TIME'S MOUTH

Communes and counterculture, dysfunctional families, astral travel...welcome to California in the second half of the 20th century.

The first time Sharon experiences her ability to revisit scenes from her past, she’s 16. “How could she see herself? She could feel her own body, back in the bedroom, but she was also here in the backyard, without a form. She was a floating consciousness. This other self, the one on the grass—Sharon recognized herself. Three years in the past. She was thirteen. And, still, sixteen. Here and there at the same time. This was the night of her father’s funeral. The best day of her life.” Lepucki’s latest novel is, in a word, a trip, narrated by Time itself. It begins with a literal trip, as Sharon runs away from the horrors of her childhood in Connecticut and heads for a different life with a new name: Ursa. Ursa’s adventures in California unfurl through the late 1950s and ’60s, and by the 1970s, she’s a single mother raising her son at a woodland women’s commune/marijuana farm, with her mysterious psychic abilities making her a cult leader. Her son, Ray, does not have a happy childhood, however, nor does his close companion, Cherry. The running away continues—first Ray and Cherry run to LA, and then Cherry leaves Ray to raise their baby, Opal, alone—and so does the time travel, as another character turns out to have Ursa’s gift. The novel follows the characters into the 1990s, by which time the terrible thing in Ursa’s past that made her celebrate her father’s death has impacted three generations of parenting, and the resentment and secrecy that have festered over the decades come to a head. Lepucki is known for combining domestic realism with a magical worldview and/or SF–adjacent elements (here, there’s an isolation chamber in a box in the garage inspired by Reich’s Orgone Accumulator) and for evoking California in all its real, surreal, and unreal glory. She does it again.

This emotionally intense, wildly imaginative novel is both down-to-earth and out-to-lunch. One of a kind.