For those who pay attention to emerging talent, David Yoon’s arrival has been nothing short of explosive. His 2019 debut, “Frankly in Love,” is already listed among the best young adult novels of all time. His first novel for adults, “Version Zero,” was one of the most anticipated crime novels of 2021. His second, “City of Orange,” is a tale of survival in postapocalyptic California.
Like all his work to date, “City of Orange” is a very intimate self-portrait with a protagonist who mirrors the author’s own life: a native Californian, a Korean American, a deeply rational and creative soul who grounds himself in his family and friends. In previous works, Yoon has touched on his father’s death by cancer, his adolescence in Southern California and his experience as a tech worker in Silicon Valley — finding the humor, passion and pain in his past. “City of Orange” breaks with that pattern and dives straight into the heart of Yoon’s worst fears for the future — literally the end of everything he loves most.
The resulting novel is a powerful meditation on destruction, loss and healing. Waking up broken in a ruined world, the hero rises from the sand to seek the necessities of life: water, food, shelter, tools. His path to survival is littered with jagged shards of memory triggered whenever he stumbles across some random fragment of the lost world. Sometimes he seizes upon these memories eagerly, but at other times he cringes in agony and fear. Even in the throes of his traumatic brain injury, he is driven to answer two all-consuming questions: How did the world end? And is it possible that somewhere, somehow, his wife and child are still alive?
For a novel about the end of the world, there is a surprisingly large cast of sympathetic characters. In the past, there are rich memories of a best friend, a wife, a baby daughter. In the present, our hero’s companions are denizens of the Wasteland: crows and corpses, aphasic madmen and abandoned children — all symbolic fragments of his shattered consciousness, past and present, from a lonely childhood to a lonely grave.
Above all, “City of Orange” is a beautiful novel about Southern California. The prose is swift and luminous, the dialogue is note-perfect, and the flashback descriptions of modern Los Angeles are beautifully written. Important scenes evoke Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey and the nearby El Segundo Blue Butterfly Sanctuary — and, of course, the star of the novel is a flood-control culvert, structures that have become iconic of Southern California in countless films and television shows since 1938.
最后，很少有世界末日的小说具有这部文学品质。“橙色城市”属于非常狭窄的类别，与艾米丽·圣约翰（Emily St. John）的“第十一台”，理查德·马蒂森（Richard Matheson）的“我是传奇”和科马克·麦卡锡（Cormac McCarthy）的“ The The Road”。像该类型中所有最好的作家一样，戴维元愿意问“世界末日”的真正含义，并为读者提供深思熟虑，发自内心的答案。
City of Orange
By David Yoon
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons; 352 pages; $27)
Author event
Green Apple Books on the Park presents David Yoon in conversation with Tom Lin:In-person and virtual. 7 p.m. June 1. Free. Masks and proof of vaccination required for in person;registrationrequired for virtual. 1231 Ninth Ave., S.F.www.greenapplebooks.com