Publisher: Ballantine Books
First Publication: 2021
Book Review: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Sometimes you stumble across a novel that hits with the transporting splendor of a soul-cleansing annual vacation—the literary equivalent of holes in your favorite pair of flip-flops and the sun-warmed taste of a crisp rosé hitting your lips for the first time each summer. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s rapturous multi-generational saga Malibu Rising is very much That Book—a dazzlingly immersive look at the lives of the impossibly privileged that still manages to resonate with startling emotional candor.
From the outset, as we’re submerged into the electrically charged “Day of the Mustique Party“—a lavish, decades-spanning annual tradition hosted by the impossibly glamorous Riva family at their cliffside Malibu compound—you realize you’re in for the pop culture beach read of the year. Reid renders the rituals and bonafide movie star charisma of her central ensemble with such sumptuous visuality and compelling idiosyncrasies that it’s impossible not to get utterly swept up in the sun-kissed, wine-soaked whirlwind of interpersonal tension and familial mythology.
Like all great renderers of the Hollywood Babylon mystique, she artfully juxtaposes moments of pure tabloid escapism and debauched glamour with profoundly relatable pockets of vulnerability and self-examination. One minute, you’re basking in the vicarious adrenaline rush of bros behaving badly and tanned beach bodies gyrating in slow motion through the dizzying melees of a quintessentially Californian rager. The next, Reid’s pulling you aside for an intimate mother-daughter heart-to-heart that reveals the immense reservoirs of long-gestating anguish sheltered beneath the Riva family’s faultless veneer.
And just when you think you’ve got a solid read on where this head-trip through old Hollywood’s second coming is headed, the author takes a wild swerve straight into the fraught double-edged birthright that was the Riva dynasty’s hard-partying familial legacy in the first place. Through an ingenious cyclical narrative framing involving the clan’s hard-living scions and their trailblazing, equally messy matriarchs June and Mick, Reid deftly illustrates how her characters’ iconoclastic public personas often double as prisons of expectation, trauma, and deeply suppressed rage toward the relentless demands of being a Legendary Figure for the masses to consume.
In other words, just as she did with the rapturous excavations of identity and public/private dissonance fueling her breakout hit Daisy Jones & The Six, Reid once again wields the outrageous trappings of celebrity and insular elite privilege as a gateway into a far more expansive exploration of authenticity in all its radical vulnerability. Only this time, the author dials up both the interpersonal intensity and soul-shaking pathos, digging deep into the long-hushed residues of abuse, abandonment, and outright sabotage that linger in even the most fabulously successful of archetypes until redemption is snatched from the flames at the very last second.
And while the eventual cathartic finale does deliver all the grandly therapeutic fireworks and tabloid-baiting family reconciliations you could hope for, to view Malibu Rising as simply a tawdry drama about a bunch of spoiled scions slumming it would be to undervalue its author’s searing insight into how the eternal pursuit of self-invention ultimately constitutes the most American of addictions. The Rivas aren’t flawless veneers to be gawked at on movie screens and magazine covers, but endlessly reflective avatars of the bruises, self-sabotages, and indelible grace notes fueling our own perennial hunger for transcendent reinvention.
In the novel’s most unexpectedly poignant stretches, the reader’s given a front-row seat to the true cost shouldered by those who choose to opt out of their pre-baked mythologies—the contortions and calculated performances, decades of self-denial and betrayal—as well as the glimmers of profound awakening awaiting those who finally shed their armors. Reid has a rare gift for plumbing these depths of celebrity pathology with neither the cynical sneering of the hater nor the fawning idol worship so common to takes on the Hollywood caste system.
Instead, her high-gloss Hollywood portraiture is suffused with an undercurrent of hard-won affirmation and deep empathy for the ways in which these modern totemic familial dynasties mirror the insular battles we all wage within our own ancestries and kin groups. Equal parts sumptuous opulence porn and soulfully redemptive mortality tale, Malibu Rising leaves you dazzled by its delicious insider glossiness and impeccably rendered soap opera narrative engines, while also stirring you toward reckoning with the hidden graces and fleeting beauty awaiting in the eye of your own cyclonic inner maelstroms.
In other words, you can’t help surrendering to the sheer pleasure of the book’s megawatt aesthetic surfaces while also managing to somehow soar to profound new vistas of awareness about life, pain, self-actualization—the entire goddamn luminous spectrum of human resilience. Such is the alchemical mastery of Taylor Jenkins Reid: a consummate literary wizard who can condense whole universes of wisdom into single brushstrokes of evocative dialogue or cutting interpersonal flourishes.
So go ahead and sink your toes into this rich, loamy saga of Hollywood’s elite unraveling one hard-partying, sun-scorched annual. Let the enveloping rituals and soapy poetry of truth-telling catharses unfurl around you until you forget where your towel ends and the characters’ identities begin. Just be prepared to encounter plume after plume of revelatory emotional truth igniting amidst the salty coastal breezes and waves of romcom treacle. Malibu Rising will transport and initiate you into something far deeper than a standard-issue beach read high—it’s a full-body communion with the triumphant and tarnished idols within us all.