My Dirty California by Jason Mosberg

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 30, 2022

My Dirty California that does not comfortably fit into a single genre. It seems to be a crime novel about multiple murders and a missing person or two until a character shows up who believes in the simulation hypothesis. She wants to leave her reality and cross into another, adding an element of science fiction to the story. Yet the character who believes in the simulation hypothesis might be mentally disturbed, so the story might be more psychological drama than science fiction. The murder mystery begins to intertwine with other crimes, although some time passes before the nature of those crimes becomes clear. Ultimately, the story reads like a thriller that moves forward on multiple fronts. Maybe it’s best not to worry about giving My Dirty California a label.

After being absent for a decade, Marty Morrel travels from California to Pennsylvania and walks back into the lives of his brother and father. Soon after he reappears, someone kills Marty and his father. Marty’s brother Jody is too late to save them, but he briefly chases the killer, a man he can only identify by the disparate lengths of the man’s legs. As he dies, Marty says something to Jody that sounds like “De Nada.”

During their brief time together before the murders, Marty told Jody that he had been documenting his experiences in videos he posted to a website he called My Dirty California. Some of the novel reads like a detective story as Jody tries to piece together clues buried in Marty’s videos that might explain his death.

Before his brother’s body is in the ground, Jody drives to California in search of the killer. Jody learns that Marty wandered and charmed, finding opportunities for short-term work everywhere he went. Marty met Renata while playing pick-up soccer. Renata told Marty she had been invited to a place called Pandora’s House, a haunted house that seems much larger on the inside than it does on the outside. Marty was supposed to see her again the next day but Renata disappeared.

Some of the novel follows Renata, including her backstory as a migrant who came across the border unlawfully and her strange adventures after visiting Pandora’s House. Jason Mosberg plants doubt about the true nature of Renata’s experiences is his effort to straddle the line between genres.

The last key character is Pen(elope), a documentary maker whose embrace of UFOs and the simulation hypothesis makes producers wary of working with her. Pen might be a nutcase but she might be right. The simulation hypothesis suggests that the reality in which we exist is actually a computer simulation. Elon Musk is an advocate of the simulation hypothesis, which might be a reason to reject it, but the idea does have some appeal. Whenever something happens that we can’t explain, a possible explanation is that the anomaly is a glitch in the computer program.

Pen not only identifies glitches, she believes that the glitches represent breaches in the simulated reality that allow travel between different simulations. Pandora’s House is, in her view, such a breach. Pen also attributes her father’s disappearance to his travel into a different simulation.

To make a documentary about the simulation hypothesis that nobody wants to produce, Pen hits on the idea of disguising her premise in a documentary about Marty’s disappearance. She thinks he went through a breach (he mentions Pandora’s House in a couple of videos), but she needs to investigate his California experience to advance the documentary. Her investigation coincides with Jody’s.

The story would be complex even without Pen and Renata. For much of the novel, the reader wonders whether Marty was killed because he was a bad guy. One of the people who knew Marty described him as “a free spirit trapped in a cage.” The bars of his cage were constructed from a moral code, making it unlikely that Marty was evil, although he may have found himself in the company of evil people. That ambiguity is one of many plot points that hold the reader’s interest.

The story is driven by linkage. One character links to another who links to a third who links to two more. Jody leads to Pen who leads to Tiphony and her imprisoned husband Mike who leads to the criminal at the center of the story. Marty’s blog leads Jody to Shiloh; Shiloh leads Pen to Nicole. Renata’s experience in Pandora’s House leads her to Coral. All of these characters play significant roles in a carefully constructed but free-wheeling story.

My Dirty California is marketed as a literary thriller. In the post-modernist literary world, it isn’t cool to leave a reader feeling satisfied with a story. Nor is it cool to allow a reader to become lost in a story. Post-modernism strips illusions away and prevents readers from using fiction to escape reality. All of that falls by the wayside in a novel that suggests reality as we perceive it might itself be an illusion. Even without the simulation hypothesis, there is no hint of post-modernism in My Dirty California. It is literary in the sense of being well-written, not in the tendency of literary fiction to emphasize characterization to the exclusion of plot. The novel is an exercise in traditional storytelling, the kind that recognizes the primacy of plot but doesn’t short-change character development or atmosphere.

With one exception, the ending ties up loose ends in a way that will please readers who feel an attachment to the surviving characters. The exception is Mosberg’s decision to let the reader’s imagination write an ending (or a continuation of the story) for one of the principal characters. My Dirty California might be a good choice for readers who embrace old-fashioned storytelling while remaining open to new ideas.

RECOMMENDED