From a Distant Place by Don Carpenter (review)

Reviews 187 From a Distant Place. By Don Carpenter. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988. 230 pages, $17.95.) California, according to the old tale, is the place where one starts afresh, realizes the dream away from the constraints of the East. The past doesn’t count. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, the bumper stickers have it. But in the act of finding oneself, one can get hopelessly lost. High expectations get ground into the California dust. The new beginning can turn into the disastrous ending. Nathanael West, John Steinbeck, and James M. Cain reminded us of this a half century ago. Getting lost has become the story contemporary California writers seem compelled to tell. Don Carpenter’s From a Distant Place is a recent entry into a field of California novels about coming unglued, about losing the path, about the unraveling of the nuclear family, the disintegration of the suburban ranchstyle dream. Since the sixties, we’ve had a number of versions of the tale, focusing, more often than not, on the California woman, detached from family, purpose, and history. There have been, among works that come to mind, Joan Didion’sPlay it asIt Lays, Sheila Ballantine’sNorma Jean the Termite Queen, Cyra McFadden’s The Serial, Alison Lurie’s The Nowhere City, Diane John­ son’s The Shadow Knows, and James D. Houston’s Love Story. What saves From a Distant Place from cliché and rescues it from being just another diary of a mad California housewife is the skillful telling, the dextrous and cinematic moving in and out of the lives of the Jeminowski family. We see them from the inside and outside, up close and “from a distant place”; we’re alternately involved and detached, sympathetic and critical. From a distance we see Steven, the estranged husband, a personal-injury lawyer who has moved to a Southern California condo on the water and is chasing women when he isn’t chasing ambulances, and Deirdre, the daughter who, with her husband, works for the telephone company but reaches out to touch no one. Up close there is Jackie, 45-year-old ex-stewardess and now distraught ex-wife, living on borrowed money and rattling around in the family house in Marin County. This is Jackie’s story and we want her to make it. We want her to get out of bed and do something with her life, to stay off the “Green Death” ale and the vodka, which she stashes in the freezer. We suffer with her the insomnia and those dreadful hangovers and, because we see her up close, we know the emptiness of her existence and affirm her attempt, at the novel’send, to pick up the scrambled pieces of her life. Similarly, we see at-close range and sympathize with the vagrant gropings and fumblings of her twenty-year-old, drop-out son Derek, a boy who knows despite his California fantasies that he’s the “little guy with no particular talent, the kind of guy the world didn’t give a shit about.” Despite the gratuitously (to me at least) ironic ending of the novel, it’s one of the better visions of the now familiar California story. DAVID M. FINE California State University, Long Beach ...