The Other California: The Great Central Valley in Life and Letters by Gerald W. Haslam (review)

Reviews 275 finely-controlled study of two women in pain: one is a housewife disfigured by burns after rescuing her daughter from exploding firecrackers; the other is a teen-aged incest victim who instinctively turns to her for help. Neither cloying nor sentimental, it probes the often excruciating bonds between females and their families while questioning the true meanings of parenthood and child­ hood. Other stories shine as well. The stunning “Bishop Ted,”presented in the format of a widow’s Sundayjournal entries, uses a limited point ofview to trace how loneliness, poverty, and fear distort her perception ofherself, her situation, and her relationship with the married bishop who excommunicated her best friend for being pregnant out ofwedlock. By the tíme she arrives at the bishop's house, suitcase in hand, to commence a love affair that exists only in her own unhinged mind, the reader is torn between sympathy and horror for this miserable soul. And “Coyote Tracks”uses a white/Indian love relationship to trace the uniqueness of the Navajo world view—and the impossibility of ever connecting truly with other people, let alone with other cultures. Not all the other stories are so rewarding. Several, including ‘The Last Day of Spring” and “Susanna in the Meadow,” seem needlessly confusing or frag­ mentary. Still others, such as “He Called Us Mormon Nuns” and “Mornings,” presumably would have more impact for LDS readers, who could appreciate Sillitoe’s probing of the interpersonal dynamics of home teachings and sacra­ ment meetings, or the subtle politics of advancement within the church hierar­ chy. But even non-Mormon readers can respond to Sillitoe’s insistent concern with the difficulties of being committed to religion in a secular age, of putting the family before the individual in a stridently self-indulgent culture. All told, Windows on the Sea is a distinctive, frequently engaging, and sometimes deeply moving collection of stories. When Linda Sillitoe is at her best, she is very good indeed. ALICE HALL PETRY RhodeIsland School ofDesign The Other California: The Great Central Valley in Life and Letters. By Gerald W. Haslam. (Santa Barbara, California: Joshua Odell Editions, Capra Press, 1990. 173 pages, $9.95.) Gerald Haslam’s literary domain is the vast Central Valley of California, the state’sagricultural heardand, set partfrom the Edenic coastland and celebrated cities to the west and south which have long preoccupied regional writers. In a series of novels, short stories, personal essays, and edited anthologies dating from the early 1970s, Haslam has recurrently probed the symbolic geography of this “other California,” capturing and conveying its essential ambience in the 276 WesternAmerican Literature way that commentators like Carey McWilliams, Kevin Starr,James Houston, and Joan Didion have rendered the Golden State’s more renowned places. Last year in Coming ofAge in California, a slim but revelatory collection of autobiographical musings, and now in this volume, a prolific assemblage of essays on the culture of California’s great midland, originally published else­ where but gathered here to comprise a kind of regional psychobiography, Haslam has brought into sharp relief the contours of life in the locale of his upbringing. The title essay, reminiscent of Didion’s vignette, “Notes from a Native Daughter” in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, provides an idiosyncratic overview of the region, “in many ways closer to Lubbock or Stillwater than Hollywood,”and delineates the themes which reverberate throughout the book: the agricultural opulence of the Valley farmland which sustains the state at the expense of its primordial ecology; the uneasy nexus of family farmers, migrant workers, and agribusiness conglomerates bound together in economic interdependency; the multiethnic character of the place that has long served the American imagina­ tion as a sanctuary for the dispossessed; the eternal quest for water to quench the agrarian thirst of the Valley’s dry terrain; the parched beauty and sweltering sensuality of the region that beguiles even as it oppresses those “blooded” on the land. Subsequent essays reprise and revise the same subjects. “The Lake that Will Not Die,” “The Kern, My River,” and “The Water Game” interweave environ­ mental and personal history; several pieces consider the vibrant if undervalued literary heritage of the area; others explore the racial...