The bonds of friendship that connect two girls are explored in Lola, California, the new novel by Edie Meidav. In this book, Meidav looks at the forces that unite Lana and Rose, or Lola 1 and Lola 2 as they called themselves as children, and the effect the power of their own girlhood potential has not only on their own lives, but on the lives of their family, lovers, children, and on the environment itself, 
on the idea of their California home. The magic that defines them, as effervescent as the negative ions that wash ashore from the Pacific Ocean, also traps them in roles they spend most of this story trying to outrun.
Rose, an orphan and adopted by a caring family, worships Lana and fights for her friendship, while Lana, the daughter of an egotistical Berkeley professor who, for most of the book, sits in a prison cell awaiting execution for the murder of his wife, fights against her father’s horrible legacy. The girls’ sense of entitlement, their aura of invincibility, is hedonistic, egotistical, and ultimately harmless, but their friendship, stretched over time until it reaches a breaking point as adults, leaves lasting scars.
Lana’s mother is also an academic, writing treatises on “fraught mother-daughter relations” with titles such as “The Corset of Anxiety.” But Lana’s father, Vic Mahler, is the star of the family. “Starting in 1960,” Meidav writes, “Vic Mahler had written about neuroethology and the bioethics of possibility within the brain in such a visionary way that a whole generation woke to feverish new thoughts about the mind and perception, a generation happy to scramble his message into acts undertaken on behalf of their own drive toward free love and pharmacology.” These followers, called “shaggies,” appreciate his ideas about choice, and shadow Mahler and his family throughout Berkeley and the course of the novel.
Meidav’s ideas are as deep and twisted as her dense, teaming prose. Throughout her story of Vic, Rose, and Lana, Meidav explores the concepts of choice, time, and the irresistible moment experienced by young people when they realize they are standing on the threshold of great action. This moment, this overwhelming sense of possibility, is embodied by the physicality and friendship of Lana and Rose, which Meidav captures beautifully. She describes Lana as “a tawny jungle cat in cowboy boots, a shaft of effortless cool around her, eyes hazel and obscenely glamorous.“ And she describes Rose as a “mesmerized chameleon, hard to place, flip-flopping along with them, never quite on the group.” Meidav catches the ecstatic moment when, as teenagers on the cusp of womanhood, they break into an impromptu dance: “You cannot do the dance alone, you do it with a friend, your flesh almost commingled in order to surrender control. If a person could x-ray the thought about the dance, the hope for early death or glory would be clear while below the two girls stay teenage fish indefinitely, blind and riding currents that say all will be smooth, sweet, a fantasy of selfhood.”
The fantasy of selfhood does not survive their growth into damaged adult selves. Vic’s murder of Lana’s mother disrupts their relationship, and Lana and Rose do not see each other again for almost 20 years until, on the eve of Vic’s execution, they meet on the grounds of a Central California health spa and nudist colony. Notwithstanding a brief sojourn in New York City, Meidav’s story is set in California, in Berkeley and Los Angeles (or “Ellay” as Rose calls it), from sun-baked pot farms in the hills of Northern California to the Central California prison where Vic waits out his remaining days.
The magic of possibility, embodied in the magical bond between the two girls, seems in Meidav’s writing also to become a metaphor for the idea of California itself. As with most of the ideas in Meidav’s book, she seems to offer space for alternative, darker interpretations. Lola, California is ripe with dualities: possibility verses action taken, potential verses failure, choice verses fate, memory verses forgetfulness. All of these concepts seem to wash over the girls as they navigate their lives and locales. When Rose spends time in Los Angeles, “she will find it useless to seek people who are unplastic, since the plastic aspect of Ellay is universal, buffering its citizens from awareness of failure, failure here meaning one gets washing out to sea on a wave of mortality or, worse, public apathy and forgetfulness.”
Meidav also explores time’s impact, through her insistent present-tense prose to her somewhat disorienting time-stamp chapter headings, which range from exact moments (“Fifteenth of December, 2008, 5:01 P.M.”) to blendings of months, years, and eras (“1976-1980 Sundays”). Time’s tyranny, and the shift to an adult’s world of deadlines, is most poignantly evoked in Vic’s death row countdown. If Lana and Rose cannot escape adulthood, Vic certainly cannot escape his literal prison and his scheduled sentence.
Vic’s ideas about freedom of choice come to a horrible conclusion when he murders his wife, a premeditated act that sends him to death row and almost severs the girls’ friendship forever. Lana and Rose are forced to orient all their current choices, as wives, mothers, and lovers, around the legacy of that choice. And as friends, they remember in their younger selves the irresistible idea of potential, of pre-choice, embodied in the myth of California and the image of two young girls dancing together, oblivious to their power but with a vague understanding of its magic nonetheless.
Lana seems to gain a final understanding of the magic she shared with Rose, when, as an adult at the spa, she spots two girls sunbathing. “The girls find each other, soak up sun in parallel, make others’ suffering disposable, create an opalescent fizz around: the world is unknown so they flip-flop the important and secure solace, good at drawing the magic circle around themselves. As reward for their labors, they get to enjoy the unguarded hedonism of melting together, the pure prolepsis of sunbathing on concrete.” It’s a lovely image, which Lana knows cannot last. Time carries her forward, past the magic of her girlhood with her best friend, Rose, past the legacy left to her by her egotistical, damaged father, past the idea of California itself, and into her own choices, and real life, and the future.
Tags: Edie Meidav, Lola California, Novel
