PositiveZYZZYVAThe connective tissue of Search History’s multiple parts is of course art and identity but, more profoundly, grief and mourning the dead ... This ontological realization of needing to find self through another and the threat of its impossibility is a major crux of the book. While Search History is a novel of big ideas about the relationships between art and technology, self and society, it is also a novel about the most quintessential human experiences—that we will lose someone we love and be forced to rewrite the world in their absence.
Alexandra Kleeman
PositiveZYZZYVAKleeman’s L.A. is as surreal as the L.A. of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Similarly, there is a distinctly drug-induced vibe that permeates the pages. But for Kleeman, it isn’t the irreverent outcast that’s imbibing, it’s the general public and they don’t even know it. Nothing is as it appears, including the movie Patrick is working on. And like a Pynchon novel, Something New Under the Sun is concerned with fallacies of truth. But Kleeman’s question seems less about whether finding an objective truth is possible and more about the nature of truth through collective seeing ... At times the novel veers heavily into the philosophical and can feel a bit removed from the emotional stakes of the characters, but just when the book seems as if it will stray too far into the conceptual, Kleeman pulls us back in with a moment of humane insight. What is most compelling about Something New Under the Sun is how Kleeman has juxtaposed eco-radicalism beside climate catastrophe and shows the irony that even in a world gone up in flames, the radicals still appear unhinged compared to the pacified masses. Ultimately, the novel begs the question, is something truer simply because more people say it is?
