Wiping Out in Southern California

Taylor Jenkins Reid has both fame and fortune, as the author of the bestselling The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and also Daisy Jones and the Six, which went on to become an Amazon Prime TV series. She is prolific, too: Malibu Rising is her seventh book, and she’s published two more after this one.

Set near the beaches of southern California, Malibu Rising follows the Riva family. The father is a rock star with many kids, and in case you didn’t get the real-life reference, he’s called Mick. The mother, June, worked at her family restaurant:

*A restaurant something like this?*
_{(Generated by Google’s AI Image Generator)}

a struggling restaurant called Pacific Fish slinging crab cakes and fried clams just off the Pacific Coast HIghway. Its bright red sign with cursive type hung high in the air, beckoning you from the east side of the highway to look away from the water for just one moment and eat something deep fried with an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

This has promise — full sentences with evocative description and a sense of place. Alas, the Riva children are the center of the story, and all chapters devoted to them are more like this:

She breathed in the salt air. [..] She looked out onto the horizon. The ocean was as blue as ink.

Women talk ‘softly, shy and smiling’. Men are ‘undeniably handsome’ with ‘tan, broad shoulders’. And once beyond the cliches, the other sentences are rather … odd.

June’s joy was something she stole between shifts.

She let the water warm her iced skin, washing away the brine, rendering her once again a clean slate.

Bliss ran through her like a bolt.

Nina became entranced by his voice [..], smitten to tell her friends at school who her dad was.

To them, June was stress and bone.

There is a lot of anthropomorphizing of natural and man-made disasters.

It is Malibu’s nature to burn.

So much for the writing. As to the plot, it centers on the 4 Riva children. Nina, the oldest, is motherly and responsible, as she grew up caring for the children after the rockstar father Mick walked out and their mother June had to work. She is also (of course) beautiful, a supermodel, and an excellent surfer. Jay, next in line, is handsome and a professional surfer. Hud is almost the same age as Jay, because he was born of an affair between Mick and a random woman, who then dumped the baby into the Riva family. Last comes Kit (Catherine), who is described as twenty, another excellent surfer, who parties, has jobs and independence, but has somehow never been kissed.

Family drama ensues. Hud is sleeping with Jay’s former girlfriend. Nina’s tennis-star husband is having an affair. Kit yearns for love. It all comes to a head at the annual Riva party, so exclusive that if you don’t know about it, you’re not invited. Meanwhile, there are regular ominous mentions of fire, which will doubtless make its appearance on the night of the party.

Interspersed with the current turmoil of the Riva kids, there are flashbacks to Mick and June’s relationship, his notorious womanizing, and his abandonment of the family leaving them virtually destitute (what, no child support from this millionaire?). He lives a mere twenty miles away, but has not seen his children for decades. Is it possible that he too will come to this party? I waited with bated breath (kidding).

Given the number of famous surfers and surfing scenes in this novel, the descriptions of surfing were particularly flat. (In contrast, check out Maggie Shipstead’s ballet novel, Astonish Me, which has visceral descriptions of dance). There are occasional mentions of ‘southwest swell’ and ‘saddling up’ — a few throwaway phrases here and there — but these characters could just as easily have been horseriders or ice skaters.

Finally, finally, after what seems like decades of flashbacks and portentous hints of impending chaos, comes the night of the party. There are celebrities galore, from movie stars to agents and musicians and athletes. There are gatecrashers, vats of liquor of all kinds, drugs, cocaine, stripping, threeway sex in the pool and basically every other cliche of debauchery. No surprises there, except that the novel inexplicably introduces even more characters whose behaviour at the party is described in detail.

Ricky Esposito was back hanging out near the food.

Vanessa de la Cruz walked into the kitchen

Who?

The party is a metaphor for the rest of the plot, which contains divorces, drugs, death, pregnancy, and money, as well as plenty of extraneous characters and sidelines.

A shy young woman appears, having heard from her mother that she had been conceived during a one-night stand with Mick Riva. Is she really his daughter? Even Mick is unsure, having no recollection of the mother, but there is some facial similarity, on the basis of which the other Riva welcome the girl into their tight cluster. I did like the uncertainty of whether she was indeed Mick’s daughter, but found the Riva children rather unrealistic.

And that, perhaps, sums up the problem with this book. The main characters are perfectly pleasant, but in no way engrossing for the reader. They don’t even suffer from the usual problem of famous children — living up to their famous father — since at least 3 of them have found fame in quite different professions. Are readers supposed to empathize with Nina Riva’s angst that her vast house was so blandly decorated by her ex? Rather slim threads to hang an entire novel on.