Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

Literary Fiction

Satire

Science Fiction

368 Pages

"Something New Under the Sun made me laugh and then made me deeply uneasy—sometimes in the same sentence. Kleeman writes about environmental collapse in a way that feels urgent without being preachy. It stayed with me."

Synopsis

Patrick Hamlin is a novelist who has come to Los Angeles with modest ambitions: oversee the film adaptation of his book, impress his wife and daughter back home, and salvage what's left of a career that has quietly stalled. But the California he arrives in is not the one he imagined. Wildfire smoke hangs over the city. Drought has pushed the landscape past desperation. And everywhere he turns, a mysterious corporation called WAT-R is promoting its synthetic water—a product that seems to have penetrated every corner of daily life, including the film he's supposed to be making. Patrick finds an unlikely partner in Cassidy Carter, the cynical starlet cast in his adaptation, and together they begin pulling at threads that lead somewhere darker than either of them expected. Something New Under the Sun is a near-future satire that holds Hollywood's gleaming surface up to the light and finds the rot underneath—a story about ambition, complicity, and the particular American talent for looking away from catastrophe while living inside it. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and named a best book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Time, the Los Angeles Times, and others, it announced Kleeman as one of the sharpest voices writing about the world we are actively making.

Our Take

What separates Something New Under the Sun from the crowded field of climate fiction is Kleeman's tonal control. This is not an anxiety-spiral novel or a didactic one—it is genuinely, darkly funny, and it earns its horror by first earning your laughter. The synthetic water plot is outlandish enough to be satirical and plausible enough to be nauseating, and Kleeman deploys it with the patience of a writer who knows exactly when to tighten the screws. Patrick Hamlin is a particular kind of protagonist: well-meaning, self-deceiving, adrift in a system he didn't design but has absolutely benefited from. Cassidy Carter, the starlet he's reluctantly paired with, is considerably sharper—and the dynamic between them gives the novel much of its momentum and wit. The LA Review of Books noted that Kleeman's great skill is blending the horrific with the mundanely troubling, and that's visible on nearly every page. Time called it "a darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality," and the New York Times described it as "a ghost story not of the past but of the near future." Both framings are accurate, and neither fully captures it. Readers who loved The Sellout by Paul Beatty for its willingness to be both furious and funny will find a kindred spirit here. Fans of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel who want something thornier and less elegiac should pick this up. And anyone drawn to White Noise by Don DeLillo—the original novel about toxic catastrophe, corporate language, and American denial—will recognize Kleeman as a direct heir.

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