Love and War in California

I think books sometimes find you. For the last year or so, whenever I stopped at a bookstore or my library, Love & War in California always seemed to be there: on display, by itself on a cart, or standing alone on the "Good Reads" shelf. Realizing I might be up against something bigger than coincidence, I tucked it amongst a slew of others and saundered off to sit in the sun. Sure enough, it floated to the top and I found myself engrossed in a two-day read that captured the essence of living in southern California in the early days of WWII. Oakley Hall does a commendable job of keeping the war a secondary, but intrigate detail, of the period. Instead of rehashing the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, he gives you a different version of families encouraging their sons to war. Instead of painting people pulling together, he sketches the hopelessness of vagabonds and the less fortunate struggling to cope. The book is comical enough to raise a smile, tragic enough to bring a sigh, mysterious enough to lift a brow, and historic enough to create a nod. It had all of those emotions. I've found that I don't write reviews of oh hum books. Those that I do comment on are ones that are usually so bad I hope no one struggles through them, or are entertaining enough that I would pass them on. Love & War is one of those I feel good enough about to put on my "read" list.

A wonderful immersion in another time, Love and War in California, on the surface, may seem an unbalanced narrative - 70% in San Diego at the beginning of the war, 20% during, and 10% for everthing since. Yet that may be the right formula for many of our lives, in terms of the experiences that shape us and seem most significant in retrospect. The dialog and situations in early 40's California seem right on the money (without anyone calling anything "swell"). Hall obviously has an easy time slipping back into his youth, the naive and not so naive as well. The war and everything after is merely preparation for his reunion with lost love Bonny. And why not? Don't many of us yearn to tie up all those broken relationships and atone for our perceived misdeeds? Perhaps even obsess about them in the midst of the more humdrum progression of our lives? Hits all the right notes for me. With an ending that arrives at the right time, not abruptly leaving us unsatisfied, or dragging on in the name of "balance". Oakley Hall is quite the old codger to be publishing something this fresh (at least to codgers like myself), and it is a fitting capstone on quite a varied career.

It's a dog eat dog world, and Oakley Hall condenses it nicely in his tight, personalized panorama of young love, power, influence, and coming of age in San Diego. A literate hero, surrounded by luminous characters, brought to life in tumultous times by an insightful, questioning author makes for fine reading and a memorable experience. There's an "Ah Ha!" moment around every corner, and it all fits together in the end like fine carpentry. Hall's writing style is very compact,his staging is vivid, and his timing is perfect. A light-hearted romance this is not. This is one of those books you will compare to all the other books you'll read for years to come, and the others will fall short.

Perhaps the best thing about Oakley Hall's latest novel Love & War in California is how clearly he brings to the page the passage from sheltered youth to experience. The action begins just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Payton Daltrey is surrounded by college friends, ready to fall in love, and trying to figure out his place in the world, like most people his age. His family has fallen apart, leaving him on his own, working hard at two jobs, losing time for his fraternity, and entranced by a beautiful fellow student, Bonny. The war that is growing with every week and month, takes his friends and his brother, leaving him to help a friend's pregnant girlfriend, and being in charge of another friend's "working girl." Payton tries to keep hold of all the strings attached to all of his friends as they embark on paths that will inevitably take them away from him. College is that interlude when we are choosing the direction of our lives, or at least direction we can start pursuing. In 1942 California, the world war pulls Payton, like most of his generation, right out of the straight path of his life. He fights, survives, loses friends and fellow soldiers, and his blissful youth. He gains the maturity he probably would have had in time, though that time might have drawn itself out longer. He goes on to the write novels as he dreamed of doing. Late in life, he is honored for that writing, and finds that life's surprises are unending and always unexpected. Hall brings to this novel the ability to capture both a 20-year-old's innocence in the brief period between Pearl Harbor and going off to war, and the experiences that same young man will have as he lives through the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of a concentration camp. He shows great compassion for Payton's youth and idealism, never condescending to it, just faithfully rendering life-size and beautiful. Armchair Interviews says: If you're looking for strong writing and a tale that is rooted in a time and universal at once, then try Love & War in California by Oakley Hall.

On December 7, 1941, Payton Daltry attends San Diego State University. When Pearl Harbor is bombed, Payton's friends and older brother Richie join the military. On December 8, 1941, a junior at the college, Payton decides to complete his degree and make it with wealthy Barbara "Bonny" Bonington, whom he jus met, and is inconveniently pregnant by her boyfriend Johnny Pierce. Payton courts Bonny and helps her meet an abortionist. However, her family rejects him as his ambition to write goes against the belief that Bonington males are doctors and Bonington females are doctors' wives. They split up as her parents are too influential and eventually he goes to war. Years later they will meet once again tied in a way that neither could have predicted when they first met in the "caff" at SDU the day after the day of infamy. In many ways Payton is a poor selection to serve as the prime focus of a novel yet it is just because he is a pitiable choice, he makes this predominantly war years' story line work. The story line focuses on Payton as he makes decisions that differ from just about everyone around him as they sacrifice their way of life and perhaps ultimately their lives while he chooses to continue his current path with the only major change being his courting of Bonny. Well written LOVE AND WAR IN CALIFORNIA emphasizes the need for sacrifice by everyone including giving up at least temporarily love when the disruptiveness of war occurs; Oakley M. Hall contrasts WWII in which almost all Americans were engaged in the war cause in some way to President Bush's failure to demand Americans outside of the soldiers and their families sacrifice butter for guns make that protective armor. Harriet Klausner