Fire and ice

I tore through this book - a new Anthropocene novel which happens also to be authored by a colleague - last week but didn't have a chance to tell you about it. It's terrific, incredibly well written and often outrageously fun. (I wouldn't have throught a "California noir" about the making of a movie, one of whose stars is inspired by Lindsay Lohan, could have captured my interest but I was hooked.) But it also left me devastated in ways I couldn't quite articulate. I can't say much now either without spoilers, but let me say this much. Kleeman doesn't just write snappy dialogue interspersed with pitch-perfect set pieces but has an amazing gift for describing sensory experiences, from sights and sounds to smells and textures - so precise and apposite you realize that we share a sensory world. So when some people in the novel come down with an (of course anthropogenic) illness which destroys their capacity to name and even distinguish their experiences, you mourn the loss of every detail of the shared world her language has illuminated for us.