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Reviewed by:
  • Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea
  • Andrew Wingfield
Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea. By James D. Houston. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2008. 275 pages, $15.95.

Near the end of James D. Houston's novel Continental Drift (1978), protagonist Montrose Doyle muses upon the coastal mountains he sees from a high open spot a few miles inland from Monterey, California:

Each of these craggy waves, each ridge, is a wrinkle in the earth's crust, forced upward into such grand shapes by the ancient pushing of the crustal plates, which happen to meet over there, six or seven wrinkles inland from the sea. This image brings home to [Doyle] that it is all one, [a] package deal—the dreaded leaps and jerkings of the fault line, and these marvelous vistas that can restore a person's soul.

(327)

Like the volatile Pacific landscapes it evokes and celebrates, Houston's previous work—eight novels and seven books of nonfiction—is a package deal. His sixteenth and final book, Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea, presents the package in microcosm.

The collection includes twenty essays divided into three sections: "Habitat," "Kinship," and "The Writing Life." For dessert, we get four fine [End Page 177] short stories. Houston composed every piece in this collection in the small cupola atop his weathered Victorian house in Santa Cruz, California. The first piece, "The View from Santa Cruz" (1964), introduces the house, to which Houston returns again and again throughout the book. Here he suggests how the historic building grounded him: "In California, I have watched mountains change their contour, seen orchards swallowed by bulldozers, known whole towns to sprout in a summer. … In California things change faster than in most other places. And I happened to fasten on old houses, like hoary boulders in the inexorable flood" (6).

The house's walls are paneled with heart-grade redwood "cut from nearby forests that grew a thousand years before the Spanish came" (8). One of its original occupants, Patty Reed, was a child survivor of the Donner Party whose voice Houston channeled hauntingly in his novel Snow Mountain Passage (2001). Under this roof, Houston and his wife, writer Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, raised three children and collaborated on Farewell to Manzanar (1973), now in its sixty-fifth printing, a chronicle of her childhood experiences in a World War II Japanese internment camp in California's Owens Valley. In the living room, Houston entertained Raymond Carver, William Kittredge, Maxine Hong Kingston, Al Young, and scores of other western writers. From his writing room in the cupola, overlooking the iconic Monterey Bay, he spent nearly half a century patiently examining contemporary California while also casting his literary imagination into the state's complex and fascinating past.

Houston studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford and went to school on the work of place-sensitive California writers such as Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck. He once applauded this trio of literary ancestors for "manag[ing] to dig through the surface and plumb a region's deeper implications, tapping into the profound matter of how a place or a piece of territory … can shape character, bear upon the sense of history, the sense of self " ("The Circle Almost Circled," in Reading the West [1996], ed. by Michael Kowalewski, 239). These words perfectly capture what Houston himself achieved in Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea.

Andrew Wingfield
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Note

Western American Literature is sorry to report the death of James D. Houston on April 16, 2009. Houston received the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1999. [End Page 178]

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