Bloomsbury: 384 pages, $30
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Mason Daunt said he would pick up the flowers himself. Like Mrs. Dalloway, he spends the day leading up to his big party \u2014 in his case a baby shower in Los Angeles \u2014 reminiscing and worrying. Unlike Virginia Woolf\u2019s titular heroine, though, Mason is distracted from his errands by a billionaire with a penis statue emergency, a session with a wolfman dom in his favorite virtual reality dungeon and, as if that weren\u2019t enough, a minor zombie apocalypse.<\/p>\n
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Jonathan Parks-Ramage knows exactly what he\u2019s doing in evoking bourgeoisie Clarissa Dalloway\u2019s routine in the opening section of his new novel, \u201cIt\u2019s Not the End of the World.\u201d Woolf\u2019s most famous book is about an upper-class woman\u2019s busy day, sure, but it\u2019s also about the ways in which she is caged by the very expectations that come with her privilege, and it\u2019s counterbalanced by the cultural uneasiness following World War I and the delusions and ultimate suicide of the novel\u2019s other main character, PTSD-ridden Septimus Smith. Parks-Ramage takes the idea of a wealthy, sometimes frivolous main character getting ready for a party and dials it up to 11. But then, in an ambitious move that brings a delightful element of camp to the novel, he abandons that relatively safe and simple premise in favor of an exercise in maximalism. Which is to say that his plot goes off the rails \u2014 and it works.<\/p>\n
Over the course of the first third or so of \u201cIt\u2019s Not the End of the World,\u201d readers learn about Mason Daunt and his world. It\u2019s 2044, Mason is a white gay artist married to Yunho Kim, a formerly successful Korean American screenwriter recently blacklisted after being questioned by the House Anti-American Speech Committee, and the two are having a baby via a surrogate, Astrid. Money is never far from Mason\u2019s mind, and he\u2019s constantly aware of how much he and Yunho are spending: $10,000 a month for Astrid and her girlfriend Claudia\u2019s L.A. rental; $100,000 on the baby shower, including a WeatherMod fee to ensure that the cloud seeding technology company will get rid of the pesky wildfire smoke and leave Mason and Yunho\u2019s backyard to bask in L.A.\u2019s promised sunshine.<\/p>\n
Mason has everything, it seems: a loving and virile husband, a mansion, a closeted gay billionaire buying up his morally vacant art, and the latest iOSCerebrum installed in his brain (which, in order to make the virtual BDSM dungeon he goes to authentic, is \u201csynced with his state-of-the-art ThrashJacketTM to ensure authentic haptic violence\u201d). What could go wrong?<\/p>\n
Only everything, of course. As the day\u2019s events unfold, interrupted by flashbacks of the 14 months leading up to it, a mysterious pink fog begins to appear around L.A. No one knows what it is, but wherever it descends, people seem to lose their minds. By the time Mason gets home, he\u2019s witnessed a brutal amount of violence perpetrated by those who\u2019ve inhaled the pink fog. Parks-Ramage delights in the gory details, the intestines and missing flesh and dangling jawbones, bringing Mason up close and personal with the ugliness that he is, otherwise, guiltily but only intellectually aware of (Mason\u2019s sessions with Vex, his dom, involve being shamed for his wealth and his part in deepening inequality amid worsening climate change). If you\u2019ve seen \u201cSinners,\u201d and enjoyed the campiness of its vampires, you\u2019ll have fun with the not-technically-but-functionally zombies Parks-Ramage deploys in this section of the book.<\/p>\n
Much like the worst kind of gender reveal party, Mason and Yunho\u2019s baby shower has consequences. Mason, shockingly still alive following the shower\u2019s events, is charged with murder. Yunho, Astrid, her baby and Claudia have all disappeared from Mason\u2019s life, although they are, unbeknownst to him, living in one of his mansions in Montana, and have started a utopian anarchist commune with three dozen or so people. Most of the sections that take place on the ranch closely adhere to the perspective of 4-year-old Gabriel, the child of Mason and Yunho\u2019s good friends and business partners. At first Gabriel is very happy on the ranch, living with their care pod, but as tensions are ratcheted up with a local militia, they\u2019re increasingly exposed to violence and trauma.<\/p>\n
Parks-Ramage doesn\u2019t sugarcoat how bad things could get and, in fact, leans into the absurdities of what the world might look like if climate change continues unabated, American democracy crumbles even further and billionaires meddling in government gain more legitimacy (a basically immortal Peter Thiel turns up in the novel\u2019s last section).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s Not the End of the World\u201d is a wild ride of a novel. Its ridiculous moments are clearly deliberate, and it\u2019s not subtle \u2014 but as Mason used to think in college when his classmates critiqued his artwork for being too on the nose, \u201cWell, the world was on fire so what was the point of being elliptical and academic?\u201d Sometimes you have to laugh so you won\u2019t cry \u2014 and as is usually the case with camp, there is something true and painful running beneath the humor.<\/p>\n
In this case, it\u2019s the question of children: Why do we have them? Are they our hope for the future or the reason we maintain an illusion of hope? Are they merely a way to give ourselves a pretense of immortality? Parks-Ramage doesn\u2019t come to a specific conclusion, and although some of his more righteous characters seem to be firmly on the reproduction-is-immoral side, his depiction of Gabriel\u2019s childlike wonder and imagination is tender and loving. It\u2019s a good reminder that, no matter how awful or hopeless things get, we can still imagine dragons.<\/p>\n
Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel \u201cAll My Mother\u2019s Lovers\u201d and the forthcoming novel \u201cBeings.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review It’s Not the End of the World By Jonathan Parks-RamageBloomsbury: 384 pages, $30If you buy books…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[62108,62111,62106,2540,3444,28609,77,62110,62107,62112,34470,62104,12867,62103,62109,16,15,26,62105],"class_list":{"0":"post-143824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-4-year-old-gabriel","9":"tag-astrid","10":"tag-baby-shower","11":"tag-billionaire","12":"tag-books","13":"tag-end","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-famous-book","16":"tag-jonathan-parks-ramage","17":"tag-l-a-rental","18":"tag-los-angeles-times","19":"tag-mason-daunt","20":"tag-novel","21":"tag-pink-fog","22":"tag-section","23":"tag-uk","24":"tag-united-kingdom","25":"tag-world","26":"tag-yunho-kim"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}