Random Book Report: Catalina by Liska Jacobs
Not really reviews, my Random Book Reports are thoughts on books I’ve read lately.
Reviews of Liska Jacobs’ novel focus on the main character’s self-destructive journey. Elsa’s downward spiral is “like watching a train wreck”, “wonderfully compelling,” “unnerving.” I love a bit of self-destruction, so I went into the book eager to be shocked by whatever this MC, Elsa, was about to do to herself, to disagree with her choices and pity her lack of self-control. Instead, everything Elsa did made perfect sense to me. This book makes sense, contrary to what one review claimed, which is that the novel is nothing but “nonsensical ramblings.”
Banged out in neon imagery and the unapologetic bluntness of Jacob’s prose, we follow Elsa as she arrives home in California. After a brief interlude at home in Bakersfield, she goes to LA, stays in an expensive hotel, takes pills, gets drunk, flirts with the bell boy, picks up a one night stand, then reconnects with old friends and heads to Catalina on a millionaire’s yacht for more debauchery. Things only go downhill from there, and her friends aren’t exactly pions of clean living either, as others have noted, everyone in this book is terrible, and yet I couldn’t look away. True, I burned through this novel in a few hours, but I don’t think you can write it off as a beach read, if the beach were in the Upside Down. Here’s why.
This may be the first book I’ve read that so accurately depicts the specific brand of nihilism that comes with being a woman and simply moving through the world. Ok, ok, the protagonist is young (though she feels old, at 30), and beautiful (on the outside), but Jacobs makes that part and parcel of her disenchantment with a world that insists she trade on her sex appeal whether she wants to or not. There’s a slow reveal as we find out what has set Elsa on her mission of debasement in the first place. Some readers might be disappointed that her inciting event wasn’t that big a deal—unless you put it in a larger context. What I saw was that Elsa had done everything she thought she was supposed to do in order to become untouchable by the pressures to submit to the male gaze. She pursues a career in the arts, climbing toward an elevated plane at an institution that exists to conserve beauty while not letting anyone touch it: MOMA. But still, her stint as sexual relief to a man in a position of power knocks her off track.
So how does she deal? By taking lots of pretty pink and yellow pills, drinking tequila and champagne, having sex with dangerous strangers, and rolling in the mucky leftover feelings of an old flame. She copes, basically, in the few ways left available to women in this version of reality, which is more or less the same as the one we’re living in. Jacobs never lobs this sad philosophy directly at us, but she does shine a spotlight on it in certain paragraphs.
My opinion on the deeper meaning of Catalina might have been influenced by something that was occurring in my life while I was reading it. A few months before, I’d rebuffed unwelcome interest from a fellow actor who was in a play I did with my local theatre group. The experience made me reluctant to return to the group; as a friend said when I told her the story, “I, too, have regretted the few occasions I’ve been nice to a man.” If that was all it took to get me to withdraw from something I love, isn’t Elsa’s opting for oblivion after being chewed up and spit out by her boss perfectly reasonable?
This is also maybe the first book I’ve read that depicts Los Angeles accurately, especially Santa Monica. Jacobs removes the veneer we’re so used to seeing on the fictionalized California and shows us what it looks like instead through a hangover: a sagging, drought-depressed, calamity. Her portrayal of Catalina is bang-on as an island divided between uncaring ruggedness and a tourist playground where everyone drives around in golf carts, the adult version of a baby buggy. The surrounding ocean almost takes on the life of another character. Elsa longs for its turbulent depths, but the ocean is the one entity in the book that doesn’t want her, or want something from her.
So, my cocktail party quip for Catalina is: It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s imperfect—it’s a dirty martini of a book, and will leave you wanting a second one.