West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State

I recently moved from the midwest to southern California, and of course though I knew about stereotypes, I had my ideas about what life in the West would be like. Mark Arax's well-written book has more than balanced my ideas of what the Golden State is like. The book contains a fascinating sample of portraits of different aspects of California, ranging across migrant labor, pot growing, the FBI, the home front re Iraq, and much more. It is a great read, no matter where you live, but it is especially great for someone like me who has recently moved to the state.

I just finished "West of the West" last night and I feel compelled to share my enthusiasm for this work. If this is the kind of book you'd never consider reading, I recommend it even more so. I remember being in graduate school many years ago and gifting myself with the promise that as soon as I finished my studies "I could read anything I wanted to." In those days I resumed my love affair with books by gravitating toward fiction or memoir. To this day, non-fiction rarely grips me, often bores me, and sometimes just feels like work. I share this information only because if you are like me, this is NOT the kind of book you'd pick up at first blush. Nevertheless, I STRONGLY urge you to spend some time in these pages. My bet is that you will experience a wonderful surprise: through keen storytelling, you will be exposed to social commentary that is respectful enough to give you room to come to your own conclusions. You'll glide over descriptive paragraphs that could have been plucked from a beautiful novel. Most remarkably, you'll bear witness to Arax making deeper sense of all of this by juxtaposing his own vulnerabilities as a man-and as a human being- onto the stories he tells. Through his wonderful prose he masterfully reminds us that even though our personal experiences may vary, our own microcosms of truth, formed within the immensity that is California itself, are invariably more similar than not. Take the journey with him.

We can talk about Mark as a wordsmith, as a master storyteller, as a truly writerly writer, as the novelist Nancy Kricorian once described him to me. This is all true, but West of the West is more than this. If you ask me, Mark is not providing illustrations of "the human condition." Rather, he's describing a particular place. And any resemblance of that place to your favorite place is up to you to discern. Years ago, Mark told me that his professional mission was to continue in the footsteps of that true-life California superhero, Carey McWilliams. Like McWilliams and most all good poets, Mark conveys the violence, the strangeness and folly of what is closest at hand. What is closest at hand for Mark are people on the land of his birth. There were his moonshining buddies, waxing poetic around the rakhi still. There were the Hayat father and son of Lodi, California, swept away with the hot foam of 9-11 hysteria. And there was Eric Jones, a small-town boy who was nonchalantly tortured by neighbors, then shot in the back and left for dead in a cotton field near the huddle of tarpaper roofs that goes by the name of Allensworth, California. In a story entitled "Eyre of the Storm," Arax describes former "leftie" attendees at the eighth annual Conspiracy Conference, the "Con Con," in Santa Clara, forty years after the Summer of Love. Over the course of the decades, a former student activist, now a teetotaling grandmother, had taken a "pilgrimage inward," from collective protest against to an ingrown obsession with nutty conspiracies. What are we to make of the fact that there are so many Arlenes out there--former leftwingers who wind up crackpots? Could it be that leftwing ideas attract cranks-in-gestation? Mark speculates: "Those who had tried so hard to change the social order and failed had retreated into their own psychic order. Protest turned into mysticism, and mysticism led to phantasmagoria and paranoia." Arax is onto something important here. And then there was the roasted chicken mogul, a poster child for the American dream, who as his last act turned two pistols against his mother and his sister. There was Hilario Guzman, a Triqui Indian from in Oaxaca, who woke up drunk one morning, harvested ten trays of grapes, and then ran his old car off a road through a vineyard. There were the dope farmers of Humbolt County, probiotic dairyman Mark McAfee, and Earl Shelton, the last Okie left in Steinbeck's Lamont. There were Fresno's Friends of Israel, for whom the slogan "Nuke Iran" has become an applause line. And there was Jeff Hubbard, whose two sons, one after the other, died ten time zones from Clovis, California, fighting yet another American war, this one in a place called Iraq. California, Mark writes, is not kind to memory. All the more reason to thank him for chronicling this part of what Carey McWilliams called "the American apotheosis that is California." (This is a revised v

Mark's Arax's WEST OF THE WEST is a rare, lasting and truly inspiring achievement in literary journalism and non-fiction. It is a piece of literature penned with extreme care and a testament to writing from the heart with deep conviction. The stories are rich in variety, sobering and deeply human, each one uncovering a new face of California in the 21st Century. Each story is a voyage into the hidden worlds that exist right next to the highways of Arax's Golden State. After finishing the book, I found myself in a state of extreme shock and joy. Shock, because the story "The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman" is probably the most raw, honest and poetic non-fiction piece I have ever read about a California migrant worker, and joy at the realization that great storytelling can inspire new ways of looking at the world around us. This book is right up there with the best of Saroyan and Steinbeck. I read it twice and will no doubt revisit it. The rural, suburban and unforgiving landscapes in Mark Arax's prose put me into the shoes of Triqui Indian migrant workers, Humboldt real estate developers and Armenian moonshiners, among other colorful modern-day Californians. Required reading for all who aspire to be storytellers.

Brilliant. Arax gets California. His journey, both external and internal, offers intrigue, emotion and discovery at every turn.