David Yoon's CITY OF ORANGE

Something I saw on Twitter recently kept coming to mind as I worked to solve the sad mysteries of David Yoon's City of Orange. The tweet said something like, "Hey, white people, racism is just fascism that hasn't caught up to you yet."

There's neither much racism (just a tiny bit; our hero is a Californian of Korean decent and is married to a black woman, but we only see one or two microagressions in the course of the novel) nor much fascism in City of Orange, but the book seems to exist to prove a related point. The apocalypse has already happened for some people, and it's happening to someone new every day. It just probably, if you're reading these lines, hasn't caught up to you yet. 

City of Orange is a clever title that's doing a lot of work in its novel. It is of course a place designation; our hero (who doesn't get a name until late in the book), amnesiac and injured as we join him in the manner of half of the modern day video game industry's output*, is quite possibly in the actual city of Orange, CA, or at least in Orange County, with much of his story taking place in and along the concrete-lined, dry channel of the L.A. River.

But that's not all. The title also refers to a thought experiment our hero vaguely recalls from school at some point, in which he and his classmates were given a writing prompt: "What if the City Were Orange"" with follow up questions like "What Would You Do in an Orange City?" and "Why Would it be Fun?":

Anyway: imagine everything orange, from the sky down to the whites (the oranges?) of your eyeballs. The orange color was beside the point, he'd written In Conclusion. Ann orange world wouldn't be any different from a city of purple or a city of green. The important thing was that everything was in monochrome. In a monochromatic world, you'd have no other colors to compare against. There wouldn't even be a concept of color to begin with. It might as well be all black and white. And did people living in black and white worlds -- like actors in old movies, or dogs -- feel like they were missing out on something? If they didn't even know what color was, did it matter?

Nameless Hero's own world has become monochrome well before our story proper starts, and he wakes up with a severe head injury on the concrete floor of the L.A. River, very much aware that he has forgotten a lot of important things but also aware that he probably doesn't want to remember. Snatches of memory start trickling back anyway as he takes stock of his situation: no other people around, only devastated and ruined houses visible nearby, everything around him in a state of neglect and decay. One of the things he has forgotten, he realizes, is what exactly happened to make the world this way, to cause the End of the World. Orange becomes a color of decay and danger, of rust and of mold and of smoldering embers and raging wildfire, and then, as he begins to remember what he, personally, had before it all went to pot, his emotional color plunges into a monochrome of grief.

Once, he had a beautiful wife he was crazy about and they had a baby daughter. He can't remember their names, only the name of his best friend with whom he first got to know his wife. Nameless Hero's friend Byron was a survivalist type, constantly trying to teach NH about things like edible wild plants and water purification techniques, but NH was too distracted by the wonder that was overtaking his life as love and family came to dominate everything (more emotional monochrome; it isn't always bad, merely a bit unreal).

As NH settles into his new life as a Lone Survivor, more glimpses of his past come, allowing us to share in his joy and wonder at being a husband and then a brand new dad. And this is the other lesson of City of Orange: pay attention to those little moments of happiness and respect their brevity and beauty. My favorite of these comes relatively late in the novel, and takes place on a family trip to a butterfly pavilion, waylaid by the discovery of a big public fountain in which numerous parents and their young children are at play:

Look at how hilarious these toddlers were, careening through arch after arch, sometimes flopping their butts right down onto a gushing nozzle! They only stopped their bumbling stumbling to stare at one another in that dumbfounded kid way.

NH compares his daughter and the other toddlers, even more hilariously, to inebriated adults: "It's like they're drunk, said [REDACTED]. We're born drunk, and the we sober up, and when we're old we get drunk again, because fuck it."

Adding to the poignancy of it all, NH meets a little boy named Clay, who seems so splendidly at home in the ruins of civilization that NH all but makes him into a guru as together they hunt crows and explore applied geometry in the form of a weird contraption of cardboard and fishing line NH has idly constructed to track wind patterns in the apocalyptic L.A. River basin. And NH finally learns his name and gets the truth that he's not exactly sought, but also not felt complete without: he learns what destroyed his world. 
And if what he learns doesn't break your heart, do you even have one?

And so another author gets added to my "Must read whatever they publish" list. And my "I hope I don't ever meet them" list, too, because a lot of the scenes in City of Orange feel really specific and personal and I don't ever want to know how much of this novel is truly made up and how much might be autobiographical.

I certainly hope it's mostly made up and isn't a fictionalization of David Yoon's own experience. Because it's the stuff you don't wish on your worst enemy, no, not even on the Orange Fascist who is still hogging the headlines as I finish this post.

But somebody should make that guy read this. If anyone could use a lesson in how everybody gets their own apocalypse, it's him. But I digress.

*Which, get ready for the video game references. This novel reads like a walkthrough of a high quality but very personal game, from its amnesiac protagonist discovering the world tutorial level to its ever expanding map -- and City of Orange is not coy about its relationship to gaming. As our Nameless Hero comes to grip with his world, he very explicitly compares it to a game, with lots of cute observations like "He wants to smash a toaster to see if it'll give up a rotating heart or a green mushroom or ammo or some kind of goodie."