Land’s End by Kevin Starr (review)

Reviews 345 Land’s End. By Kevin Starr. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979. 854 pages, $14.95.) When Kevin Starr’s prizewinning history Americans and the California Dream appeared in 1973, one critic complained that it was “the kind of book people will buy and not read. Its syntax is complex, its vocabulary rarefied, and it presumes considerable understanding of Western civilization.” In other words, Starr’s history committed the most unpardonable of all literary offenses: it required its reader to think. Land’s End is Starr’s attempt to rewrite his earlier, formal view of history in a more popular format. The result is a novel which is both rousing soap opera and lively intellectual drama. Starr also has it both ways by combining a nostalgic look back at the simplicity of provincial San Francisco with a hard look at the chic decadence and leaderless turbulence of today’s high-rise town. Land’s End is a sprawling, robust tale of two cities — San Francisco present and San Francisco past. The present is revealed through the point of view of James Norton, disenchanted chief librarian, idealistic scholar, and uncivil servant. San Francisco of old is evoked through the adventures of Sebastian Collins, a man whose long (1848-1940) and wonderfully colorful career tantalizes and inspires Norton to become his biographer. As the biographer moves beyond simple hero worship to complex selfevaluation , he discovers that the life of Sebastian Collins offers hope for the salvation of a disillusioned James Norton and for the resurrection of a deteriorating San Francisco. “We’ve lost our history,” he explains about the malaise of the city, “and a certain disorder of spirit is eating away at our collective soul. I sometimes fear that something horrible will happen in San Francisco. I don’t possess an exact image for my fear, but it involves a collective act of murder and self-destruction.” Life imitates art, for the People’s Temple holocaust and the MosconeMilk murders have given us those “exact images” and confirmed James Norton’s apprehension that San Francisco, which had lost its heritage, was about to lose its soul. “When you are at the end of America,” Norton asks, “where else is there to go?” A believer in lost causes, Norton is resigned to staying on and fighting for the improvement of the library and the city it struggles to serve. But it is a telling comment that the happy ending of Land’s End is achieved by sending the librarian and his new bride out of the unmanageable city and into the serene countryside. The novel ends on a warm, blossoming afternoon in the Napa Valley, where the newlyweds wander hand in hand along “a bee-buzzed footpath edged on either side by banks of orange-gold California poppies” and savor “a landscape luxuriant with the golden promise of California.” 346 Western American Literature The implication is that the fine gold of that promise can somehow be transplanted to redeem the tarnished gilt of a once lustrous San Francisco. But the final irony of the novel is that the reader finds himself hoping that Mr. and Mrs. Norton will stay in their Edenic valley, haunted only by the sounds of honeybees and tinkling cowbells, rather than return to a fallen city haunted by the sounds of gunfire and sirens in the night. Historians may complain about Starr’s use of history as fiction. Novelists may object to his use of fiction as a vehicle for social and political medita­ tion. Certain San Franciscans will be flattered (or flustered) about the way they have been portrayed; others will be disappointed or even indignant that the writer has left them out of the story (getting into Land’s End may become an event of greater significance than getting into the San Francisco social register). But the book is worth these complaints, as well as its occasional story­ telling lapses. Starr’s sacred and profane salute to The City is also his own autobiography, and that is worth having. In this bid to become one of San Francisco’s major interpreters, the novelist reveals himself as the leading character of his civic epic. Seen in the...