A New Regionalism
I’ve been thinking lately about space and time.
I’ve been thinking about how, when you know a place, space and time can bend. Like when I drive from the hot, flat, massive Sacramento Valley to the cool, fog-soaked, minor valley where Petaluma resides. How if you didn’t know the differences between Sacramento County and Sonoma County, how if you were just passing through them, it would be a minor trip. Nothing, really. A couple hours in a car, a couple albums on the stereo, a few good topics of conversation, the passing of some asphalt under your wheels.
But let’s say you know the places, you know the differences. The distance can seem immense, like traversing different realms. It’s not just the topography that changes—flat expanses of crops that extend until your eyes give up becoming rolling hills hugged by oak after oak. Nor is it just that the air changes, from blasted heat that would kill you after a few days of exposure to something moist and soft, to air that begs you to spend time with it.
It’s also the people you meet, the things they wear, the conversations they have, the way they treat a stranger. I recently stood in the Petaluma Market, just hours after having arrived from Sacramento, in front of coolers full of every microbrew imaginable. I was holding my seven-month-old daughter in my arms, poring over all the options but frozen by their sheer number. A man next to me, also checking out the beer, looked over at her. She smiled at him, and he began laughing. “My God,” he said. “You don’t need medicine in this life. All you need is one of those smiles every few days, and you’ll have eternal health.”
What a thing for him to say, what a leap across the chasm between American strangers that seems to grow oddly wider as time goes on. It struck me that a man would be honestly and openly touched by my kid’s smile—something that might not feel right, somehow effeminate, to a man from another part of the state. In Sacramento, where I live now, people comment on my daughter all the time, yet the sentiment is almost always matter of fact and vaguely conspiratorial—how old is she, she’ll grow up so fast, is she walking yet, look at those blue eyes, etc. Then the moment passes. The Petaluma man I stood in front of those beer coolers with was less a fellow parent or adult swapping tricks of the trade than a sprite that had sprung from the ground, coming to remind me of the joy I was feeling as I raised this small being.
The man also reminded me of the differences between all the cities and towns dropped throughout the landscape of Northern California. Each place is unique, and the distance between them is in part what makes them so. Yet we continue to find ways to pretend distance doesn’t exist. Conversations with video images of friends and lovers and families seemed a comical fantasy when I was a child, but now my daughter paws a glowing screen as her grandparents fawn over her. Still, distance stubbornly remains, no matter how hard we try to eliminate it—when I move my body from Sacramento to Petaluma I must travel over land, and that land is solid, is real. It has an identity, or millions of identities. And that distance requires time to traverse, whether it’s traversed from the high, ephemeral loneliness of a plane, or from the noisy bustle of a car, or by the quiet one-two rhythm of our feet shuffling us towards our destination.
If we stop pretending that distance no longer exists, and instead celebrate it, study it, we might approach a truth. As our roots dig deeper into a place, time and space begin to change. Tahoe can seem thousands of miles away from Sacramento, an epic journey into a totally separate landscape of soil covered in pine duff, of an azure lake so blue it seems pulled from a child’s imagination. Time becomes circular and varied rather than linear and predictable, as we accept the constancy of change around us. Like the cycles of our creeks and rivers—blank and crabby in the heart of summer, surprised with sudden activity in the fall, bloated and distracted during the winter flows, and angrily giving up the ghost in spring.
Yet if we lose ourselves in the landscape of the north half of one state, how will we ever gain a diverse worldview? How can we understand the global, geopolitical morass that now shapes our lives in ways we are seldom able to recognize, but must in order to save ourselves and our planet? I can’t fully answer that question. But I do know that I’m sacrificing some of my more general knowledge of the world for a specific knowledge of my region. That every day I spend poring over a map of Sonoma County is a day I didn’t spend trying to comprehend foreign conflicts or the economic impacts of unchecked globalization.
In the end, we rarely do what we logically should, but rather what we want, what we feel we must. I can go east and I can go west from Sacramento, and traveling a short distance in either direction, taking the time to notice what I find there, both fulfills and awakens me. It provides a quick step outside my own way of life, reminding me that the way I spend my days isn’t the only way, nor the natural or obvious one. It reminds me that life is limited, that our days are numbered, that there are only so many places we can know. That we only have so much time to understand the world around us—the world we were tossed into, unknowing, like my daughter was just months ago.
– CM
Here’s an interesting one: Name three major California fiction writers. Quick. There’s Steinbeck, obviously. There’s Stegner, perhaps, if you’ve done your homework. There’s Didion, sure, though Didion is known by most as a nonfiction writer—plus she spent much of her career in New York. Name one more, and don’t glance at the bookshelf.
Most California writers face the question of whether to go east and make a name for themselves or to endure the lesser renown that separation from the East Coast publishing industry entails. Writers like Leonard Michaels or William Saroyan would certainly be more widely known today had they moved to New York, as Didion did. But if achieving success requires leaving California behind, how can we expect the state to be represented accurately—or at all—in contemporary fiction?
Of course, California boasts its own commercial powerhouse—Hollywood—and for every novel set in New York, one might name a film set in California. Most of these films take place in Los Angeles, and this overrepresentation of Southern California limits people’s perception of the state. Still, part of what makes California culturally relevant is the power and reach of the film industry.
That John Steinbeck is California’s most celebrated and revered writer may have something to do with Hollywood’s familiarity with his work. Wallace Stegner also won a Pulitzer, plus a National Book Award, though none of his work was adapted for the screen. Perhaps Hollywood, despite its propensity to abbreviate and adulterate, is more efficient at establishing a writer’s career and a lasting place in the American literary canon than the publishing industry.
In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck provides an exquisite portrait of both a landscape and the people who populate it. His opening depiction of the Dust Bowl’s onset describes the two as deeply connected: “The people, lying in their beds, heard the wind stop. They awakened when the rushing wind was gone. They lay quietly and listened deep into the stillness. . . . In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood.” For all its photographic grace—its cameraman would shoot Citizen Kane a year later—only one scene in John Ford’s 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath achieves the beauty of Steinbeck’s prose. It comes late in the film, after Tom Joad has left his family behind, and it pits his diminished figure against a harsh and lifeless landscape; both man and land are silhouetted against a portentous, sinewy sky.
While on the surface the scene reveals Tom’s regression from pugnacious hero to diminutive outsider, it also showcases the film’s greatest departure from the novel—its focus on Tom as leading man at the expense of the collective. As he does with most of his fiction, Steinbeck begins Grapes with an individual—Tom Joad—and moves toward a universalized group, or what he called a “generalized individual,” a progression all but lost in Ford’s adaptation. The interspersed chapters in which Steinbeck sets the Joad family aside and uses nameless, often archetypal figures to establish a larger community are obviated by the film’s focus on the particularized hero. As a result, the film is more personal and easily digested than Steinbeck’s novel, though it speaks to a much narrower audience.
The same could be said of Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, another significant, if lesser known, California novel. Published to much critical acclaim and a wide readership a generation after Grapes, Fat City engages the West’s mythologized drifters and loners, but makes no progress toward depicting a larger community. Like Steinbeck, Gardner opens his novel with a drifter, an aging prizefighter named Billy Tully. He then moves to Ernie Munger, an up-and-coming fighter and Tully’s foil, though neither individual provides a locus from which to move toward the collective. Instead, Gardner remains very close to these two central characters and focuses exclusively on their respective isolation. Because of this narrowed purview, Fat City often feels sparse and unfulfilling.
In both the novel and its film adaptation, for which Gardner wrote the screenplay, Fat City‘s Stockton is depicted reportorially, in quick and unembellished jabs: “The park was a block of lawn and shade trees within a periphery of tall date palms with high sparse fronds.” Unlike Steinbeck’s rich, tragic portrait of California, Gardner’s setting acts as a mere backdrop to his characters—his is a place to which no person could ever feel connected. And yet, while this may have provided thematic weight to Fat City, Gardner is less concerned with his characters’ detachment from place than with their inability to connect with one another.
Perhaps it’s unfair to say that Fat City doesn’t stand up to The Grapes of Wrath, as few novels do. Still, the insularity of Gardner’s characters makes for an insular, often lonely, and occasionally frustrating novel. While Steinbeck’s wide lens offers his readers an expansive and comprehensive portrait of both a land and its people, Gardner’s constant narrowing-in can often leave a reader with precious little to grasp. And yet, when compared with much of today’s American fiction, Gardner’s book seems almost profoundly concerned with place. Gardner was born and raised in Stockton, and was well acquainted with the boxers and farm workers he depicts in his novel. If nothing else, throughout Fat City, his Stockton is always there. It’s a place he knows well, a place he depicts truthfully and authentically.
Forty years after Fat City‘s publication, we are seeing the emergence of a generation of writers who are no longer products of a given region or of any specific location. Instead, these writers are born in creative writing programs, steeped in the placeless transience of academia. Further, many budding writers leave behind the region with which they are most familiar to attend these programs, and a sense of displacement often prevails in their work. Much contemporary fiction is informed not by a particularized landscape, or a specific regional culture, but instead by the strange machine which is the graduate fiction workshop—a machine with little time for such a thing as place.
Many writers speak with intoxication about the fundamental changes the digital revolution will soon impart to the publishing industry—the rise of self-publication, the e-reader’s elimination of the complications of distribution, the collapse of the conglomerates and the return of the small press. Yet a decentralized publishing industry is unlikely to do much for reintegrating setting into American fiction. As the Internet, that paragon of placelessness, drives the industry toward these changes, place’s role in fiction promises to become only further diminished. Steinbeck wrote most of Grapes on a single typewriter at his home in Los Gatos, whereas today’s fiction is composed on laptops and cloud-based software in a variety of locales far from the author’s home, or from the region depicted in the work. As globalization and communications technology continue to erase the idea of place from our culture, how can we expect our literature to concern itself with the concept?
The lack of setting in modern fiction may also be due to a problem we’ve faced since the onset of mass culture. Authors have continually striven for a wider audience, shunning regional specificity and particularity in the hopes of telling a universal story. As a result, the fundamental notion of place has been slowly erased from our literature. What has driven, and continues to drive, many American writers is hardly whether a work provides a meaningful depiction of a place, but instead publication, praise, and wide readership.
That, of course, plus a film option.
– PB
On a Sunday afternoon a few months ago, I walked up Grand Avenue in Oakland to a café where I planned to grind through a stack of essays that needed grading before dinner, a weekend routine since I started teaching college English a couple of years ago. There I saw another man, a little older than me, also grinding through a stack of essays. It wasn’t a novel encounter—in the past few decades the robust community college and university systems in California have increasingly given over teaching duties to part-time employees, and an influx of second-language students have made writing classes all the more necessary. In short, there are a lot of us teaching a lot of classes. In the Bay Area counties especially, with their combined dozens of colleges and universities, there are enough to almost constitute a micro-class of voluble, harried men and women.
But this guy didn’t seem to be handling things all too well. There are some who approach the overwhelming workload with discipline and buoyancy, exercising in the morning, grading in the afternoon, planning their classes all summer, pacing themselves. But here was someone who seemed exhausted, grimly pushing through work that clearly needed to be done by morning. And the devices he used to prop up his brain were various—several cups of coffee, a plug of tobacco discretely wedged under his lip. His blue eyes were watery, his dirty blond hair unevenly cropped. He made me feel uneasy.
He periodically glanced at me doing my own work, and after an hour, he’d grown fidgety. Eventually, he turned to me and began asking the easy opening questions traded among youngish faculty (“What campuses do you teach at? What’s your commute like? Any full-time prospects?”) before he started talking to me in the rapid, confessional style of the under-rested. In fact, I came to see him a few times in the following weeks, in the same café, and the experiences were nearly identical. He turned out to be pretty interesting, with a unique take on our common endeavor.
Originally from Truckee, he’d earned a master’s degree in literature from a Bay Area university, stopping short of the PhD, and was now what’s called an “adjunct English instructor.” Though when among his in-laws, when among his dwindling friends, when smoking with his dad and blowing whiskey steam into the black Nevada County night on weekends up north, he answered to “professor.” As in, “Professor, how about a smoke.” Because only full-time faculty have technically earned the title, such moments made him feel guilty—he imagined a tenured colleague lurking in the pines, raising a bushy eyebrow over frameless glasses. But these moments didn’t seem to call for a lecture on the hierarchy, nomenclature, and fussy etiquette of higher education found even on those bantam campuses at which he taught. His friends and family were happier hanging around a “professor” anyway, he was sure.
He’d describe the work as being, from a certain vantage, absurd. There was the obvious—hired on a part-time, temporary basis in order to save colleges money, adjunct instructors trundle among several campuses, earn a middling income, receive no health insurance, and can find themselves unemployed without warning. Most classes offered at a typical college or university campus, he liked to point out, are taught by people who don’t have the good wages and the job security enjoyed by the people sweeping the floors of that campus, or answering its phones. He seemed to only vaguely remember choosing grad school and this career path during a fugue-like year—age twenty-six?—in the depths of the Bush administration, feeling quite sly as he immolated the cozy office life he’d been living. He had expected the tenuousness and low pay, considered this the price one pays for doing good, interesting work, and did not brood.
But why on earth, he seemed to have lately come to wonder, should everyone learn to write essays? He’d describe himself, waxing bitterly ironic, as minister of some arcane textual procedure, the sweatered man standing between a pleasant Filipina and a nursing degree, setting into motion the strange period of her life during which she spent a week’s worth of foodless lunch breaks at SFO completing a C+ semiotic analysis of a Bebe advertisement. He did not feel useful. He had begun to think of his immigrant or first-generation students as superior to himself, muscling through a hostile language and the peculiar vanities of their educators toward a job that made financial sense. And he had begun to see himself as a member of a bumbling cohort still stabbing at their Boomer parents’ wistful dictum: “Do what you love.”
From another vantage, the work was exquisite. He’d challenge me to name another profession that connected an individual more deeply to a region and a culture than one that asked you to crisscross it daily, pit stopping to teach its citizenry how to read, write, and think critically. The Bay Area, after all, is beautiful and complicated—a woolly, teeming, violent thing floating on marshlands and climbing up coastal hills—and each teaching day took him on a hundred-mile circuit through it. From his apartment in Oakland, he crossed the Bay Bridge, drove down Highway 101 through San Francisco to San Mateo, then further down the peninsula to Palo Alto and Cupertino. At each stop he’d haul his primitive gear—books, nests of paperclips, Xerox-warmed bales of paper—into a room to perform the task of coaxing and tempting people toward the production of organized, meaningful language.
And as a son of the mostly white, mountainous hinterlands of California, he seemed to be utterly enthralled with the diversity here. He’d describe in detail the different ways his particular task of teaching would play out among audiences as sundry as one could imagine—Filipinos, Chinese, and Italians in San Mateo; rich Silicon Valley kids, East Palo Alto Latinos, Hong Kong international students, and occasional Iraq War veterans farther south. Then, back home in Lake Merritt, he shared a building with middle-class blacks and whites and bought his beer from Ethiopian émigrés.
Each evening, as he took down his first deep, piney swallow of California ale, he’d imagine himself having spent the day as a journeyman archivist, secretly coding and taxonomizing as he hurtled atop grand, arching freeways in his ’95 Civic. He would imagine standing on one of our peaks, Mount Tamalpais, maybe Mount Diablo, stabbing his arms out at patches of culture and wilderness in the landscape beneath him—”Look at this place with me! That is there, and that is over there. Perhaps what meets your eye is a smear of chaos on unsteady ground, a soggy, unknowable mishmash. But I’ve come to know much of it!”—while a sundry crowd gasped and hawed.
– RM