Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman is what I would call a sneaky read. 

It seems to start as one thing–a writer desperate to make it in Hollywood and prove his worth to himself and his family. But it quickly pivots into a haunting story that deconstructs the protagonist’s and the audience’s sense of reality.

The rug gets ripped out from underneath you as you read the novel. It feels almost like a roller coaster in the dark. You know the author has you in the palm of their hand, but it also feels like you don’t know what is coming next or what is or isn’t real.

The characters continue to evolve with complicated depth. The locations ring true, as someone who has lived in LA for over 20 years. 

I think what is most haunting, though, is how Kleeman weaves corporate greed into the novel as the root of the evil—but that evil only takes hold if individuals are complicit in it. In that complicity, relationships unravel and the reader is left with the unsettling sense that everything is precarious.

Everything in life is an agreement. Traffic lights are an agreement to stop on red and slow on yellow. Government is an agreement that laws are to be followed or there will be consequences. And Kleeman points out with Something New Under the Sun that that also makes destruction an agreement. 

We agree to buy products from companies that poison us and hide the truth from us. We agree to pay taxes to a government that subsidizes those companies and gives them kickbacks. 

We agree to put one foot in front of the other eating and drinking things that have health warnings because it is easy, convenient, or everyone else is doing it. 

We are all someone else to everyone else’s sense of everyone else - and that makes us all complicit in destruction. 

Once the truth unravels in the novel, I could not stop reading, but I also felt my stomach drop. 

This book is memorable and it will haunt you. It will make you think and it will make you feel like you visited Los Angeles in a near and possible apocalyptic state.