Mason Daunt said he would pick up the flowers himself. Like Mrs. Dalloway, he spends the day leading up to his big party — in his case a baby shower in Los Angeles — reminiscing and worrying. Unlike Virginia Woolf’s titular heroine, though, Mason is distracted from his errands by a billionaire with a penis statue emergency, a session with a wolfman dom in his favorite virtual reality dungeon and, as if that weren’t enough, a minor zombie apocalypse.
Jonathan Parks-Ramage knows exactly what he’s doing in evoking bourgeoisie Clarissa Dalloway’s routine in the opening section of his new novel, “It’s Not the End of the World.” Woolf’s most famous book is about an upper-class woman’s busy day, sure, but it’s also about the ways in which she is caged by the very expectations that come with her privilege, and it’s counterbalanced by the cultural uneasiness following World War I and the delusions and ultimate suicide of the novel’s other main character, PTSD-ridden Septimus Smith. Parks-Ramage takes the idea of a wealthy, sometimes frivolous main character getting ready for a party and dials it up to 11. But then, in an ambitious move that brings a delightful element of camp to the novel, he abandons that relatively safe and simple premise in favor of an exercise in maximalism. Which is to say that his plot goes off the rails — and it works.
Over the course of the first third or so of “It’s Not the End of the World,” readers learn about Mason Daunt and his world. It’s 2044, Mason is a white gay artist married to Yunho Kim, a formerly successful Korean American screenwriter recently blacklisted after being questioned by the House Anti-American Speech Committee, and the two are having a baby via a surrogate, Astrid. Money is never far from Mason’s mind, and he’s constantly aware of how much he and Yunho are spending: $10,000 a month for Astrid and her girlfriend Claudia’s L.A. rental; $100,000 on the baby shower, including a WeatherMod fee to ensure that the cloud seeding technology company will get rid of the pesky wildfire smoke and leave Mason and Yunho’s backyard to bask in L.A.’s promised sunshine.
Mason has everything, it seems: a loving and virile husband, a mansion, a closeted gay billionaire buying up his morally vacant art, and the latest iOSCerebrum installed in his brain (which, in order to make the virtual BDSM dungeon he goes to authentic, is “synced with his state-of-the-art ThrashJacketTM to ensure authentic haptic violence”). What could go wrong?
Only everything, of course. As the day’s events unfold, interrupted by flashbacks of the 14 months leading up to it, a mysterious pink fog begins to appear around L.A. No one knows what it is, but wherever it descends, people seem to lose their minds. By the time Mason gets home, he’s witnessed a brutal amount of violence perpetrated by those who’ve inhaled the pink fog. Parks-Ramage delights in the gory details, the intestines and missing flesh and dangling jawbones, bringing Mason up close and personal with the ugliness that he is, otherwise, guiltily but only intellectually aware of (Mason’s sessions with Vex, his dom, involve being shamed for his wealth and his part in deepening inequality amid worsening climate change). If you’ve seen “Sinners,” and enjoyed the campiness of its vampires, you’ll have fun with the not-technically-but-functionally zombies Parks-Ramage deploys in this section of the book.
Much like the worst kind of gender reveal party, Mason and Yunho’s baby shower has consequences. Mason, shockingly still alive following the shower’s events, is charged with murder. Yunho, Astrid, her baby and Claudia have all disappeared from Mason’s life, although they are, unbeknownst to him, living in one of his mansions in Montana, and have started a utopian anarchist commune with three dozen or so people. Most of the sections that take place on the ranch closely adhere to the perspective of 4-year-old Gabriel, the child of Mason and Yunho’s good friends and business partners. At first Gabriel is very happy on the ranch, living with their care pod, but as tensions are ratcheted up with a local militia, they’re increasingly exposed to violence and trauma.
Parks-Ramage doesn’t sugarcoat how bad things could get and, in fact, leans into the absurdities of what the world might look like if climate change continues unabated, American democracy crumbles even further and billionaires meddling in government gain more legitimacy (a basically immortal Peter Thiel turns up in the novel’s last section).
“It’s Not the End of the World” is a wild ride of a novel. Its ridiculous moments are clearly deliberate, and it’s not subtle — but as Mason used to think in college when his classmates critiqued his artwork for being too on the nose, “Well, the world was on fire so what was the point of being elliptical and academic?” Sometimes you have to laugh so you won’t cry — and as is usually the case with camp, there is something true and painful running beneath the humor.
In this case, it’s the question of children: Why do we have them? Are they our hope for the future or the reason we maintain an illusion of hope? Are they merely a way to give ourselves a pretense of immortality? Parks-Ramage doesn’t come to a specific conclusion, and although some of his more righteous characters seem to be firmly on the reproduction-is-immoral side, his depiction of Gabriel’s childlike wonder and imagination is tender and loving. It’s a good reminder that, no matter how awful or hopeless things get, we can still imagine dragons.
Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”
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