A Review of Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021)

Posted by: ccape

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape



I picked up Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021) with her first novel in mind, the strange and quirky You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Something New Under the Sun is likewise filled with its own idiosyncratic characters and off-kilter situations.

Let’s let the marketing description give us some information: “East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second. In this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.”

This novel primarily follows these two characters and their various exploits trying to unravel a kind of conspiracy afoot in relation to the film production. Why, for instance, does everyone drink WAT-R, a kind of stand-in for the real thing? WAT-R is only partially made of water, but is supposedly enhanced by various flavorings and additives. Somehow the producers seem to be huge investors in WAT-R and seem far more interested in certain returns than on anything related to the film. Kleeman’s deployment of this novel technology certainly moves Something New Under the Sun into the realm of science fiction.

But what I absolutely adored about Kleeman’s characterization is the journey that Cassidy Carter goes through from the start of the narrative to the end. I found her to be an emotionally complex character in way that often outshone Patrick, who originally seems to be the ostensible protagonist. For his part, Patrick originates as the reader’s center of identification. Like Patrick, we’re confused by the strangeness of the Hollywood types that populate the text and the glossy surface that we’re used to seeing concerning representations of Los Angeles. In this way, Kleeman is following in a long tradition of writers who have depicted the so-called City of Angels and complicated how we come to understand this location. Kleeman’s work offers its own way of thinking about Los Angeles in the COVID moment, with its emphasis on natural disasters, droughts, and fires.

The other subplot involves Patrick’s tenuous relationship to his wife (Alison) and child (Nora). They are staying at an eco-commune called Earthbridge. It would seem that Alison is someone ahead of her time in the sense that she already foresees the various disasters that are going to befall Americans. But Alison’s retreat into the commune effects little change, which is part of the larger novel’s problem. What are we to do about these various issues related to climate, drought, and the living conditions that are rapidly changing how we live and how we can thrive? The bleakness of this novel is that we get very little in the way of answers. The increasingly dystopian nature of this concluding arc was, in my opinion, disappointing, but Kleeman is an exceptionally talented prose writer. Her words spark off the page and give truly dynamic weight to her characters and the various plots.

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