Book review: The Survivalists by Kashana Cauley

By Simon Demetriou

A debut novel is always exciting. When it’s a debut novel that brings together corporate law, third wave coffee, and doomsday survivalism written by someone with a history of working on some very funny TV shows, that excitement gives a novel quite a lot to live up to. The Survivalists might not quite fulfil its promise – but it comes pretty close.

There are a lot of weirdos in New York, but Aretha – rising associate in a Rockefeller Centre law firm and the novel’s protagonist – and her best friend, Nia, a successful therapist, are not among them. That’s why they need to meet up for brunch every Saturday and discuss the various crazies each woman has encountered in the week. For Aretha, that means the men she’s dated – like the tax obsessive who ‘rattled off deductions… while Aretha wondered if she was already dead’. Meanwhile Nia casually shares confidential information about her clients over their 16 dollar eggs.

But then there’s Aaron – the first man Aretha’s met recently who had ‘the decency to not suck’. Tall, handsome, kind Aaron who owns his own specialty coffee company and a brownstone in the heart of Brooklyn. And who – best of all – has absent and/or dead immediate family members (Aretha’s own parents were killed in a car accident in which they ended up impaled on the antlers of dead stags). Sure, Aaron doesn’t drink, which bothers Aretha, ‘but his dead grandma tried her damnedest to cancel it out’.

What’s not to like? Well, there’s the fact that Aaron lives in a house with Brittany, ‘the meanest of the cheerleaders of the world’ and James, a disgraced, alcoholic ex-journalist. Oh, and guns. Lots and lots of guns. Because it turns out that the owners of ‘Tactical Coffee’ (‘because you don’t want to fall asleep during the apocalypse’) are survivalists who illegally buy and sell guns and have a 400 square foot bunker in their yard.

When Aretha decides to move in at the same time as she starts not winning at work, it begins to become a little foggier as to who’s crazy and who isn’t.

The Survivalists is funny. In places very funny. Cauley’s sharply witty phrasing gets the novel to glitter and bubble from the very start. What she doesn’t quite manage, however, is to sustain the sparkle through the body of the book; as the action heats up, the detail drifts and the wit recedes, culminating in an ending that is fitting but clunky. This is an exciting debut novel, perhaps more so because its writer still has some kinks to iron out in her development as a novelist. I’ll be waiting anxiously for her next attempt.