism in deadpan prose, Miller makes this coming-of-age tale work as both a poignant portrait of a bright but vulnerable teen and a biting social critique. Supersmart fiction from an arresting new talent.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist

The Metcalf family may be road-tripping toward the Rapture in California in Miller's debut novel, but the cross-country journey marks the beginning, rather than the end, of an examined life for her 15-year-old narrator, Jess. Between discovering that her prayer-happy father has lost his job and finding the positive pregnancy test that her 17-year-old sister, Elise, took in a Biloxi hotel bathroom, young Jess has plenty on her mind, as middle America speeds past the windows of the family's Taurus. With so much in flux, she starts asking questions-about their matching black "King Jesus Returns!" T-shirts, about the purity ring her father gave her, and about herself. Meanwhile, Jess and Elise set a course for debauchery in roadside hotels, drinking and partying with any boys they can attract. It's an apocalypse-driven ripening for Jess. Beyond the well-crafted coming-of-age narrative, Miller gets every little detail about the South-from the way the sky greens before a storm to gas stations where Hank Williams Jr.'s "Family Tradition" blares-just right. But it's Jess's earnest, searching voice, as she contemplates her parents, the trip, and their values, that lingers after Miller's story has finished. In Jess, Miller has created a narrator worthy of comparison with those of contemporaries such as Karen Thompson Walker and of greats such as Carson McCullers. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Metcalfs, an evangelical family from Montgomery, AL, are on their way to California for the Rapture. Fifteen-year-old Jess, a puzzled observer of her family's fault lines, narrates the westward journey through the Deep South. Obedient (she hands out religious tracts at rest stops), protective (her beautiful, bad-girl 17-year-old sister, Elise, is secretly pregnant, and Jess worries about her and the unborn baby's safety), curious (the separate motel rooms provide cover for decidedly nonevangelical explorations of drinking and boys), and devoted (for all the Metcalf family flaws, they love one another), Jess is a delightful, sharply funny chronicler of the exquisite details and spot-on dialog that are unique to the best Southern fiction. VERDICT Miller, known for her short stories (Big World), has written an irresistible first novel that brings a steady-eyed look at a part of the American conversation that is too often caricatured. A sure-handed master of the Southern psyche, Miller has earned all the early buzz on this one. [See Prepub Alert, 10/28/13.]-Beth Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Miller (Big World, stories, 2009) puts a family on the road but doesn't give them much to do in her aimless first novel. You'd think that people expecting to be taken up by the rapture in three days would be a lot more cheerful than the Metcalfs are when we first encounter them in Louisiana. But it soon becomes clear that only Dad has much invested in the end of the world, and that might be because he's lost his job again; there isn't any other apparent reason he has insisted that the family drive from their home in Alabama to experience the rapture in California. Mom is listlessly along for the ride (readers may well feel the same), and oldest daughter Elise aggressively challenges Dad's professions of faith at every opportunity. She's the family's designated bad girl, although at present, only her sister Jess, Miller's 15-year-old narrator, knows that she's pregnant. As they meander across Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, staying in crummy motels and eating in bad restaurants, Jess worries about her weight, her sister's pregnancy and the unanswerable enigma of why Elise is prettier and more popular than she is. The religious angle mostly gets dropped in favor of Jess' adolescent angst; two sexual encounters with boys who actually do think she's cute seem intended to show Jess gaining some self-respect, but they're mostly sordid and sad. The Metcalfs witness a fatal car accident, Jess and Elise encounter some strange fellow motel visitors, but there's no narrative drive to the events; even the rapture's failure to happen is greeted with a shrug. This lack of affect may be the point of Miller's deadpan narrative, which substitutes the brand names of junk food and Hollywood movies for social observation, but it doesn't make for compelling fiction. Drab and dreary.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.