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Essay Reviews 153 Pomona Queen. By Kem Nunn. (New York: A Washington Square Press Trade Paperback, 1993. 224 pages, $10.00.) Since 1984, California novelist Kem Nunn has built three ambitious novels around the rubble ofworking class life in contemporary Southern California. In a rich, colloquial prose simultaneously haunting, menacing, and darkly comic, he has presented an array of people and scenes which are more often the subject of rock or country songs or television tabloid news shows than they are serious literature. Aging, burnt-out surfers, third-rate punk musicians, teenage runaways, outlaw bikers, door-to-door salesmen, earnest evangelists, and UFO cultists collide against a landscape pockmarked by oil derricks, abandoned mines, ratty thrift shops, and decaying suburban malls. Other threads run through Nunn’s work. His novels combine elements of the mystery, the Western, and the mythicjourney, and they manage to be both original and richly allusive. An alert reader can hear a variety of echoes: Bob Dylan, Robinson Jeffers, Ross MacDonald, James Crumley, Sam Peckinpah, Thomas McGuane, Sam Shepard, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and even 1950s potboiler films like Them and It Came From Outer Space. What is most significant about Nunn’s fiction, however, is its rendering of the inextricable link between characters’ fates and the perilous state of the landscape against which they move. Earl Dean, the protagonist ofPomona Queen, is the great-grandson ofone of the Pomona Valley’s first citizens, William Tacompsy McCauly, a settler from back East “who had posited a world of pastoral charm and wealth, spread the possibilities before the hopeful eyes of his kin with the ease of a street huckster flashing cards” before being killed in an accidental shooting. By the time Earl Dean reaches maturity, the family fortune has evaporated and the orange groves have been reduced to a single acre. Dean himself has undergone a number of metamorphoses. First he is a piano-playing bluesman/rocker calling himself “Johnny Magic,” later a parttime community college student with a variety of odd jobs. As the novel opens he is nearing middle age, balding, battered, and living in a 1971 Dodge maxivan. Nevertheless, he still sees himself “a pilgrim, a seeker after hidden paths” haunted by memories of the Pomona Valley before the groves were plowed under to make room for strip malls and tract houses. Dean wryly inventories his life and its prospects: shampoo carpets by day, sell vacuum cleaners by night. . . .There was, perhaps, light at the end of the tunnel. Granted the tunnel was one long piece of shit for an aging hipster with a degree in studio arts. But there you were. You picked your place, you made your stand. Like Nunn’s other protagonists, Dean is driven by the desire to believe in something as much as by any particular belief. As a younger man, Dean had 154 WesternAmerican Literature encountered a “Theology of Hope” set forth in the quasi-philosophical tract written by a “dropped-out, turned-on chemical engineer.” The essence of this theology is the notion that in a world where men could no longer count on proving anything as unlikely as the existence of a god interested in their affairs, one could at least hope for such a thing, that this hope might in fact inform one’s life, that it might make a difference. Set against this flimsy optimism is Dan Brown, the redneck psychopath into whose house Earl Dean unwittingly blunders with his sales pitch and Cyclone vacuum cleaner. A former classmate of Dean’s, Brown still remembers his performances asJohnny Magic and insists that he accompany him in tracking down a woman who supposedly has knifed Brown’s brother. Coincidentally, this woman is the leader of a band named “Pomona Queen,” the name Dean’s grandfather had used on the labels of his packing crates. The image which adorns these labels has haunted Dean as persistently as the memory of quiet and fragrant nights in the orange grove. It is that of a beautiful young woman, a “sad-eyed lady . .. the Mona Lisa of the Pomona Valley” in whose “suggestion of a smile” the failures of McCauly’s vision and Dean’s life...

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