library card

As of this morning I am currently reading: The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Margaret Duras.

Recently read:
Florida by Christine Schutt
Where I was From by Joan Didion

The connection between the former is cash. As in, a plenitude of it. Florida's stark account of a life led knowing who will get what, who has what, and what one is worth seems to mark the deaths of the less affluent characters with a sense of tragic poverty (that their tropical nursing homes do not confirm). It is just that they did not die with as much as they could have, that remains the rub. This mocking aside -- or not mocking, this discomfort with the extremely rich. (Let's me honest, I made uncomfortable by wealth. Resentful of its artifice, but more so of its presumptive powers.) There was a sparseness to the text that I appreciated greatly, but the whole book flew by in a few subway rides. It made the air conditioned confines feel like a strange reflection of New England winter -- the descriptions of which always seemed more acute then those of desert. There was something empty about it to. Sad little rich girl. Really, I'm not mocking, there was something immensely moving about the sad little semi-orphaned rich girl.

Where I Was From is a mixed non-fiction/autobiography that talks about a California I've never known. Not that I was ever a resident for real. I was born in Camp Pendleton, that stretch of beautifully preserved land just north of San Diego, or as I always thought of it as a child, south of Disneyland. Still, it was a military stint which ended in my family's return to the land of grass seed and mushrooms. Still, both sets of grandparents came from the mid-west (Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri) usually via California. Family reunions are held in Merced, relatives live in Redding, San Diego, Modesto, Stockton. Small cities on stretches of highway that undulate in the rearview when we drive there -- which is always in the height of summer.

And here is the rest of it.

Aside: Once, dashing down I-5 after not visiting my grandfather, the window of our minivan burst, throwing glass into the backseat, filling kt's carseat with small pebbles, but leaving everyone unscathed. We laughed the whole way home that this grandfather (mentally ill or just mean?) saw us driving past and volleyed a warning shot of sorts.

Back to the book: The California I know is post-dust bowl. It is following the crops North, living in tents, it's my grandmother laughing with her sisters that Grapes of Wrath made it look too easy -- it's me knowing that my grandmother didn't learn to read until she had worked for many years and has certainly never read Steinbeck. California is a mix of myth and sadness -- weather everyone loves and histories they want forgotten (fleeing the foster care agents, the car crash no one speaks of, my aunt disappearing south with a pool shark...California is marked by booze, booze, booze.)

Where I Was From is not about migrant farm workers. It isn't Okies fleeing drought or African-Americans fleeing the South. It is not the migrant story, but the pioneer.

It begins with the journey west in the 1800s by California's "first families" and traces various family objects, cites passages from the Donner party, generally marks what it means to leave, to flee, to always drop dead weight (be it chests, children, history) on the way. This is the standing metaphor for the rest of the text as it explores what makes up the psyche of the West, one that is marked by such retreat, but which wants to stave off the influx of the new migrant.

Didion tells of a few families, the rich and powerful, who sold their enormous ranches and began the subdivision of land that marks the present make up of Cali. We see that in her descriptions of the industrial suburban south, the vast highways that lead into nothing, the aerospace industry, the shipyards.

It was a strange text -- so removed from the California that I know because it was marked not by the working of the land, but by the surveying of it. Even in her intense self-criticism, Didion still seems imbued with a sense of entitlement -- one that allows her to take in vast landscapes and feel something like ownership.

Didion illustrates the way the sunshine state's view of itself -- as fiercely independent, maverick, strong -- masks a reality that is marked by dependence, cruelty, and denial. In some ways, its an articulation of the general myth of America, but made small (or at least, smaller). There is a sense, in the end, of how it all fits together. How that history marks the present, how the Donner party and the Spur Posse are hopelessly entangled, but you have to read the book to understand that. Not being Californian, but feeling sprung from there, the book goes toward a lot of what it means to be from the far west. There is a severance from history required to move to the edge of the country, to find oneself as far West as possible. There is an obstinance in it, there is fear. If I am anti-Freudian and refuse to believe that it has been passed to me directly from my parents, I will argue that culturally it is ingrained. There is a generational sense that running is the answer, that poverty and struggle must be left behind. There is also the reality that there is no where else to go.

Maybe there is something more than money that links the two books. Schutt's Florida is marked by a mentally ill mother who dreams of fleeing New England to live in that other citrusy state. She ends up in California, struggling to pay the bills, surrounded by the burnt out leftovers of the America's 1960s optimism -- strip malls, empty warehouses, grass filled lots.

The beautiful old West.