Books: Apocalypse Soon Golden Days

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Carolyn See's latest novel is an adventuresome blend of feminist fiction and nuclear apocalypse fantasy set in California. That pulling this off might require the implacable imagination of Doris Lessing does not seem to have daunted the author, whose career suggests a practical attitude toward the writing game. See has had good critical success with her novels Rhine Maidens and Mothers, Daughters. As a component of "Monica Highland," she has collaborated on mass-market romances (Lotus Land and 110 Shanghai Road). There is also Professor See, who teaches writing at UCLA, and See a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times.

This well-directed busyness is shared by Edith Langley, hero of Golden Days, who has awakened from the coma of two bad marriages with the understanding that a girl has got to hustle. This is how she did it: "I made myself up half hour by hour. I rented myself out to silicone chip places. I got myself a weekly financial column at the city's 'second' paper, which got me to parties, which got me to cute guys, which got me to some financial meetings of small businesses, and little by little I was able to build up a fairly decent ! portfolio." The diversified hoard includes rubies, good enough reasons for Langley to set herself up as a specialist in gemstones. For a fee, she raises the jewelry consciousness of Beverly Hills matrons. As described, Langley's own ex-husbands come across as flawed zircons.

One of the assumptions of Golden Days is that testosterone is the most unstable element in the universe. When men, the sole possessors of penises and nuclear missiles, go wrong, the result is usually bad. See's holocaust is foreshadowed by a catalog of vague fears. The cause of the actual disaster is left unclear, although the reader has been prepared for its reason: the inevitability of male conflict. This is a stimulating and not unreasonable assertion, although it is not convincingly worked out as fiction. Neither is the author's romantic projection that the destruction is a new beginning that will eliminate the traditional causes of social and sexual discord.

See's prose is strikingly gnomic as Langley tells of her past and future. But the consistent tone masks an impatience with novelistic invention. Much of the novel reads like a catchall of California behaviors and the confessional sociology that passed for journalism in the '70s. Sometimes See is right on the money: "I don't remember Jack very well at all. And we were married five years! He hated the way I held hamburgers." But there is not enough of this to pass for serious fiction in the '80s.