L.A. Weather by María Amparo Escandón
Like the city itself, L.A. Weather celebrates diversity and chaos as it follows a year in the life of a Mexican American family. Although each character won me over, María Amparo Escandón shines brightest when she is capturing the “the sights, sounds, and scents of the metropolis—each enclave with its own language, music, foods, and customs.” For example, in the sample below, she reveals one character’s thoughts as he walks along Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima, an old neighborhood in the northern San Fernando Valley.
When he was in high school he had promised himself to walk all the neighborhoods of Los Angeles in order to be able to understand his city in all its complexity. As he continued to fulfill his goal over the years, he realized that the exercise would prove impossible. In every area he got to roam, he’d confirm what he already suspected: there were hundreds of cities within his city, each telling a different story. He’d need several lifetimes to understand its many incarnations. One of them, the most obvious one, perpetuated by many out-of-towners, was the entertainment mecca, with streets and parks named after movie stars, familiar locations, and neighborhoods banned by the film industry due to shoot burnout. People who knew little about L.A. imagined everyone walking around with a screenplay soggy with sweat under their armpit. This was the birthplace of Hollywood after all. But in truth, Los Angeles was whatever you wanted it to be, and that was thanks to the constant influx of immigrants arriving with their dreams, not only from other countries, but from other states within the nation. Even its famous palm trees came from somewhere else. [p. 203]
…
Every race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and food preference was well represented within Los Angeles County, and this is what Oscar loved most about his city; how it welcomed everything and everyone, because honoring traditions was not a top priority. [p. 204]
Set in contemporary pre-COVID Los Angeles, the story begins on Sunday, January 10, 2016, and ends on Sunday, December 25th of the same year. Structured as a diary for the year, the novel follows the Alvarado family which includes Oscar, the patriarch of a California family whose wealth has dwindled over the generations; his wife Keila, a Jewish Mexican, who is a successful artist; and their three married daughters, all accomplished professionals: Claudia, a chef with a widely viewed television cooking program; Olivia, an architect who has made a fortune flipping houses in gentrifying neighborhoods; and Patricia, a social-media guru. Each individual in the family feels the pressure of representing the Mexican immigrant community and, as Patricia tells us, they are distinctly aware of the tenuousness of their success.
Los Angeles was developed as a horizontal city so its image could be projected in glorious Panavision. That was Patricia’s personal insight about her hometown as she drove down Olympic Boulevard to the hospital. She made a mental note to share this thought on Instagram along with a photograph of the sprawl she’d recently taken from the Griffith Observatory with an unusually clear sky devoid of smog, fire smoke, or marine fog, the L.A. trifecta of air quality. She’d go there oftentimes just to remind herself that because she lived in the wealthiest city of the wealthiest state of the wealthiest country in the world, she had been bestowed with the ultimate responsibility; to thrive in her endeavors many times over on behalf of all the immigrants who hadn’t been given the chance. [p. 201]
The plot follows one crisis after another within the Alvarez family. One introduced in the beginning of the novel deeply affects everyone: Keila informs the family that she’s decided to divorce Oscar. She tells her daughters that “The man I married vanished last year, and I’ve got this sad avatar instead.” [p. 22] Why Oscar has checked out is a mystery that raises suspense; Escandón creates additional tension when Claudia, Olivia, and Patricia insist that their parents spend a year trying to fix their marriage and they agree. It is this year, in which the novel’s events will unfold.
Escandón’s narrative voice is often clever and warm, and her portraits of sisterhood, fatherhood, motherhood, and familyhood, of petty quarrels and deep devotion, are authentic and sincere. I appreciate María Amparo Escandón, Flatiron books, and Goodreads Giveaways for introducing me to this masterfully told story.
