Golden Days is the only Carolyn See novel that opens outside California. “Once, I remember, in an entirely different world,” she begins, “I interviewed that East Coast photographer who made a good living taking pictures of people as they jumped.” And yet, even here, that voice—gossipy, insinuating with its reference to that photographer—operates like a whisper in your ear. This is what I most admire about See’s fiction, the way its conversational qualities get us to drop our guard. In Golden Days, it’s a strategy that works brilliantly because this is a novel written to surprise us, in which the worst of all possible outcomes, nuclear war, may not be so tragic after all. To get there, See starts in a naturalistic vein, as her narrator, Edith, returns to Los Angeles, before shifting gears as global tensions explode. That I’m giving away nothing essential by revealing this is part of the point, for what most interests See is the support women show for one another in a world defiled by men. After the missiles launch, Edith and her beloveds must figure out how to persevere. Even (or especially) in the face of catastrophe, See writes about the city as it is. “They say L.A. is large,” she tells us, “but they lie.… ‘Real’ L.A. had its thick, coiled root downtown.… Then a thin stem, the Santa Monica freeway, heading due west and putting out greenery, places in this western desert where you’d love to live—if things went right.”•
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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