CALIFORNIA DREAMING

In Silver’s novel, a young, idealistic woman moves to California in search of a meaningful life but instead finds disillusionment and ennui.

Elena Berg grows up hearing her mother’s fairy tales of a “gold-tinged” California in the 1960s, a “place where anything was possible.” She decamps from her New England hometown for the Bay Area with a position teaching English to middle school students in Oakland as part of the Teach for America program. Her lofty aspirations to teach economically disadvantaged kids are stymied by reality, however: She struggles to make any progress in class or real connections with her students, and she even begins to question whether poetry is something they genuinely need, a profound disappointment affectingly portrayed by the author. Elena finally quits to work for a tech startup, a curriculum-design company that produces a program to help students learn how to read closely. But the sense of greater purpose this work inspires is waylaid by the company’s pivot away from an educational product to document scanners. Silver sensitively depicts the painful disenchantment of the protagonist—Elena discovers not only how romanticized her image of teaching is, but also of California itself, revealed here to be a locus of crass commercialism, violence, and grotesque inequality. “My transition into thirty is not feeling graceful. I have been thinking of the ways in which those dreams fulfilled can make way for new dreams to emerge, but then, too, the opposite—the way an unfulfilled dream nags and tugs, gets in the way of moving forward.” The author paints an impressively complex portrait of the tumultuous 2010s that thoughtfully addresses issues as diverse as abortion and Jewish identity. The plot can slow to such an unhurried amble that it begins to feel self-indulgent, and there’s more than a touch of staid cliche to Elena’s arc of self-discovery. Still, Silver’s prose is ruminatively insightful and emotionally powerful, and the sheer intelligence of the work compensates for its literary stumbles.

A meditative novel composed with psychological subtlety.