Cheryl Walsh

A review of The Californians by Brian Castleberry.

 

The Californians is a multigenerational saga that chronicles the rise and decline of a family of 20th-century creatives. Spanning a century and four generations, the story technically follows two families, but they are spliced together in the second generation by irresponsibility and betrayal. Those two themes shape the characters and drive the plot, along with the creative passion of protagonists Klaus and Diane, and a strong if unearned sense of entitlement on the part of several other characters.

 

The structure of the novel is more complex than the typical family saga, and so requires a bit more effort on the reader's part to follow it. Tobey, the fourth generation of this hybrid family, opens and closes the book in 2024. The other two point-of-view characters are Klaus, a silent film director in the 1920s and a television producer/director in the 1950s and '60s, and his granddaughter Diane, a photorealist painter in the 1980s and a conceptual/performance artist in the 2000s. Each POV character's story unfolds basically chronologically, but they are braided together so that the story jumps back and forth between and among time periods, with "interstitial" material between chapters in the form of a website, news clippings, letters, emails, text messages, ads, articles, a student essay, a blog post, book excerpts, reviews, and interviews. This material jumps all over the place chronologically, but with clear time markers.

 

As a big fan of braided narratives, I enjoyed the juxtapositions that resulted from this structure, though in the first third of the book, I did wish for a kind of genealogical chart to keep track of how the characters were related. Klaus's son and Diane's father, Percy, had a brief affair with Mrs. Harlan, who had been married to the star of Klaus's best-known TV show. Percy left adolescent Diane with Mrs. Harlan and her son, Track (who became Tobey's father). Diane and Track developed a close bond and looked upon themselves as "almost" siblings (though they drifted apart as adults), and Mrs. Harlan became Diane's only reliable parental figure.

 

The most tragic aspect of this story results from absent or inadequate parenting in each generation—Klaus was an orphan, and in each generation lapses in parenting produce painful and sometimes disastrous results. All the characters are deeply flawed, and many readers may find them unlikable, but I also sympathized with each of the protagonists. Klaus is terribly self-centered, and single-minded in his creative life—which by its very nature is collaborative—to the detriment of many around him. But he can be very generous and is helplessly in love with his wife. Diane spends much of her life in avoidance and denial, but she is also kind-hearted and capable of real focus when she finds her direction. Tobey has terrible judgment and is prone to escapism, but he yearns to be a good person and is trying to find a purchase for his moral compass.

 

The tragedy of the story is bolstered by the terrible effects of the AIDS pandemic, climate change, and tech-enabled corruption. However, it is also balanced by the artistic accomplishments and creative fire of both Klaus and Diane. What I really liked about this tale of creative people wrestling with their demons is that the greatness of their art is not dependent on the demons. Rather, they achieved a measure of greatness in spite of the demons. What might they have achieved in nurturing rather than undermining circumstances? Inside that tragedy is also a scrap of hope.

 

With thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for providing access to an advance copy.

A review of the novel A House for Miss Pauline, by Diana McCaulay.

 

I loved Diana McCaulay's wonderful protagonist, Miss Pauline Sinclair, a 99-year-old woman who has lived her whole life in the Jamaican country village of Mason Hall. In the weeks before her 100th birthday, the stones of her house begin to move at night and speak to her, not only disturbing her sleep but roiling her conscience. She has lived her whole life by her own rules, not an easy thing for a Black woman in the 20th century and a Jamaican elder in the 21st century. And her conscience is clear with respect to the laws she has broken and the taboos she has violated. But there are also compromises she has made that go against the grain of her moral fiber, and the stones are demanding a reckoning. She dreads that reckoning, and she avoids and courts it by turns. She knows that she will never be at peace until she atones for the harm she has caused others, but she is pragmatic enough to know that the atonement may destroy her and everything she has built in her life.

 

Legacy is a bright thread woven into the fabric of McCaulay's story. Not only Miss Pauline's legacy, but the legacy of slavery in Jamaica and worldwide—and not only the physical legacy embodied in land, property, and wealth, but the spiritual legacy that inhabits the souls of all descendants of slavery—descendants of the enslavers and well as of the enslaved. The competing claims of ancestry grow in breadth and depth for Miss Pauline, and the clear-eyed wisdom and regret she brings to her life's reckoning offer a fragile hope for healing.

 

Thank you to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for providing access to an advance copy.

A review of To Save the Man by John Sayles.

 

This deeply researched novel juxtaposes life at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in the late 19th century with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In this juxtaposition lies the book's great work of imagination, allowing the reader to experience what Wounded Knee meant to some of the students at the school as well as to the reformers who ran the school. At the same time, it illuminates the motivations and effects of the school's program of forced assimilation, the unabashed goal of which was "to save the man" by killing the Indian within him.

 

I greatly appreciated the depth and breadth of Sayles's research. For the first time, I began to understand the good intentions that so successfully masked the cruelty and arrogance of the various reformers who founded and promoted the Indian boarding schools of the 19th and 20th century. I also appreciated Sayles's respect for Native cultures and his refusal to make his Native characters archetypes or stock characters. As a reader, I understood them as individuals with different levels of Native experience and White exposure and education, and never did I feel compelled to see them as composites or representatives of their tribes.

 

Because there are so many characters in this novel from so many backgrounds—a feature of the Carlisle School in that it had students from all across the continent—the narrative momentum was diluted. Many interesting things happened, but not everything was of interest to me, and without the less-than-interesting events forming a forward-moving narrative thrust, the pacing seemed to lag. The description of life at the school often felt ethnographic—recording the culture of the Carlisle School in its enforced uniformity that overlaid the great diversity of its students. I appreciate that in many ways, but I also got impatient with it when I wanted the story to move forward.

 

Sayles wanted to make this story into a movie, and I wanted to read the book in part because I admire his movies so much—he is one of my favorite film directors. I could see much of the ethnographic nature of the book made into the kind of slice-of-life scenes that Sayles does so very well. He uses cinematic techniques in much of the book, most noticeably quick cuts between scenes and characters that sometimes even interrupt dialogue—something that is highly effective in movies but a bit jarring in a book, at least until you get used to it. It did help to propel the book forward through a great deal of character development without complicating the plot further, which ultimately enhanced my reading of the book.

 

I also wanted to read To Save the Man because I'm very interested in the history of Native America, wherein the boarding schools and the Wounded Knee massacre both loom large. Despite my impatience with the novel's slow narrative development, I enjoyed reading it and greatly appreciate the insight I gained into the origins of the Indian boarding schools and the additional perspective on Wounded Knee. I was trained as a historian before I became a fiction writer, and I'm always aware that even the most deeply researched novels are not works of history. However, good historical fiction can give you the feeling of being in a distant time and place in ways that are otherwise inaccessible. John Sayles does that very well in To Save the Man, which gave me greater empathy for and understanding of the people who were caught up in that history.

 

Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House for providing access to an advance copy.

A review of Our Nazi: An American Suburb's Encounter with Evil, by Michael Soffer.

 

Michael Soffer's Our Nazi is a clear and accessible history of one case of a former Nazi SS officer and concentration camp guard who immigrated to the United States. Like a fair number of others, he assumed a quiet suburban life while hiding his past from his neighbors and the authorities. Our Nazi does a very good job of describing the wider context of Nazi hunting in the 1970s and '80s on the part of the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations as well as other organizations. Our Nazi is also a courtroom drama conveyed with skillful storytelling.

 

The historical research is thorough, and it is also very personal. It includes the words and perspectives of many ordinary people, which for me makes it compelling reading. It depicts the conflict in the middle-class community of Oak Park, Illinois that results from the revelation that a well-known and well-liked neighbor and friend, Reinhold Kulle, has a dark Nazi past. The shock reverberates throughout the community and splits it into two factions. It illustrates very well how such community tensions can bring latent antisemitism to the surface and notes how this case followed a typical pattern in its public reaction: initial denial, then minimizing or normalizing the past behavior, followed by a call to let bygones be bygones that contrasts Christian forgiveness with Jewish vengeance.

 

Soffer rightly points out the intentional and unintentional distortions of record, and sometimes outright lies, of Kulle's defenders, without painting them all with a broad brush of bad intentions. However, he does a disservice to the anti-Kulle contingent by not taking a more critical view of their position and contentions, because their side—which is where Soffer's sympathies lie—is just not as comprehensible in his telling. I kept wanting more of an analytical framework through which to compare and contrast the ideas on both sides, rather than simply the documentation of righteous outrage that supposedly speaks for itself.

 

If understanding is the purpose, it would have been helpful to point out and discuss the pros and cons of both sides' arguments in a systematic way. For example, the question of whether Kulle was a Nazi or a former Nazi is fundamental to understanding the schism. Kulle's defenders, if they referred to his past, consistently called him a former Nazi. Kulle's adversaries called him a Nazi just as consistently. It is a basic difference in point of view that causes, or at least is a symptom of, a deep rift in the community. But Soffer doesn't point out this difference or analyze it in any way. The contrast remains implicit, when an explicit examination could have been illuminating.

 

Kulle's friends, neighbors, and colleagues did not see him as a Nazi; there was nothing in his behavior in the community that coincided with Nazi ideology. His adversaries seemed to believe once a Nazi, always a Nazi, and that anyone who had participated in the Holocaust was a current moral danger. A case might be made for that point of view, but Soffer doesn't make it and neither do his sources. To the Kulle adversaries, it was self-evident. It's not self-evident to me, however, and so I'm left sympathetic but unenlightened.

 

The bias of the book is evident in its subtitle: an American suburb's encounter with evil. Most people in Oak Park did not encounter evil in this case—Kulle was kind and supportive, a caring colleague, friend, and neighbor. He did a lot of good in his decades in Oak Park, which Soffer shows very clearly and fairly. There was no evidence that Kulle engaged in any persecution or other evil while he lived in Oak Park. To his adversaries, however, his presence in the community was experienced as the presence of evil. I don't understand this point of view, however much I would like to, and Soffer doesn't explain it. I'd like to know the logic behind their argument that the legal issues should be separated from the moral issues. What exactly do they mean by "moral" in this situation? And more specifically, why should past wrongs be weighed more heavily than right living in the present? At one point a Kulle adversary maintains that it is an issue of justice rather than vengeance. I want to know what the difference is in their eyes, so that I can understand the distinction and their ardor in pursuing justice. But neither term is defined, so again, I'm left sympathetic but unenlightened. For those who aren't sympathetic, antisemitic tropes often rush to fill in the explanation.

 

I have a deep interest in the Holocaust, though no personal connection to it. Although I think Our Nazi missed an opportunity to help explain the lasting impact of the past on Holocaust survivors and their descendants and relations, it did a good job of documenting that impact in Oak Park. I learned a lot from it, particularly regarding American perspectives on the Holocaust.

 

Thank you to NetGalley and the University of Chicago Press for providing access to an advance copy.