Golden Days

Author: Carolyn See

There was a rather grisly trend in the early 1980s for television plays such as The Day After and Threads to portray the horrific aftereffects of nuclear war in the most startling imagery. But such imagery rarely carried over into literature, where post-apocalyptic fiction still tended to pass lightly over the immediate horrors and turn to the plucky survivors some time afterwards. One surprising exception to this rule was Golden Days by Carolyn See. See tended to write feminist novels about wealthy women in Los Angeles, and for much of its length that is exactly what Golden Days seems to be. The women lead a privileged existence of shopping and cocktails and gossip and infidelity, but in the background international crises mount. Only towards the end of the novel does a full-scale nuclear war break out, and the rather self-satisfied women of the first part of the novel suddenly have to cope with the resultant devastation and disease, the radiation sores and the riots. It is a harsh, nightmarish reversal, all the more effective because See does not shy away from describing the resultant horrors. The fact that nuclear war comes so unexpectedly in this novel, the fact that an easy and comfortable life is so abruptly overturned, give this an air of disturbing realism that is curiously absent from all too many post-apocalyptic stories.