Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist, her observations are startling, poetic but not precious, and often very funny

 

Dia Felix, Nochita. City Lights, 2014.

www.diafelix.com

Daughter to a divorced new age guru, Nochita wanders through the cracks of California's counter-culture, half feral child, half absurdist prophet. When tragedy strikes she is sent to live with her father, a working-class cowboy with a fragile grasp on sobriety and a dangerously mean fiancee. Stuck with adults chillingly unable to care for her, Nochita takes to the streets, a runaway with nothing to run from, driven forward by desperation, hope, and an irrepressible wonder. Nochita is a poetic novel dazzling in its detail, stylistically daring, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny, and brutally real. At its heart is the singular voice of Nochita, tender and fierce, alone and alive and utterly unforgettable. Dia Felix is a writer and filmmaker and an award-winning digital media producer for museums (SF Exploratorium, Museum of Arts and Design). She currently teaches and mentors teens in experimental documentary filmmaking. She is the founder and editor of Personality Press. Born and raised in California, she currently lives in New York. Nochita is her first book.

"In Nochita, Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist. What a pleasure to open a book and find such exuberant and committed artistry. A stunning debut."--Janet Fitch

 Nochita shimmers with humor and delight, she burns with stark raving intelligence."- Mary Gaitskill 

 Filmmaker Felix's debut novel explores the life of a young woman, Notchita or Chita, whose pleasant but unconventional childhood is disrupted by the death of her cool, hippie "guru" mother. When Nochita goes to live with her alcoholic father Jorge and her overly sensitive stepmother Beverly, she gains a better understanding of his experiences in the Vietnam War, until his post-traumatic stress disorder forces Nochita to try to live on her own. Felix peppers the book with several interesting fragments—Nochita has a pet pig, meets outsiders like herself, experiments with drugs, makes discoveries about her sexuality, finds unusual employment as a cigarette girl, and learns to cope with death. There are also some darkly funny moments but ultimately the book seems invested with showing us the strange and dazzling people in Nochita's life rather than giving us time to understand and experience these characters. As a result, there is no emotional pay-off at the end. Even the book's central tensions—Nochita's conflicted longings (she desires normalcy yet she constantly seeks adventure)—aren't fully explored. - Publishers Weekly

"Felix's triumphant first novel falls somewhere between poetry and prose … which sparkles and snaps with verbal vitality."—Booklist

“With its California counterculture setting, frank descriptions of teenage sex, and colorfully intriguing characters … Felix has written a modern fairy tale with a dark side … [Her] inventive prose makes the journey worth it—Erika W. Smith

"Everything is epic and unreal, this world by turns seeming to taunt us with an uncanny narrative and then stop us in our tracks with dreamlike non sequiturs."—SF Weekly

"There is a way some writers say hello on the first page that gets me excited to be in their conversation. Nochita has it with teeth!! I love this book and the weird strong eye it has on the world, melting clothes off bodies with a crème brulée torch."—CAConrad, 

Felix’s Nochita is but one of the [Sister Spit’s] army of heroines and heroes for whom traditional roles and expected timelines no longer serve, who are ready to stop pretending in order to strike out for a vague “something else.” Health and wealth is not always forthcoming in these stories, but keeping it real is."—Caitlin Donohue

"Nochita is lyrical but at the same time graphic and raw … [it] draws us in with dark humor, cynicism, and contradictions. I can definitely see this as a captivating film with its fascinating characters and introspective plot. Any takers?"—JD Jung, Underrated Reads

A blurb from Janet Fitch graces the back cover of Dia Felix’s debut novel, Nochita—which seemed appropriate, at first. When I was a teenage fiend for fiction, Fitch’s White Oleander was a prime piece of evidence toward my conclusion that wild and beautifully damaged girls must sprout naturally from the soils of California. (Francesca Lia Block’s books were another.) In this glitzy-gritty, weatherless realm, youth equaled beauty equaled tragic backstory equaled effortless creativity. I lived in the Midwest; I wanted to go.

Going by a basic description, you could slot Nochita neatly into this micro-genre. The titular heroine is the child of a beloved New Age guru, and she grows up around Sacramento steeped in Kundalini yoga, meditation, and philosophy while remaining uncorrupted by mainstream standards of behavior and grooming. When her mother dies, however, she’s taken in by her distant dad and his bitchy fiancée. As she passes from childhood through adolescence she must navigate a world far less nurturing than the hippie bubble she grew up in, though she never quite sheds the uncanny aura of the feral child. She sleeps on the beach, she does downward dogs and drugs and various people as she pleases, she falls in with poets and strippers and a coterie of aging San Francisco drag queens.

But this is a weirder and better book than summary and setting can suggest. This novel’s California is unlikely to lure teen dreamers from Michigan; the darkness here is dingy and queasy, not glam and noir. Instead of inspiring wanderlust, it just makes you want to linger inside Felix’s prose. Nochita’s first-person voice succeeds astonishingly well at feeling like a real, live consciousness. We drift with it through just about every kind of event that can happen in a human mind: dreams, conversations, fantasies, meditations, drug trips. There is no “and then I woke up” to explicitly orient us in the wash of it all.

Such are Felix’s gifts that this seems like a sign of trust in her readers rather than willful obscurantism. Nochita’s ultra-appealing narration makes it easy to hold on even through the most experimental passages: her observations are startling, poetic but not precious, and often very funny. When it’s operating in a more naturalistic mode, the book has the ache and texture of life anywhere. Take the working-class wedding between two vitamin-popping self-help addicts, the bride getting ready in an RV while she badgers her tomboy stepdaughter into donning a face full of makeup. Or the much later development in which Nochita—who isn’t quite sure whether she likes the label “lesbian,” although it grows on her—falls for straight-ish party girl Anna, who makes her feel like “a hypnotized ape” with her “milky girlness.”

The book’s sprawl and dazzle seem formless for the first several very short chapters, but gradually the threads pull tighter and make the design clearer in retrospect. It’s a neat trick, and neater still that it doesn’t feel like one. Things do start to unravel a bit in the final third, but the failure to build to an entirely satisfying ending may come with the thematic territory. Kaia, Nochita’s guru mother, has trained her to see herself as part of the uniform substance of the universe and to inhabit each moment as it passes without judgment. “Soften to everything,” she instructs her followers. The fragmented episodes of the picaresque plot are tied together by an underlying emotional narrative: that of Nochita trying to balance her mother’s values with the need for self-preservation, feeling out the difference between softening and disintegration.

In this world of continual expansion and flow, maybe any ending is bound to seem a little arbitrary. On the other hand, my slight disappointment when the book stopped is also a function of just how willing I was to keep listening to Nochita. That’s the only downside of Felix’s choice to treat this material as a poetic novel rather than young-adult lit: little hope of a sequel. - Daphne Sidor

A blurb from Janet Fitch graces the back cover of Dia Felix’s debut novel, Nochita—which seemed appropriate, at first. When I was a teenage fiend for fiction, Fitch’s White Oleander was a prime piece of evidence toward my conclusion that wild and beautifully damaged girls must sprout naturally from the soils of California. (Francesca Lia Block’s books were another.) In this glitzy-gritty, weatherless realm, youth equaled beauty equaled tragic backstory equaled effortless creativity. I lived in the Midwest; I wanted to go.  

Going by a basic description, you could slot Nochita neatly into this micro-genre. The titular heroine is the child of a beloved New Age guru, and she grows up around Sacramento steeped in Kundalini yoga, meditation, and philosophy while remaining uncorrupted by mainstream standards of behavior and grooming. When her mother dies, however, she’s taken in by her distant dad and his bitchy fiancée. As she passes from childhood through adolescence she must navigate a world far less nurturing than the hippie bubble she grew up in, though she never quite sheds the uncanny aura of the feral child. She sleeps on the beach, she does downward dogs and drugs and various people as she pleases, she falls in with poets and strippers and a coterie of aging San Francisco drag queens.

But this is a weirder and better book than summary and setting can suggest. This novel’s California is unlikely to lure teen dreamers from Michigan; the darkness here is dingy and queasy, not glam and noir. Instead of inspiring wanderlust, it just makes you want to linger inside Felix’s prose. Nochita’s first-person voice succeeds astonishingly well at feeling like a real, live consciousness. We drift with it through just about every kind of event that can happen in a human mind: dreams, conversations, fantasies, meditations, drug trips. There is no “and then I woke up” to explicitly orient us in the wash of it all.

Such are Felix’s gifts that this seems like a sign of trust in her readers rather than willful obscurantism. Nochita’s ultra-appealing narration makes it easy to hold on even through the most experimental passages: her observations are startling, poetic but not precious, and often very funny. When it’s operating in a more naturalistic mode, the book has the ache and texture of life anywhere. Take the working-class wedding between two vitamin-popping self-help addicts, the bride getting ready in an RV while she badgers her tomboy stepdaughter into donning a face full of makeup. Or the much later development in which Nochita—who isn’t quite sure whether she likes the label “lesbian,” although it grows on her—falls for straight-ish party girl Anna, who makes her feel like “a hypnotized ape” with her “milky girlness.”

The book’s sprawl and dazzle seem formless for the first several very short chapters, but gradually the threads pull tighter and make the design clearer in retrospect. It’s a neat trick, and neater still that it doesn’t feel like one. Things do start to unravel a bit in the final third, but the failure to build to an entirely satisfying ending may come with the thematic territory. Kaia, Nochita’s guru mother, has trained her to see herself as part of the uniform substance of the universe and to inhabit each moment as it passes without judgment. “Soften to everything,” she instructs her followers. The fragmented episodes of the picaresque plot are tied together by an underlying emotional narrative: that of Nochita trying to balance her mother’s values with the need for self-preservation, feeling out the difference between softening and disintegration.

In this world of continual expansion and flow, maybe any ending is bound to seem a little arbitrary. On the other hand, my slight disappointment when the book stopped is also a function of just how willing I was to keep listening to Nochita. That’s the only downside of Felix’s choice to treat this material as a poetic novel rather than young-adult lit: little hope of a sequel.

Nochita

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