Mecca

October 1, 2021

Descended from both the Indigenous people and the Spanish colonizers of California, Johnny Frias feels completely at home in its small town, canyons, and byways, and his story as unwound here by the sharp-minded, lush-voiced, multi-award-winning Straight creates a portrait of the state itself. Johnny works for the California Highway Patrol, ticketing speeders whose racist insults he brushes aside and trying to forget an incident from his rookie year. At the time, he killed a man who was assaulting a young woman, and two decades hence the consequences of his actions are exploding. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from November 22, 2021
Straight’s ambitious return to fiction (after the memoir In the Country of Women) takes an empathetic look at members of Southern California’s Latinx community who face the dangers of fires, earthquakes, ICE raids, police brutality, and “la corona.” There’s Johnny Frias, a 40-year-old motorcycle cop who lives with the secret knowledge of the rapist he killed and buried in Bee Canyon 20 years earlier; Ximena, a young undocumented Mexican woman working as a maid at a desert spa, who comes across a newborn infant abandoned there; Merry Jordan, a neonatal nurse whose teenage son, Tenerife, lies brain dead in the hospital where she works, having been shot by a cop; Matelasse Rodrigue, a harried mother of two young children, whose husband, Reynaldo, has left them for a new life practicing capoeira; and Mrs. Bunny, a mysterious wealthy woman living in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz neighborhood, whose fate is improbably intertwined with those of Johnny and Ximena. The author’s love of the Inland Empire and its people shines through on every page, and there is a Didionesque quality to Straight’s depiction of SoCal characters living in the shadow of prejudice and poverty, but in place of Didion’s free-floating anomie there is fierce compassion. This evokes the best California fiction.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
Is Susan Straight the bard of Southern California literature? In her eighth novel--she has also written a memoir and a collection of linked stories as well as a book for young readers--the author stakes her claim. A sweeping and kaleidoscopic work, it begins (how could it not?) on the freeway, "a Thursday in October," a highway patrol officer named Johnny Frias tells us. "Santa Ana winds, ninety-four degrees. Fire weather. People were three layers of pissed off. Everyone hated Thursday. Wednesday was hump day, but Thursday was when people drove like they wanted to kill each other." Johnny is one of several protagonists in Straight's novel, which flows from first to third person and life to life as if to embody the instability of the region it evokes. The notion of Southern California as elusive, beset by wind and traffic, is hardly a new one; it infuses the work of writers such as Joan Didion and Carolyn See. Straight, however, is operating in a different register, one attuned less to Los Angeles than to the sprawl that surrounds it, extending into the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley. Her focus, as it has long been, is on people to whom the stereotypes of sun and speed and reinvention do not apply. Here, that means not only Johnny, but also Ximena, an undocumented domestic worker, and Matelasse, whose husband leaves her with two young sons not long before the Covid-19 pandemic begins. "Black acres of sandy field," Straight describes the landscape, "the corral where his grandfather's horses and the bull named Coalmine used to live. Then the arroyo, and the foothills." This is a novel that pushes back against the clich�s of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.

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