Something New Under the Sun

Chapter Two


In the photographs posted online, the restaurant is enchanting: shady and cool in a land of so much sunlight and bare, exposed skin. In one photo, a close-up of a whole spatch-cocked quail, grilled with preserved kumquat, is set against a colorful salad of shaved fennel, caraway seeds, and smoked juniper berries. The body of the quail is fragile and precise, like a tropical flower. Small crooked wings and glossy drumsticks encircle a vacated center, where the guts have been extracted with the tender skill of a model-airplane hobbyist. Past the tight-focus food, the background is a murk of charcoal grays and moody blues, indistinctly stylish. In another photo, a gray granite bar slopes a mellow S, bordered on one side by a line of gleaming gold-tone Art Nouveau barstools, on the other by a wall of artisanal tequilas reaching all the way up to the vaulted ceiling. At the right side of the image, individual dining tables in dark wood and oiled metal are cast in somber window-light and shadow, like a Vermeer painting of a high-end gastropub. In reality, the place feels like a cave: dark and in-set, with a guillotine of expensive brass lights dangling overhead.

Patrick sits in the corner of a large, steep-backed booth upholstered in cerulean velvet, with two brand-new copies of his novel Elsinore Lane on the table before him. He s tall enough, five foot ten, which is almost six feet, but the booth is designed to make all guests feel small and weak, regardless of their size or body type. The tufted back rises up over his head, culminating in a forward-curving cushion that pushes his head down slightly, forcing him to slouch. On the way here, his rideshare had gotten stuck in traffic, and he had spent most of the trip trying to think of how he d play his tardiness off to Jay Arvid and Brenda Billington, the film s executive producers. Lateness, a sign of irresponsibility, could be transformed into a sign of power under the right

Alexandra Kleeman

Kleeman is a visionary writer . . . She s also very funny. These two qualities are shown to great effect here, as she turns her attention to the movie business, our looming climate crisis, corporate malfeasance and the Disney child star system. It s a brilliant, ambitious book. Refinery29

With nods to Beckett and Stoppard, Kleeman juxtaposes fiery doom with passages of sharp, absurdist dialogue and a sprinkle of one-liners reminiscent of Fleabag. Instyle

The varieties of emergency ecological, psychological, familial, medical are the half-hidden subject of Kleeman s novel, burning at the periphery of what begins as a modishly detached rollick through Hollywood and its empty promises. . . . It is a ghost story not of the past but of the near future, a ghost story as alarm bell, one hard to leave in the realm of fiction. The New York Times

Kleeman s world is unsettled, but so is ours. And she leans into that unsettledness to create a world that is just a few notches more uncanny than our own, starkly making the absurdity of ours that much more clear. Nylon

Kleeman s great skill, and this novel s abiding triumph, is how seamlessly she blends the horrific with the mundanely troubling, the ridiculous or the impossible with the ordinarily absurd. LA Review of Books

Throughout, Kleeman writes expressively about place and the manifold ways our lives are shaped by our imperiled environment, foregrounding the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties. Vulture

Because this is an Alexandra Kleeman novel, none of it goes where you think it s going to, but it s all so wildly entertaining and beautifully written that it really doesn t matter where you end up. Literary Hub

Written with tremendous verve and flair, Something New Under the Sun is both an urgent novel about our very near future and a deeply addictive pleasure. . . . Kleeman is a phenomenon, one of the most