The Gold Coast (Three Californias Series) [Paperback]

The setting is Orange County in the middle of the 21st Century, with the USSR and the Cold War alive and well. Orange County has largely disappeared into a maze of highways and strip malls. The protagonist, Jim, is a twenty-something still dependent on his parents, who dabbles in Zen, post-modern poetry, works at an insurance agency and teaches night classes at a local community college. He cannot concentrate on anything for too long and tends to see other people as characters in a novel who come and go at random: when Jim's dad taught him about engine mechanics, Jim is interested and sees how the thermodynamics involved can be a metaphor for society, but then he promptly forgets it. When he visits his uncle Tom in a massive retirement home, he is fascinated by the lonely old man's storys of how Orange County used to be and resolves to spend more time with him, but as soon as the visit ends, he gets the heeby-jeebies about the retirement complex and ignores his uncle until he's obligated to visit again. He is in a relationship showing signs of becoming serious, but betrays his girlfriend for a random hook-up with a girl at a party. When Jim's friends tell him that his ex's heart was broken by the betray, he is surprised and rather indifferent.

Eventually Jim realizes how hollow he is and his first attempt to find meaning is to get involved with some saboteurs trying to end America's huge military-industrial complex. Eventually, we see him grow up and develop a mature relationship with an art teacher, and even become reconciled with his parents. He also finds his voice as a history writer who seeks to find out what Orange County used to be like, and how it came to be a suburban nightmare.

Jim is the main character, but Robinson also looks at Jim's parents, friends, and intersperses the fiction with prose meditations on the stages of Orange County's history. The result is a rich journey to a world that is hauntingly like our own. For instance, nobody has a boyfriend or girlfriend, they have "allies", much like the modern term "partner", and while the Cold War may be dead in our world, Robinson does a good job of making our consumer culture take a look in the mirror.

Many people talked about "American Beauty"'s indictment of American suburbia, but ten years before that movie came out, Robinson created a much better examination of suburban culture, without the blatant polemics of American Beauty.

It's different from much of Robinson's other work, but it still has his unique style and is well worth your time.

In any case, the plot thickens as Jim gets involved in the underworld of anti-military-industrial complex sabotage. We realize some personal cataclysm's inevitable, as Jim's own father develops high-precision munitions a la the Strategic Defense Initiative (the book was written in the 1980s). We follow Jim, his dad, and Jim's pals as they work, play, and blow up various weapons plants. The plot ends with something of an epiphany for Jim - a rather postmodern one. Postmodern, because it leaves that empty, "existential" or "what does it all mean" feeling in the reader that people who chronically wear black, smoke cigarettes, and inhabit coffeehouses so like to affect. We hope that Jim makes a turn for the better.

Be that as it may, there are more than a few telling passages that leave their impression. KSR has developed the skill of capturing the moment - and the observer's reflections thereon - beyond the level of most modern writers. Those individual versus the world (or individual-in-the-world) moments are rather "existential" in the original, phenomenological sense of the word (not the coffeehouse sense), and are KSR's real contribution to fiction. A case in point is when one of Jim's friends, a surfer, undertakes his sport at nighttime. You'll have to read the passage for yourself to believe how incredibly well it distills the narrator's experience.

I admit to some disappointment after the great expectations raised by the previous volume in the trilogy, The Wild Shore. In sum, Gold Coast is strong work compared to most sci-fi, but weak for KSR.

Jim, the prime protagonist, is a much conflicted individual, who really has not found out what he really believes is right or what he should do with his life. Involved in a seemingly endless round of parties with his friends, having no serious commitment to his lady friend, holding two desultory part-time jobs that he has no enthusiasm for, considering himself to be a writer with a strong interest in the history of Orange County but without any finished product he thinks is good, and still partially dependent on his parents for support, he is a prime target for suggestion and peer pressure to define his actions. When one of his friends suggests that he should actually do something to change the domination of the country by the military-industrial complex, he jumps at the chance, and soon finds himself involved in industrial sabotage. His father, in the meantime, is also fighting the same war, but from a completely different perspective of an engineer actively employed by that same complex, trying to find a technical solution to the MAD arms-race.

Along the way to Jim finding his own resolution to his life, we are treated to historical snapshots of Orange County from its very early settling by native Americans to the coming of the Spanish, to its flowering as an agricultural paradise, to its great industrial expansion during and after World War II, and finally to the condition depicted at the time of this book, as an almost totally asphalt covered warren of apartments, malls, offices, and neon lighting that has forgotten its historical and ecological heritage. These sections, viewed separately from the rest of the book, form something of an extended prose poem, with a very heavy 'back-to-nature' message, that intertwine with Jim's search for meaning in his life, and provide a strong under-current to the novel's action.

The opening of this book is very rough, with too many characters introduced too briefly, with trivial and sometimes outdated dialogue, and without any apparent clear focus or direction. It is not till almost halfway through the book that it settles down and starts showing depth and direction. From this point on, the novel becomes much better, as the reader becomes interested in the characters and moral dilemma's they and their world face.

This is not KSR's best novel. The book wanders for too long before finding its legs, and the ecological sub-theme is sometimes too strident, the bashing of capitalism inadequately supported. But it has something to say about both our current industrial society and about the everyday individual's place in that society, about making a difference, about having commitments and moral integrity, about both the 'how' and the 'why' a life should be lived.