‘What a Time to Be Alive’ review: Jade Chang satirizes wellness gurus

Is it cheesy to open this review with “What a time to be alive, indeed”? Almost certainly, but Jade Chang embraces clumsy cheesiness in her new novel about an L.A. spirituality influencer named Lola Treasure Gold. And truly, this is a great moment for literary fiction, with genres blurring and archetypes and tales transforming: In “What a Time to Be Alive,” Lola’s rise to fame is just one thread in Chang’s literary tapestry; the novel is equal parts love letter to Los Angeles, narrative about being a first-generation Asian American, exploration of grief and love and a found-family novel featuring an adoptee that doesn’t put reunion as the emotional climax.

We enter as Lola arrives at her best friend’s funeral, early for the first time in her life. The young man has died tragically in a skateboarding accident, and the whole thing was caught on video because he and his friend were (what else) filming sick tricks for social media. In a moment of drunken grief, Lola says something sort of messianic, which someone else cuts together into a video perfect for a grieving world, and suddenly she’s a viral sensation.

Like her debut, “The Wangs vs. the World,” Jade Chang’s new novel jumps around in time, revealing more of the past as the story moves forward.

(Tatiana Wills)

The novel then winds through Lola’s year after that: her initial rejection of internet fame before chasing internet clout despite knowing that’s what killed her best friend. There is a TED conference, a sexy nerd, moon rituals and another friend getting famous as a musician thanks to the same viral video. There are the highs of fame and the lows of being harassed by internet strangers. And there is the cruel reality that behind her picturesque grief, her floor is full of holes, her bank account is overdrawn, and Lola has no idea what she wants, let alone how to get it.

The novel is propulsive because Lola, like the moon she teaches about, cycles through desperate impostor syndrome, moments of frustrating narcissism, and quietly asking herself the question many of us do at some point: Is this the year I finally get it together? She is psychologically complex, straddling both beautiful sincerity and utter vapidity.

Chang’s voice as a writer has gotten stronger since her debut novel, “The Wangs vs. the World.” Her prose is infectiously funny, and her ability to satirize rich people paying silly amounts of money to be led to their souls has only sharpened. Here she takes aim at influencers espousing wellness for likes, their followers and the whole industry of commodifying belief. The people populating Lola’s world are hosting inane-sounding podcasts, falling for multi-level marketing schemes and microdosing daily, erasing any sense of awe in the process.

But the sharpest satire of all may be Lola herself who — spoiler! — falls for her own shtick in the end. In her performance of grieving and gaining wisdom for her followers, she forgets to actually grieve. She becomes so wrapped up in her own fame that she doesn’t remember that there was a friend there that day, filming the fatal accident, and he’s drowning in his grief and guilt. She may “see” her moon ceremony attendees, but she doesn’t notice him, even though they’re sleeping together, even though he tells her he is struggling.

Like “The Wangs,” Chang’s new novel jumps around in time, revealing more of the past as the story moves forward. Yet unlike her debut, “What a Time to Be Alive” is all from Lola’s point of view — an interesting shift considering Lola’s inability to see her friends clearly. She is so wrapped up in her own future that a lot of the side characters — arguably, too many side characters — get dropped when they’re no longer useful to Lola. Readers will never know what became of the sexy nerd from TED, the friend who filmed the skateboarder’s death or the (sort of) adoptive mother who both loves and rejects Lola. This would annoy me if I didn’t trust Chang did this intentionally as part of her goal to tell atypical immigrant stories.

There is a hole at the center of this narrative that either Lola is unwilling to examine or no one noticed in editing: Lola’s biological mother was deported when Lola was 9 and … no one adopted her or put her into the foster system? A white family takes her in, but seemingly not legally, and more shady dealings are revealed throughout the novel but never solved. What’s going on here? Why doesn’t Lola ask more questions?

The subplot of Lola trying to find her biological family is cut off when her brother reveals himself to be inconveniently mentally ill. Lola believes that he needs help, and that she is poised to offer that, yet still runs away the moment he begins to act “dangerous.” Despite her guru dreams, she doesn’t question her own bias that mentally ill people are dangerous and writes it off like he triumphed by (allegedly) stealing her watch — a Rolex that she had stolen from the sexy nerd. This, Chang seems to be saying, is Instagram Enlightenment. How can we trust her, or any of them?

I don’t. And yet, somehow, I like Lola. She reminds me of the famous scam artist (with the emphasis equally on both “scam” and “artist”) Caroline Calloway. So much of Calloway’s persona rested on her brilliant ideas tempered by charming ineptitude, her devil-may-care approach to her own fame. Like Calloway, the question with Lola becomes, how much of this is her job and how much of it does she believe? And just how much has she duped herself?

In the end, Lola reveals to her followers that her messianic speech from the initial viral video was part of a drunken game in the desert, a challenge to pontificate on a subject for a full minute without pausing. She’d been given the word “scam” and started a spiritual movement with it.

Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of “Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of.”