And Not a Drop to Drink

A neo-noir set in an even thirstier Hollywood.

- By Jennifer Wilson

Alexandra Kleeman

In Something New Under The Sun, the latest novel from Alexandra Kleeman, a starlet finds herself wandering in the California desert, dehydrated and disoriented. The state has depleted its water supply, and residents must sustain themselves on a factory-produced liquid called wat-r, which Cassidy refuses to drink, even the “triple-milled,” high-end version co-designed by a Finnish installation artist. She thinks she may be hallucinating a figure in the distance, but who is she to judge what’s real? A former child star, her life has been full of fakes—TV dads and false friends who pretend to care and then abscond when the tabloids turn on you. Half of L.A. has had their nose fixed to look like hers. Cassidy cannot abide more forgeries. “I want water, not the knockoff,” she tells a waitress earlier in the book. “I want a hundred percent.” Unfortunately, in Kleeman’s vision of California, that kind of thing can run over $1,400 a bottle, particularly if you’re looking for water from, say, an Antarctic ice shelf.

In Something New Under the Sun, Kleeman takes the water wars of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown