The End of California

Pete Barrington is returning to his hometown in Loring, Mississippi, after having escaped it twenty-five years ago via a football scholarship. He's lived in California and become a successful doctor, but his part in a scandal sends him back to the only other place he knows. His lovely wife and teenage daughter have never been anywhere but the West Coast and are full of trepidations about their new hometown. There was also a quiet scandal when Pete moved west all those years ago. He'd had an affair with the mother of one of his high school friends. Her husband divorced her soon after he left town and his friend, Alan DePoyster, always blamed Pete for the break up of his family. Alan had tried to leave Loring, but ended up successful on the small town scale as the manager of the local Piggly Wiggly supermarket. He tried to be thankful and live the life he heard preached about in the church where he was an active member. He did it easily until Pete Barrington came back to town. Steve Yarbrough is a storyteller. Using the same sets of words we use in everyday life, he creates characters who move into the loft in your mind for a stay; tension so thick you can't drive through it in a Mack truck; and clean, flowing, evocative dialogue. He writes real characters whom seethe quietly with rage caused by bygone pain. He draws pictures with an undercurrent of anguish in everyday life, as if the shopkeeper, accountant, teacher or taxi driver you encounter could very well be living life in search of redemption from their desperation as they carry on normally. Even his incidental characters deal with the undercurrents of racism, ageism, and class distinctions. Armchair Interviews says: Yarbrough, a professor of creative writing, is a powerful writer with things to say and prowess to say them well.

I think the negative reviews here are missing some of the subtleties of this book. Although some of the intertwined relationships may seem 'pat,' in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, there isn't much of an alternative, given the limted population. And that's a great strength of the moral lessons this book has to teach, whether you're from McGhee, MS or Manhattan. It seems like Yarbrough's point is that every action has consequences that reverberate down the years through a community--so that what Edie DePoyster did 25 years ago would have (and has) haunted her son Alan all that time. Thus, his fracture is hardly pat but rather as inevitable as a kettle boiling over, given the chain of events set in motion by Pete Barrington's return to Loring. This is really a book to be read slowly, with an eye toward all the nuances of the conversations, the significance of every action being observed in a fishbowl of a town. Read it like the old men sitting around the courthouse watch the action on the square and you'll find it richly rewarding. Yarbrough is one of the best southern writers we've got.

Another remarkable, confident book by one of the best writers out there. As good as PRISONERS OF WAR is, this is even better. This is the real thing--a compelling, fascinating story perfectly written, perfectly told.

Writing in a clear and graceful prose, Yarbrough dramatizes a cast of diverse characters who are driven not so much by the claustrophobic environment of small-town Mississippi as by their inner states of rage, guilt, and grief. The godless and the god fearing alike seem equally adrift. Neither the law, symbolized by the state trooper who appears in the first pages of the novel, nor the church, represented by the young Baptist preacher out of touch with his congregation, offers a stay against the moral chaos that unfolds in this tense, gripping novel. Because Yarbrough is from Mississippi and because he writes of the South, he is often compared to Faulkner and other Southern writers, but I think his roots go back even deeper, back to the dark forests of Nathanial Hawthorne. Yarbrough's characters, like Hawthorne's, are trapped and tormented by their own psyches. For the most part they are self-consuming and lost, apparently incapable of accepting themselves as members of the brotherhood of sinners. But perhaps at the end it is the protagonist's daughter, Toni, who knows the way to redemption. The novel sometimes raised the hair on the back of my neck. I wish it were twice as long.

I usually read books written by women because there are so many wonderful female authors out there now than there were when I was younger. But every now and then I find a book that has been written by a man that interests me. THE END OF CALIFORNIA was one of those. I was visiting my son in Atlanta when I found it and he said he'd looked at it too. I picked it up, put it down, picked it up again, and finally added it to the pile. I'm so glad I did. This is a book that is just plain good. I love books about people. I don't need adventure or mystery or romance. I like reading about how people are feeling or thinking. I like reading about relationships. I like reading about people who have done something to change their lives. And this book covers all of those things and more. I started it when I was in Atlanta, finished it today, and will now put it in the mail to send to my son. In the meantime, I'll go back in time and check out some of Mr. Yarbrough's other books and see what I've missed. In the meantime, Mr. Yarbrough, write on!