By Daniel Herborn
FICTION
The Californians
Brian Castleberry
Harper Collins, $24.99
In scenes that have taken on a “ripped from the headlines” immediacy by the devastation in Los Angeles, ne’er-do-well Tobey Harlan flees an inferno engulfing his Californian town in the opening pages of The Californians.
Tobey, it turns out, has plenty to run from. He is working a dead-end job in a cafe after a stint in prison. His ex-girlfriend, Sophie, has checked into an “intentional community” in Oregon that wasn’t interested in letting him in.
He makes his escape with Sophie’s violent cat and Mercado, an older neighbour he had never spoken to before, for company. As his old life goes up in flames, he sees a chance for reinvention; we’re told he will shortly steal some valuable Di Stiegl paintings from his father, Track Harlan. While sleeping in his car on the road, Tobey comes across some strange news about Track – a wealthy Boomer who has swallowed right-wing conspiracy theories whole – being named in an investigation into NFT fraud.
From there, the story flashes back to Track’s childhood when he and Di meet as their parents begin a relationship. Sensitive, talented and motivated to get her parent’s attention, the young Di already seems to be moving towards a life of artistic achievement.
Brian Castleberry’s novel spans a century of American history.
Later, Di strives to crack into the social coterie of the art world, falls in and out of relationships and becomes addicted to cocaine before emerging as a bold artistic voice, shining a light on the human toll of AIDS in an era when Reagan wouldn’t mention the epidemic.
A further layer of the onion is unpeeled to sketch out the story of Di’s inscrutable grandfather, Klaus, who has a similarly tumultuous trajectory: he immigrates to America and makes a beeline for Hollywood, where he shows a natural flair for self-mythologising, mixes with stars real and imagined and blags his way into a directing gig. While his first film has him poised for mega-stardom, he soon flies too close to the sun and falls dramatically out of favour after a grandiose attempt to film Hansel and Gretel.
After a spell as a drunk and unemployable industry exile, a dark television detective drama, imagined as a kind of forerunner to The Sopranos, offers Klaus a shot at redemption and further entwines the fates of the Harlan and Stiegl families.
The opportunistic and venal Track is less ambitious than Klaus or Di, yet he proves successful in his own questionable way, wholeheartedly embracing Reaganomics and flipping the properties his father had bought into ever-increasing caches of real estate, money and influence.
Conveyed through interview scripts,Variety stories, memoir chapters, university essays, blogs and even automated text messages, the narrative races back and forth between characters and eras, finding links across their tempestuous lives even as they remain enigmatic to each other.
In The Californians, Castleberry – who was named a New York Times Editor’s Pick for his first novel, Nine Shiny Objects - has created a sprawling saga that is both colourful and convincing. It weaves in and out of some of the major fault lines of a century of American history, from the silent film era to McCarthyism and our age of digital disinformation, as it bristles with ideas and ambition. It has a wealth of cynically funny things to say on the relationship between artists and the establishment.
While the genre and era hopping sometimes preclude deeper insights into what makes its characters tick, the pace, verve and novelty of The Californians create an often dazzling mosaic effect, and the vignette-like chapters mean a new perspective or thread of the story is always just around the corner.
In this panoramic landscape, improbably, the hyper-privileged and dim-witted failson Tobey emerges as the tale’s most sympathetic figure. There’s something all too recognisable as he scrambles for his next move as his life flounders, and something admirable and pure about his yearning for a different life.
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