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David Yoon’s survivor in City of Orange lives in a ruined place, not knowing at first how he got there or what the apocalypse was that befell him. Slowly the truth emerges. Photo: Shutterstock

Review | In City of Orange, YA writer David Yoon’s adult novel, unexplained desolation gives way to incapacitating heartbreak

  • The world is a stretch of abandoned concrete drainage in which, improbably, a man survives. He can’t recall why he’s in pain or what he’s lost – only fragments
  • Yoon’s oddly structured tale takes a while to make sense – and when eventually it does for the survivor, the heartbreak is enough to incapacitate him

City of Orange by David Yoon, pub. G.P. Putnam’s Sons

The year is 2010. We’re somewhere in California, and life on Earth seems to have ended. The survivor in City of Orange wakes without any past: “And his name? […] He tests the dead batteries of his memory.”

He is lucky enough to find running water and the drive to stay alive. Also lucky enough to forget the cause of his terrible physical pain, and much of what he has lost.

Plus, he has something in his shoe that may or may not be lucky.

In David Yoon’s first-written adult novel, the world is a stretch of abandoned concrete drainage, urban scale. Somehow, in a concrete hollow, it provides cans of food and the most basic defensive weaponry. (Yoon’s first-published adult work was last year’s Version Zero and he’s a bestselling young-adult writer.)

The protagonist knows he had a family, but he can’t remember their names either:

“One, two, three.

Him, wife, child.

Stop.”

Piece by piece he struggles to recall: “I’m Korean”; how to use a can opener; what his mother told him about American soldiers in the Korean war; how to avoid tongue injuries; that those piles of stones are called “cairns”.

The remnants of pop culture are in his head (tumbleweeds, water purifiers, paper restaurant tablecloths and crayons). It’s all he can remember, as though markers of culture have taken the place of actual society. We could be seeing the fallout from the Airborne Toxic Event in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985).

Or perhaps the vicious satirical version of materialism in Bret Easton Ellis’ novels, but in super slow motion.

The cover of Yoon’s novel.

There are signs that other humans have been in the area, but there are none to be seen. Perhaps they’ve succumbed to the aliens or disease or cannibalism. Everywhere, there are crows.

At times, it almost seems as though no one could live quite that slowly or with so much luck amid the ruins, and if no one could live like that, perhaps we are in one of those dead narrator novels such as (spoiler alert!) William Golding’s Pincher Martin (1956) or even Flann O’Brien’s bad-trip, genius work The Third Policeman (1967).

And this is how the first parts of the book proceed, with unexplained desolation and a refusal to pursue truths it may be best not to know: when the chance comes to see his reflection in shards of mirror, he decisively looks away.

Author David Yoon. Photo: David Yoon

The classic hook, defer and spill of the mystery story does not apply. It’s a frustrating pattern, an odd shape for a novel – even the protagonist knows it:

“He is not a hero in some adventure

book about surviving against all

odds. He is the guy who hides away

procrastinating with string and

cardboard. Last Surviving Member

of Human Race Puts Things Off.”

And slowly, as with almost all the action in City of Orange, the second plot expands to fill the narrative space.

He’s not dead or even the last survivor. He meets his crazy doppelgänger, an old man who knows only one word, but carries a photograph of family: self, wife, son. He accidentally kills a crow and is haunted. And then, standing outside his shelter, there’s a boy. Real? Crow-boy? He thinks he may be mad, or at the centre of some variation of 1998 film The Truman Show:

“[The boy is] most likely another

provocation in a growing line of

provocations: first the old man, then

the crow, now this […] The boy says

nothing. He shifts his feet, just as the

crow did earlier. Even his hair is flat and

shiny like crow feathers.”

“I’m not a crow,” the boy tells him, in the first sentence he’s heard, more than halfway through the book.

We have been looking at the wrong apocalypse. This terrible world has mapped one apocalypse on another and the expected, clichéd storyline of the extinction of humanity obscures the incapacitating heartbreak at the heart of this novel.

Now the structure of this book makes sense, for this is the shape of grief. Bit by bit he remembers the car accident, at first involuntarily, then allowing recollections, and licensing himself to feel everything that a less personal apocalypse in a hyper-real landscape might hide.

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