'Malibu Rising' by Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

From the BLURB: 

A lifetime holding it together. 

One party will bring it crashing down. 

Malibu: August, 1983. It's the day of Nina Riva's annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over-especially as the offspring of the legendary singer, Mick Riva. 

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames.

But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family's generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

‘Malibu Rising’ is the new book by American author Taylor Jenkins Reid, her seventh novel and the third in what is a loose “Cinematic Universe” of a part-fictionalised timeline of American fame … her first foray into alternate-Hollywood was 2017’s ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ which is where readers first fleetingly met Dean Martin-style crooner, Mick Riva – whose four abandoned children are the protagonists of ‘Malibu Rising’. 

I’m not 100% sure if Jenkins Reid’s big breakout success, the 2019 novel ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ (which looked at an alternate 1970s American music-scene, written as an oral history of one band) has character cameos feature in ‘Malibu Rising’ too … making this the third book in a loose Taylor Jenkins Reid Cinematic Universe? But I wouldn’t be surprised. In ‘Evelyn Hugo’, Jenkins Reid gave us 1960s Golden Age glamour of a claustrophobic Hollywood, ‘Daisy Jones’ was all about the love revolution of the 70s music-scene, and ‘Malibu Rising’ spins around the technicolour 80s – making a pretty neat trilogy of fame, fortune, and how fleeting it all is. 

‘Malibu’ spins around one night in 1983 that is about to become infamous – at the annual party of Nina Riva, the oldest daughter of American singing sensation Mick Riva. By the end of the night her house will have burned down, and multiple celebrities will be arrested for various hedonistic acts – the book takes us through the hour-by-hour play-by-play of the day and introduces us to Nina and her three siblings. 

There’s Jay – the eldest son of Mick Riva and a surfing sensation whose star is on the rise. Next there’s Hud – a few months younger than Jay – a talented photographer whose romantic optimism may be about to get the better of him. And youngest sibling is Katherine ‘Kit’ who has never been kissed and is determined to not examine too closely why that is, and also correct the situation at her sister’s big party this year. 

Then there’s Nina herself – a talented surfer who has found uncomfortable fame via a modelling career she’s embarrassed by, but needed in order to pull herself and her siblings out of near-poverty following the death of their mother and abandonment by their famous father. As a teenager, Nina became the head of her family and surrogate parent to all three of her siblings – and she now finds it hard to shake loose the shackles of responsibility, and finally examine what a lifetime of placating and keeping her head above water has done to her.

Amidst all this is the flashback unfolding romance of Mick Riva and their mother, June – a slow-moving car-crash we read unfold alongside another inevitable blaze burning across Malibu … 

Jenkins Reid in her other two books in this loose universe, has kept the children of famous people pretty firmly on the sidelines. They’ve quite literally been passive observers to the tale of their famous family, bit-players on the stage of someone else’s life. So it’s really interesting that Jenkins Reid has decided to take a secondary side-character from ‘Evelyn Hugo’, and give his kids the limelight … to tell a story of being on the periphery, the discarded backstory of someone else’s biography. Mick Riva is clearly a throwback to Desi Arnaz, crossed with Eddie Fisher, with the croonability of Dean Martin – and it’s the Eddie Fisher feel of the character that I found most interesting (he had five wives, was in a messy love triangle with himself, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor) and that’s because of his most famous child, Carrie Fisher.

Look, none of the Riva children are facing down the same mental and substance abuse battles that Carrie Fisher was (though there is an observation of alcoholism in the Riva family) – but there’s something about Carrie writing her semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge in 1987, the same time-period that Jenkins Reid has also thrown the Riva children into, to come into their own and reconcile with their larger-than-life and absent father, that is delicious in its crossover.

I really do love that Taylor Jenkins Reid is treating American fame as their modern mythology. This is something that I think she owes a lot Ryan Murphy who started playing with this idea of showing Americans their true modern genesis when he made American Crime Story and the first season ‘The People v. O. J. Simpson,’ in which he really posited that this was an impactive cultural moment for a whole generation, and one that largely shaped the future (this was an early version of modern reality-TV, from the car-chase to the courtroom; and Murphy hammered this home by alluding to the Kardashian family being hugely influenced by these events.) I do think Jenkins Reid has tapped into this observation beautifully – and many more have since followed; from ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ giving us an imagined female stand-up trailblazer (and now Jean Smart is showing us that progression and stagnation in ‘Hacks’), to David Fincher bringing us the true-story of ‘Mank’ and retroactively looking at the making of ‘Citizen Kane’ (commentary-within-commentary about the blurred lines of politics and Hollywood). 

This is also to say – Jenkins Reid has never written about the lives of imaginary famous people, their trials and tribulations, to say “woe is me” about their too-tight glass slippers. She spins these stories of fame and fortune to make bigger commentary. ‘Evelyn Hugo’ was brushing up alongside the commodification of women and femininity, touched on abuse against women within Hollywood – but more broadly; was revealing the queer history within Hollywood, and the ways it was kept hidden so as to project and protect a desire for heteronormative, nuclear family political aspirations to the general public. ‘Daisy Jones’ was a lot about the creative process, and what happens when a woman dares to not be cast as the ~muse~ but puts herself, her desires, front and centre in her art. Similarly, ‘Malibu Rising’ isn’t just about a dead-beat Dad flaming out on his family – rather, it’s about how much is just surface-level illusion. Mick Riva may be able to sing pretty, but he’s left a trail of destruction in his life. The Riva kids were able to bandage and paper-over their crumbling home-life after the death of their mother so as to go under the radar of social-services. And all of them as adults may be starting to look like success-stories; but it’s mostly just another façade, and what’s front-facing is not what is making them happy. These larger themes all have tendrils in today; whether it’s the #MeToo movement or living in a social-media age and the lies that brings … Jenkins Reid knows very well throughout all these books, that fame is just a distortion and amplification of reality. And if she has any over-riding message in all her works it’s to tell readers not to be fooled into worshipping False Gods. No matter how pretty and alluring their lives and exteriors may be. 

I really enjoyed ‘Malibu Rising’ – and I’m thrilled to learn that it’s been optioned for a TV series (even as I’m a little iffy on how that’ll work … I would have thought it was a slam-dunk for a movie adaptation?) and all I know for sure is that I’d love to see George Clooney cast as Mick Riva! Please! Make it meta by head-nodding to George’s old playboy persona in the media! 

I also think it’d be cool, since many real and imagined 80s celebrities are name-dropped (Jennifer Beals! Goldie Hawn! Rob Lowe!) and Nina as a model, reminds me of a cross between Brooke Shields and Cindy Crawford … so how cool if they played with the kids of those celebrities to appear in an adaptation? Pop Crawford’s daughter Kaia Gerber in there! Have Kate Hudson playing her mum! Go wild with tongue-in-cheek nostalgia! 

All in all though; this isn’t my favourite of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book (it’s still ‘Evelyn’ for me, and always). I also think the ending was a little rushed and didn’t quite land the same way that the heart-in-throat revelations in ‘Evelyn’ and ‘Daisy’ hit? I also wondered if there was a dropped-thread toward the end; when much is made of Mick Riva not indicating as he turns into a driveway, just as a secondary character is also heading home in their car … I was expecting a crash; but maybe that was just a red-herring rather than an editorial hole? Maybe another reason this wasn’t as big a WOW book for me is that I do want more. Particularly youngest sister Kit’s story, which really felt like it was just getting started by book’s end and now I want more! 

4/5  

'After I Do' by Taylor Jenkins Reid

From the BLURB:

When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one rule: they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes.

Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to question: When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for?

This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do is the story of a couple caught up in an old game—and searching for a new road to happily ever after.

‘After I Do’ was the 2014 women’s fiction novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, the second novel she wrote.

So … after loving ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ and ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ I decided to peek at Taylor Jenkins Reid’s backlist and see if I couldn’t get more of her sweet, sweet stories into my veins. At a glance; while her backlist is still women’s fiction, ‘Evelyn’ and ‘Daisy’ were the first two books in which Reid changed things up from suburban and ordinary family-sagas, to the lives and troubles of famous people. But in both cases (and especially prominent in ‘After I Do’) is Jenkins Reid’s preoccupation with examining the veneer of happiness, and the breaking-point at which people decided to really start examining their lives and the truth of their relationships.

‘After I Do’ for instance, is about Lauren and Ryan who’ve known each other for eleven years and been married for six, but when we meet them they’re at breaking-point. Little annoyances, grievances and nit-picks have poisoned their marriage and one night they both confront the startling realisation that they don’t like each other very much right now. For Lauren, this translates as a deep sense of disgruntlement and disappointment when Ryan’s business work-trip is cancelled and she doesn’t end up getting the time alone she craved. For Ryan, he admits that he’s started looking at other women and wondering “what if?” It’s small; but that’s their breaking-point.

Now at this stage, I’ll fully admit that Lauren and Ryan pretty quickly brushed-aside the idea of counselling or doing any real work on their marriage. They both considered ‘open marriage’, date-nights and time apart as a solution … and kind of decide to meld that into one big idea of living apart for one year. Dating other people. Not corresponding with each other. Really going their separate ways and at the end of 12-months, coming together to see if they still want to continue their marriage.

Everyone else in their life – family, friends and co-workers – pretty quickly label this a ‘trial separation’ but neither Lauren nor Ryan are keen on the idea of putting such a label on it. They genuinely want to do this to see who they are independent of each other (fair enough, since they met at 19) and if they want to continue being together – but the underlying belief from both of them is that this “time off” will definitely result in a stronger marriage.

The book is told entirely from Lauren’s POV, which works well to heighten the drama – just as she doesn’t know if Ryan is seeing other people, or how he’s coping, nor do readers. We also get a brief run-down of the start to Lauren and Ryan’s relationship through her eyes; getting the dewy romance of their teen years, which heightens the drama because we know – much like Lauren – that there is something good between them, and worth fighting for.

During her marriage sabbatical(?) I was pleased to see Lauren exploring through her friends and family, different amalgamations of relationships and marriages and how other people’s married-lives work. I also really liked that her sister stands as a character who doesn’t want a relationship right now (maybe ever) and definitely doesn’t want kids, and that Lauren checks her heteronormativity when her knee-jerk reaction is to say; “you just need to meet the right guy!” Lauren really does learn to see the myriad of ways that people exist both in relationships, and being single.

I will say that maybe the one way this novel presents itself as Jenkins Reid’s early-work is in its somewhat simplicity. Part of me wonders that if she was writing this novel *today* - she’d take it from a slightly trickier perspective (maybe from a person that Lauren or Ryan dates, who falls for them but is doomed to heartache because it’s destined to only be casual and temporary). Or what if (and I’m showing my absolute adoration for Georgie and Sam in Melina Marchetta’s ‘ThePiper’s Son’ here) either Lauren got pregnant or Sam got a woman pregnant while on this ‘year off’.

That’s maybe the one way this novel isn’t a five-star for me. In its simplicity – especially because thanks to ‘Evelyn’ and ‘Daisy Jones’, I’m a little more used to Jenkins Reid writing trickier, more grey-areas in her depictions of people and relationships.

But ‘After I Do’ is still a solid, fantastic read and I’m really glad I’m diving into her backlist. If this novel and her latest works are any indication, I’m going to really enjoy the ride!

4/5

'Daisy Jones and The Six' by Taylor Jenkins Reid

From the BLURB: 

There was Daisy, rock and roll force of nature, brilliant songwriter and unapologetic drug addict, the half-feral child who rose to superstardom. 

There was Camila, the frontman’s wife, too strong-willed to let the band implode – and all too aware of the electric connection between her husband and Daisy. 

There was Karen, ice-cool keyboardist, a ferociously independent woman in a world that wasn’t ready for her. 

And there were the men surrounding them: the feuding, egotistical Dunne brothers, the angry guitarist chafing on the sidelines, the drummer binge-drinking on his boat, the bassist trying to start a family amid a hedonistic world tour. They were creative minds striking sparks from each other, ready to go up in flames. 

It’s never just about the music…

Late contender for one of my FAVE books of 2019 - 'Daisy Jones and the Six' by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

I loved her other book, 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' so I shouldn’t be surprised that this one hooked me too ... she’s changing up the Golden Days of Hollywood flashbacks for the Rock N’ Roll 70s LA scene in interview format with this book that’s *very* ‘Almost Famous’ meets 'A Star is Born' (the Gaga and Bradley one!) via ‘The Commitments’ by way of Fleetwood Mac’s story.

This is an interesting format for a fiction-book, fair warning. It's set out in an interview-format (does that still count as an "epistolary novel"?) like you're reading the transcribed notes of a Rolling Stone interview, or the transcript of a VH1 'Behind the Music' episode... there's a core cast of characters that make up the infamous band at the centre of the "biopic" but as they mention moments (like their album-cover photo-shoot) other people creep in to give their point-of-view (like the photographer, for example). 

I haven't seen too many people who couldn't get over the format, and pretty universally I see readers appreciate what it brings to the story - an ability for character's to tell their own history, their own way; maybe it's misremembered (clashing with other's character's consensus memory), outright lies, or situations coloured by more information as to what someone was going through themselves at the time. It adds so much to the dynamics of the band and new facets to the problems they face (namely; that it's a whole bunch of disparate people coming together with all their clashing ideas and sensibilities to make art) and it is *fascinating*! 

From the outset, you also feel that the interview is building towards ... *something*. Something happens with this band that shoots them into the stratosphere (so that however-many-years in the future, they're worthy of an epic biopic) but also that everyone's memories are coming across bittersweet. Not just nostalgic, but tinged with individual regret from that time. It gives the novel a central "whodunit?" kind of mysterious atmosphere as we go along on this ride through memory-lane to find out where everyone ended up. And I've got to say - the interview format kind of lulled me into this false-sense of perception, so that when the *little* reveal happens towards the end I literally cried out with emotion, and then proceeded to bawl my eyes out. 

This is looking to be the first of Taylor Jenkins Reid's books to be adapted - and I can see why. I think it'll work really well as a TV mini-series, and it's a stroke of genius to have cast Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough in the lead (I mean!!!!). I’m really hanging out for the casting of my faves though - Karen & Graham though. 

I LOVED this book. It was like reading particularly salacious celebrity gossip but with depth and wonder, romance and heartache and I just can not recommend it enough. Definitely a fave of 2020. 

5/5