Book Review : Jordan Harper - The Last King of California (2022)
I’ve never been to California, but it's been a latent obsession of mine for most of my life. It’s the place everyone dreams about and yet it breaks more hearts than it mends. It’s the place where Hollywood and San Bernardino somehow coexists. No one ever believes it can become a nightmare for them and yet it is for more people than not. Author Jordan Harper seems to share my obsession for the territory, but unlike me he lives there. It’s also the setting (and theme?) of his 2022 novel The Last King of California.
The Last King of California tells the story of Luke Crosswhite, the nineteen years old son of imprisoned gang leader Bobby Crosswhite, who returns home after failing at regular college life thing in Colorado. But Luke is no prodigal son. Sensitive and non-violent, he's thrown into the fire by his uncle Del and his right-hand man Curtis when local nazis of the Aryan Steel move in to assimilate all the gangs in the area. Helped by his childhood friend Callie, Luke will try to survive the present and earn a future.
American Wayward Son
This novel is a subversion of the American Outlaw trope. Luke is neither badass, nor insightful. He's grown up around fierce, violent men and he wants nothing more than a normal life. But he fails at becoming a boring responsible adult, so he’s forced to return to the only place that'll have him no matter what: where he's just Big Bobby’s kid. Stripped of his future, identity and physical integrity, Luke is forced to become a new person by circumstances and that transformation is The Last King of California's calling card.
It's really cool and empowering to witness someone being healed by the violence that hurt him. The future reconciling with the past. I did have my issues with the Combine (Bobby Crosswhite’s gang) as they felt like a collection of rag tag individuals who came together for no other reasons than they all felt like being violent and lawless for a living. They don’t have a thing uniting them together. They’re not bikers or cartel associates. The Combine are just convenient enablers for Luke to reconcile himself with his violence within.
I would’ve loved a Combine member to have a subplot exploring a different aspect of their personality outside of being a soulless criminal. Luke’s relationship with obligatory love interest Callie and her emo rap boyfriend Pretty Baby unfortunately takes a lot of the space that would've been dedicated to that exploration and Callie just isn’t that interesting in the perspective of Luke's transformation. I would argue that Callie and Pretty Baby’s subplot make The Last King of California more of a forgettable crime novel.
So, I (kind of) lost interest in The Last King of California halfway through, which is uncharacteristic of my relationship to Jordan Harper’s novels (I usually love everything he does), but that bad boy gloriously rallied in its last stretch.
How To Talk About Climate Change Without Talking About Climate Change
I command the plot of The Last King of California for being revolutionary and whatnot. It's a novel about gangs scrapping for territory, so I’m pretty sure you already know more or less how it ends. But Jordan Harper makes smart use of an underdiscussed Californian landscape variable it order to throw his reader off guard: forest fires. No one outside California ever wants to talk about forest fires because they’re antithetical to the romance of the place, but they exist and they’re dangerous and life-threatening as fuck.
No one in the novel pays attention to them either until they land on their doorstep and force all the characters to stop warmongering. Except that they don’t. That's where The Last King of California shifts from a conventional crime novel into a weird, most definitely unique eco-Shakespearean tragedy. There’s no big, sweeping statement about humans trashing the planet. No tear-jerking duck caught in plastic beer casings. Just fire. Big, bad, suffocating fire. The very setting of the novel attacks its characters.
I don’t know what your opinion is on the matter, but I feel like it makes a stronger point about climate change than any sanctimonious "the ducks and the turtles are all dying" kind of storyline. It doesn’t call attention to itself. It subtly integrates a storyline that doesn’t have anything to do with it, until it does. I don’t think Jordan Harper meant to make a statement about climate change in The Last King of California, but that merely original final act of his novels makes a convincing one, whether he likes it or not.
*
I liked The Last King of California. I might've not loved it like I did Love & Other Wounds, but it's a slight step forward for him from She Rides Shotgun in terms of longer storytelling. It suffers a little bit from having only one character showing real depth, but it ebbs and flows until it hits you in the balls with unpredictable elements. Otherwise, it is another outstandingly well-written novel for Harper (sometimes too much. I mean everything smells 'greasy' in this book) that navigates through its own peaks and valleys.
Not a genre-defining novel, but definitely something the first thing should read around the pool.
