Girls, gurus and generational drift

A couple of decades back, Lana Mahler’s father was an adored philosopher at UC Berkeley, the object of fascination, celebrity and even worship. After all, everyone’s looking for a guru. Lana and her best friend, Rose, called themselves Lola One and Lola Two and invented a perverse version of freedom. Now, Mahler’s father is days away from being executed, Rose has become a lawyer and is trying to get him a stay of execution, even as Lana refuses to help. The dynamics of one dysfunctional family stand in for the California approach to life as a long search for answers, and with lush, poetic language, Edie Meidav has created in Lola, California (Picador, $17) a new way of seeing tragedy.