When a publisher finally picked up my third book, The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley, my friend Anne congratulated me on completing it. She knew the book had taken me over 20 years to write. Then she asked a keen question: along with the sense of accomplishment, did I feel a little sad?
The justice system can seem like a faceless monolith. But beneath the veneer of legal solemnity, the paper trail left by trucking disputes or chicken-fat injuries amounts to a kind of living library, an archive of corporate overreach and personal foibles, transcribed in every register imaginable by people — biased people, with weird hangups and charming habits — telling the stories of their lives through their most tragic, selfish or trivial problems.
This is a dystopian novel in thrall to its own genre, full of knockabout comic book bravado, with regular knowing nods to literary and cinematic history. It is, in short, a blast.
In Guido Morselli’s eerie and fantastical 1973 novel, “Dissipatio H.G.,” a man discovers he has inexplicably survived the sudden disappearance of the human race. It’s tough luck, given that he’d planned to drown himself in a cave the very night it happened. Instead, the unnamed narrator emerges to find himself alive and alone in the world, after an apocalyptic ambiguity he refers to as “the Event.” Descending from his remote village, he searches for survivors in Chrysopolis, a fictional mercantile city. There he finds not people, but rather “a taste of eternity”: memories, emboldened animals, flickering apparitions and lush, unfamiliar silences.
The author might have done more, for instance, to explore the risks ahead posed by cyberterrorism, computer crime and the growing reliance on electronic transactions. But as an introduction to how money morphed into the varied forms it has today, Goldstein’s book is a readable place to start.