Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
From the author of 'Daisy Jones & The Six' comes this beach read. This was icily billiant about a family and the lifelong effects on them of their obviously insincere absent father. Everything about the jerk father is negatively focused.
It is Malibu 1983, the Riva siblings are cool and fabulous and interesting. Nina Riva is having her famous annual summer party and everyone wants to come. Nina is a supermodel/surfer and as for her siblings? Jay is a surfer, Hud a photographer and surfer and Kit is another surfer. They're a source of endless fasciantion, mostly due to their legendary father Mick who abandoned them twice.
The party goes out of control and secrets come out. There are shocking events, infuriating men and a father who is disheartening and who lives in cossetted prvilege. The father is wince making in his dismal selfishness. He's an arch betrayer. This book causes rapt attention, as one fateful night Mick returns to the now grown children he long ago repudiated.
People don't talk or act like they live in 1983. Mick leaving his inconvenient children twice and letting them grow up in poverty was not a career ending taboo. Mick doesn't care how utterly devastating his actions are to women and children. The kids are disinhibited beach bunnies. Nina is earnesty staid and Mick is vacuously self promoting and ignores the rickety dynamics around him.
Vertiginous changes are coming. This was very good. Mich deserves to be castigated and this was persistently engaging and coldly brilliant.
Best Lines:
“Two-sink world.”
“Wasn't sure what it looked like or how one went about making it.”
“A house she never would have chosen...left by a man she could not even remember why she married.”
“Whatever hand was guiding him – guiding everyone – toward a certain future...”
“Put out a signal and see if anyone answered.”
“Companionless.”
“To be the only one who mattered.”
“Men's interest magazine.”
“That he's...never been here.”
“She threw a dinner plate at him. And then two more.”
“Never kind.”
“What waited them all-”
“Heartbreak and consequences.”
“Missed the future she thought she had been building for herself,”
“Inevitable calamity.”
“A big difference between what you needed to believe and what you actually believed.”
“Things he felt he needed.”
“Benevolent confidence.”
“She had never heard of Coors, did not have a context for it other than to know it was beneath her.”
“People couldn't just do coke off coffee tables anymore?”
“Until that would be received as a good thing.”
“Adjust your tone.”
“Afraid he wasn't going to matter very soon.”
“The man he'd yearned for had never existed.”
“Someone peed on a Lichtenstein. A Lichenstein.”