WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

After a daredevil’s death shocks his circle, his best friend goes on an audacious quest for meaning.

Joan Didion called the aftermath of her husband’s death “the year of magical thinking.” For Lola Treasure Gold, the year after her best friend, Alex, dies is a season of sublimated grief turned metamorphosis. Though Alex is gone, his death is a sensation—he fell seven stories trying to sail a skateboard from one roof to another, witnessed by the friend who was filming. Their tight friend group is stunned, and to add to the loss, Lola knows their friendship could have been more. These are social media–savvy free spirits in LA; Alex died doing a stunt for clout—or maybe transcendence. Experimenting with her purpose and identity, and needing income, Lola starts to branch out. She gets shoved into the limelight: Someone films, remixes, and posts her semi-serious soliloquy on what Alex’s life might mean. The video takes off, and Lola attracts a growing fan base. She gets the hang of living larger online and, through a hero’s journey of adulation and cancellation, travels the path from ironic pseudo-guru in a sea of charlatans (“I’d just flown back from a secretive weeklong retreat intended to help scions of billionaire families understand how to live with themselves”) to someone who really does infuse people’s lives with sincerity and wonder. Chang draws characters with quick mastery, and writes Lola as a mille-feuille of sophistication, delighted lust, and self-doubt. The dialogue snaps and sparks, and Chang dispenses observations about race, class, feminism, sex, and influencer and tech-founder culture with panache. As the novel follows Lola’s search for a reason to live without Alex and a vision of who she could be on her own, it braids satire of rich people searching for their souls and a practicum on how to find closure, with both our living and our dead. Lola’s ache to know more about her Chinese family of origin, which turned her into a first-generation orphan half-raised by a landlord, is a poignant throughline as well. Despite sometimes fluffy revelations, Lola is a magnetic character who, despite her public life, has her most profound thoughts in private.

Nails the emotional contradictions, absurdities, and cathartic surprises of modern life.