The Sympathizer makes Alta’s “25 Books That Define California” list as its portrayal of Hollywood and California is one not to be missed.
It could have been called so many more accurate things. A number of these possible names lurk in our cities and rivers or perch atop mountains and beaches. Take Malibu, where the Chumash people lived as far back as possibly 7,000 BCE, the name coming perhaps from their word Humaliwo, which means “where the surf sounds loudly.” Or Milpitas, whose name comes from the Mexican Spanish for “cornfield.” Perhaps a place as big as the Golden State shouldn’t have been given one name but many? Napa, probably a corruption of a Wappo word that means “homeland,” might have been the best. But it also might mean “bear,” “fish,” or “village,” depending on who is doing the translating. Perhaps a state this big could have multiple meanings. But California?
The name comes from a novel—at least, that’s the consensus. In all the history of states and countries, has there ever been a stranger, more official enshrinement of the interaction between the imagination and place? There are a few trick names of towns: Middlemarch, New Zealand, may have been named after Eliot’s book, and not to be outdone, the British have a seaside village in Devon called Westward Ho! (with the exclamation point). Still, when Spanish explorers began to sail around the coast of Baja and started calling the area California, after an island in a novel by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo called Las Sergas de Esplandián, they leapt over the thousands of years of Indigenous history, not to mention more than 100 tribes with their own literatures and languages—and doomed the state to a kind of futurity and fantasy.
California has been rewriting itself ever since, working against and with the winds of adventure, always trying to catch up with who actually lives here—or, in some cases, is arriving. Always describing how we live and frequently, as a result, what we fear. Often, this work is done by the recently arrived. When the grandson of an Orthodox Jewish trader from Albany turned up in 1854 and started telling the tales of miners arriving, Bret Harte was not at the beginning of the state’s literature but somewhere way in the middle or its late middle age. To deal with how much had to be un-remembered in order to make the place new, California spawned concepts that are with us today. Like nature. Like the wild. Jack London played to the latter concept, and how many children around the world grew up listening to its call?
It took a form like the novel—pliable, fresh, hungry for new syntax and language—to deal with a place as big and various as what came to be called California. And in turn, California has grown around the novels that created it, shaped it, revealed it. Sure, it’s a literary hypothesis, but come with me into this scriptorium version of history, as the editors of Alta Journal have surveyed authors, critics, and booksellers and asked them to pick their favorite California novels—romance tales from the 16th century were off the table. A satellite from Sacramento living in New York, I did not vote, but I look at this final list of 25 with fondness, fascination, cheer, disquiet, impatience, and wonder. I encourage you to do the same.
What a violent, precarious, cut-up place is modern California. There are no vaulting Bierstadtian idylls here, but in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust—the brief, splenetic tale of a Hollywood set painter getting drawn into a dark vision—there’s a blockbuster film about the destruction of the fake paradise. “Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies,” the narrator thinks. “Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke.”
It’s not a joke for the characters in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden or Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, people who are trying to live off the land but have very different experiences. The families in Steinbeck’s novel make their way west largely by choice, seeking fortune and bringing with them knowledge about farming. Meanwhile, Viramontes’s characters are literally running from white authorities and hiding as if it were not the 20th century but the 19th, their circumstances nearly as unsafe as those of runaway slaves.
Of course, this precarity extends to today, as so many of Manuel Muñoz’s stories reveal. How nice it would have been to see him on this list, but he writes primarily in the short form. I also would have liked to see Maxine Hong Kingston, but as great as Tripmaster Monkey is as a novel, the scale of her achievement in China Men and The Woman Warrior, in weaving the stories of Chinese immigrants and what they bring with them, is so great that she demands, in many ways, a nonfiction list. Still, how could Julie Otsuka’s astonishing chronicle of a family’s deportation to the Topaz internment camp, near Delta, Utah, not have made this list? Other writers have told this story, but Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine renders that history real in a way that makes it not surprising. It has sailed past half a million copies sold. Or how about Rabih Alameddine’s masterpiece Koolaids, his astounding novel of San Francisco during the worst years of the AIDS pandemic, and the age of Lebanon’s civil war, a book of two catastrophes that manages to be both hilarious and a memorial to all those who died too young. Perhaps it’s omissions like these that make book lists so interesting and worth arguing about. What titles would you like to see included?
The best memorials are reflective on the surface, so we can see a bit of ourselves peering in, looking for—what? In his great book about the war in Vietnam and memory, Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen describes how then–college student Maya Lin captured this essential duality of memory in her inspired, but imperfect, proposed design for a national Vietnam War memorial, in which she wanted us to see ourselves seeing the past. In a state as young as California, one where some of our trees are 10 times as old as the official state itself, the wisdom of this approach has created some of our best fiction, including Tommy Orange’s There There, in which an Indigenous videographer winds up recording members of his community in the run-up to a violent event. “We are the memories we don’t remember,” one of the characters says, “which live in us…in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.”
Lyman Ward, the disabled narrator of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, comes from the opposite side of that history. In this novel, a creative retelling of a life (lifted in part from Mary Hallock Foote’s writings), Stegner’s narrator wants to make a record, as faithful as possible, about his grandmother and her dramatic swerve west, away from a Brahmin life of mandarin pleasures, onto a landscape being mined by hearty men looking for ore and fortune. Even though it was published in the early 1970s, this disquieting, beautiful, sometimes ugly-spirited book, reread now, has the same mesmerizing effect as William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in the way it showcases how possession (and dominion) comes with a form of deforming nostalgia. Like Steinbeck’s novel, it rises up out of the East, with its account of Wharton-era New York City, and then flings its characters against the land, a wild, dangerous place, a bewitching and vast beauty.
Of course the world’s greatest dream machine—or propaganda network, as the hero of Nguyen’s The Sympathizer thinks of Hollywood—would wind up here. In his exhaustively researched book Celluloid Skyline, James Sanders describes how diaspora Jews fled pogroms and collapsing societies for California and rebuilt their sense of urban life on studio sets, a fabrication that had a huge impact on how urbanity is imagined today, to say nothing of history. When the hero of The Sympathizer comes to California, it seems only a matter of time before his mission of spying on the deposed South Vietnamese will overlap with the memory-making machinery of Hollywood.
Joan Didion understood this dark vision of what Californians produced, and what it said of what people wanted. Parts of her writing life were spent lurking in the margins of what came to be called true crime, then stepping out of the shadows to write big-screen treatments with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. She knew well the yo-yo of reality that is commonplace today long before it was, which is why Play It As It Lays, her second novel, which begins with a breakdown and then skitters cinematically across Los Angeles in a moody, dismal seethe, feels so up-to-the-minute, even though it’s closing in on 60 years old. Didion missed some big stories of California life, or took a pass on them: the arrival of Chicano and Asian American identity movements, the incredible looting of public institutions. But of the new journalists, she understood best how close what we see during presidential elections is to a kind of camp cinema.
Charles Yu, who made the list with his Interior Chinatown, has turned this concept of reality as a screen treatment into a new type of novel, in which a character tries to flee the role he finds himself constantly cast in, Chinatown not a place anymore but an imprisoning meme. Amy Tan, in her great debut, The Joy Luck Club, felt that restriction too and wrote mightily, if realistically, against it in the novel’s linked stories. In his Booker Prize–winning novel The Sellout, Paul Beatty took the piss out of the concept that rebelling against absurd ideas can lead to anything other than heightened absurdity—or, in his case, postures of radicalized existence that are also forms of camp. The linguistic freedom and the underlying fury of that book can draw a line straight back to Ishmael Reed, the great poet, novelist, and playwright of Oakland whose Mumbo Jumbo is the California Book Club’s selection for April. How great it would have been to see his indelible work on this list.
But there is his predecessor, the writer who paved the way for Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead, and dozens of other unforgiving stylists with crime on their minds: Chester Himes. In his 1945 debut novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, a Black shipyard worker must navigate communist-scared America at a time when job opportunities for Black men like him included a great deal of peril, a cauldron of projections and stress that leads to a plot that runs parallel to that of Richard Wright’s novel of the same year, Black Boy. The Italian American hero of Ask the Dust follows a similar trajectory from hope to despair, or perhaps from despair to even greater despair. Depression-era Los Angeles is not exactly a good place for the broke, let alone a writer trying to live off oranges and alcohol. Like all places that are close to the center of dream machines, California produces the highest forms of eloquent insanity, the kind of barbed bitterness of those who looked straight into the eye of a system that held the power to make them immortal, but didn’t.
But there’s more to California than the impulse to fame, even if that is what the name conjures today around the world. Our balletic highways and sprawling subdivisions are now home to tens of millions of dreamers, and getting in has been the new form of novelistic exploration. Not getting into the wild, but getting out of it, into a family dealing with the struggles of childcare, as in Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries, or into a world of rich young adults during the early 1980s, as in Bret Easton Ellis’s exquisitely nihilistic Less Than Zero. From Leonard Gardner’s Fat City to Rachel Kushner’s grand The Mars Room, so much of California literature stems from evenings of bad decisions. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, for one, and John Rechy’s City of Night, to name another.
California can’t hold, can it, or will it? All this delicious and deplorable decadence. One needn’t have lived in the state during this past burning decade to know that it has begun to pay the cost of its so-called creation. One of the best books on this list, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, imagines a world in which a great fire swallows Los Angeles right after a nationalistic election has installed an authoritarian leader so fond of corporations that parts of the state have become company towns. Butler’s prognostication would be merely spooky were she not also so perceptive about how social inequality, the breakdown of order, and climate change are not simply pieces of narrative, or futurity, but an actuality. Here we are, living in her novel today—not a romance novel, but a dystopia. Perhaps the Golden State is at last discovering realism. May it not be too late.
