They say you always remember your first true love. Thrilling, dangerous pinpricks of initial infatuation, followed soon after by unadulterated joy in having discovered your partner in crime, your accomplice, your mirror (or magnifier). Your secret-keeper, explorer, dreamer, competitor, protector, heart-breaker. That fierce, blinding, complicated love that only one teenage girl can have for another.
In Lola, California (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00), Edie Meidav’s probing third novel, the friendship between Lana, the daughter of a prominent Berkeley professor-cum-neurophilosopher awaiting execution for the murder of his wife, and Rose, a foster child who attaches herself to Lana’s family and finds herself their (occasionally reluctant) memory-keeper, unfurls across a span of years (California of the 1970s and 80’s; 2008) and against a backdrop of countercultural disaffection, the trials and betrayals of parenthood, and the devastating consequences of choice.
Vic Mahler is an institution in 1970’s Berkeley, with a cadre of loyal, obsessive followers known as “shaggies,” a famous, long-suffering feminist wife, Mary, and Lana, his rootless, rebellious daughter struggling to suppress any “Mahlerness” of her own, any traits which might bind her to either of her parents, but especially to Vic, so prone to disinterest and overwrought academic pronouncements. On a car trip, when Lana and Rose are young: “If you can’t recapture childhood perfection, what then? You spend the rest of your life trying to get back your ideal? Or you turn pragmatic…you resign yourself to loss”; and later, “Boil all my life’s work down to this one idea if you must—we have not been created to be machines of genetic input.”
When we first encounter Vic, it’s 2008 and he’s withering away in Alcatraz, spouting off about connection (“Though Vic got iron-barred before people started using the Internet for everything, he quickly understood the idea of a web connecting people’s brains—his earliest work had rotated around the idea”) and deteriorating mentally, as he inches ever closer to his execution date.
Meidav unravels the details of Vic’s crime slowly and often shockingly, creating a panoramic California landscape in the process. Her terrain is deliberately crafted, brutal and loving and heady, reminiscent of Didion at her best, recalling that innately Californian promise of freedom, slippery reinvention, and the prison of too many choices. “The prophet matters in Berkeley, a place where no one has breakdowns because the idea of a breakdown simply does not exist,” she writes. “Instead, people go into periods of healing and newly outfitted jargon.”
As a girl, Rose is “all chrysalis, bruisable and diffident, aware of contours, thrilled by the people she will meet, the ones who will reveal all her possible faces, still hidden in magic invisible cloak sleeves.” She wrestles with the weight of feeling unwanted, an “original sin” in her mind, impossible to ever fully cast off, and immerses herself in Lana, in the adventures and burgeoning sexuality of “Lola”—the identity the two girls form together, inspired by The Kinks’ song, that “mixed up,” “shook up” world where “girls will be boys and boys will be girls.”
Together, the girls are powerful, absorbed in themselves, and content (for the moment). As Meidav writes, “What is fun is disguise and age transvestism, the two-headed revolution of the Lolas, their statutory taboo entry into any place that would forbid them. Their religion is movement, their sacrament choice, their enemy everyone else’s sincerity, their savior the giggle that lets any wound of their own stay unspoken.”
When Lana is simply herself, without the protective façade acting as “Lola One” (Rose is “Two”) affords, she struggles with loneliness and depression, a series of quickly obtained, increasingly traumatic abortions, and finally, a prolonged stay at 1950’s style mental institution, complete with shock therapy. When Lana re-emerges into her old life, only to learn of her mother’s murder soon after, she makes the only choice she has ever really found appealing: to disappear.
Twenty years out, Rose is now an estate lawyer, floundering in dissatisfaction with her career, and recently dumped by a boyfriend who grew frustrated with repeated fertility treatments. She, rather unusually, given her relationship with Lana, has written consistently to Vic in prison, unable to completely relinquish that part of her past.
Lana has been estranged from Vic since the murder and has attempted to start her life over, as the mother of twin boys and the haphazard girlfriend of a dippy hippy guru named Dirk, who has moved the family to a nudist spa in the hills of Northern California. It’s here that Rose tracks Lana down, hoping to enlist her in her quest to obtain a stay of execution for Vic.
Lana would prefer to “defend herself to no one,” and so Rose is both an unexpected “ghoul of remembrance telling her in so many ways that a person cannot hide forever” and the one who has “always been there…from the start,” the “best partner” Lana believes she will ever have.
The novel has a few weaknesses—there are unanswered questions and seeming improbabilities, hazily sketched minor characters and a rapid-fire conclusion to an otherwise languidly paced plot. What’s impressive is that these problems, which can be make-or-break for some novels, don’t matter so much here. 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.
Check out Edie Meidav’s song picks for the novel here:
And the original score here:
Michelle Koufopoulos
Michelle Koufopoulos is a writer, editor, book lover and tea enthusiast. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and spent a year studying at Oxford University, being indoctrinated into British culture while working on her novel set in Paris in the 1920s. She writes regularly ...
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