Sequoia Gardens: California Stories by Ernest J. Finney, and: The Garden of the World by Lawrence Coates (review)

The spirit of California looms large in these two recent offerings from Lawrence Coates and Ernest Finney, a landscape which both authors ultimately envision as a sort of fallen “garden,” as the titles of both works suggest. While The Garden of the World is explicitly set in Prohibition-era Santa Clara Valley and Sequoia Gardens has a more contemporary feel, both authors’ intimate knowledge of the state’s history and environs brings life to a myriad of characters in search of the quintessential California dream. Finney’s collection of short stories in particular attempts to give readers a wide-ranging tour of the costs often exacted in pursuit of all that California seems to offer. From stories of down-and-out construction workers, Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants, Central Valley farmers, Army recruits, and bankrupt dot-com entrepreneurs, there is a restless kinetic energy that drives each of the characters and their respective storylines. For both Coates and Finney, California is less a place of arrival than of transit, a place of constantly changing faces and characters, each with interesting stories to tell and complex webs of intrigue left in their wake for those willing to listen. It is a place where foreigners imagine California “as a combination of the people in a Western movie where everyone is shooting at each other with Winchester rifles and in one of those television sitcoms, the kind where all the principals are alluding to sex or having sex with each other, and the audience always laughs at anything they say” (Finney 167).

These fundamental contradictions are most explicitly explored in the title story from which Finney’s collection takes its name: “Sequoia Gardens.” For the twelve workers recruited from Mexico to care for and harvest an illicit marijuana farm in the Sequoia National Forest, California is literally a landscape straight out of a cinematic dream. As they pass through Los Angeles, it becomes a familiar “world made out of cement” where “something is always burning” while the forest itself evokes memories of “a nature movie” far removed from the “war occurring daily in the cities of California” (1, 7, 10). Here, as in other stories in Finney’s collection, the land itself becomes not only a backdrop for the dramatic conflicts of each character’s tale but also a lens into the past. Whether characters are descendants of “Okie” families that migrated to the Central Valley in the thirties and forties or just San Franciscan orphans who read California history as a way of understanding why “poor people came to the most expensive city in the world to live,” Finney could be faulted for seeming to be more invested in giving the reader a history lesson than in the dramatic mechanics of the story itself (151). But his intentions are admirable as they reveal a deep and thoughtful concern for the larger issues confronting western scholars, particularly the ongoing process of revising and rearticulating how contemporary California fits into the larger narrative of the American West.

Like Finney’s Sequoia Gardens, Lawrence Coates’s The Garden of the World comes to see California as a landscape capable of concealing “old and bitter debts beneath the entirely human dreams that had given shape to [it]” (200). For Coates, however, the world of his novel is confined to the historical framework of Prohibition-era Santa Clara Valley. Whereas Finney focuses his stories on the “high finance” of Central Valley farms and marijuana fields, Coates centers his tale of unchecked ambition, betrayal, and deceit in the vineyard of patriarch and master vintner Paul Tourneau whose troubled relationship with his first son, Gill, proves to be his undoing. A novel about family drama in a vineyard in Northern California may seem far removed from traditional notions of “the West,” but Coates explains in an author’s note...