RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksSomething New negotiates the wild torrents of the climate crisis while sailing a recognizable narrative barque: a four-act structure, a noir-adjacent plot, and the color palette of a Miranda July film. Something New is not just an intellectual and imaginative victory, but also an emotional one. It vivifies a catastrophe that often registers as tragically abstract, bestowing upon the Anthropocene and every creature it afflicts the kind of attention that Simone Weil equates to prayer ... the mystery in question is never very mysterious. Instead, the book generates power through its intricate ecosystem of resonances and its devotion to the theme of ecological collapse. While Something New remains rooted in plausible—indeed, probable—human drama, its animals, plants, and landscapes are not portrayed as incidental accoutrements to the narrative; they are the narrative. In 10 observant chapters, Something New distinguishes itself by treating the nonhuman creatures of its world as primary characters whose relevance need not be explained, whose integrity need not be earned ... Something New is not a perfect novel—is there such a thing?—but it would be a mistake to waste words on its flaws, which are merely distracting, never disqualifying. At times, I missed the unabashedly dreamlike nature of Kleeman’s previous work—the Kafkaesque dissonance—but most of the strengths she has displayed thus far are at their finest in Something New. While it is more cinematic than her first two books, it likewise finesses unreality to access reality ... Kleeman demonstrates a loyalty to strangeness; there is an extraterrestrial, anthropological quality to her prose, liberating observations from shorthand ... Something New Under the Sun is a eulogy, a ghost story, and an informed ode to the ways and forms of life destroyed by human appetites. Most of all, it is a masterpiece.
