She Treads Softly: The Californians

Monday, February 17, 2025

The Californians

The Californians by Brian Castleberry
3/11/25; 384 pages
HarperCollins/ Mariner Books

The Californians by Brian Castleberry is a recommended generational family drama that covers a hundred years of history.

In 2024 Tobey Harlan, a temporary waiter, loses everything he owns in a Northern California wildfire. He is heading to stay in his father's house. Once there he plans to steal three valuable paintings and has a plan in place to sell them. A hundred years earlier, Klaus Aaronsohn reinvents himself as Klaus von Stiegl and travels to Hollywood to make silent films. He later directs a popular 1960's TV crime drama,Brackett, starring Tobey’s grandfather. Klaus's granddaughter, Di (Dianne) Stiegel, is an artist in the 1980's NYC art scene. It is her paintings that Tobey is planning to steal.

While the writing in the sprawling novel is exceptional, the organization of it didn't work for me. The opening with Tobey immediately caught my attention but then the novel jumps back in time and alternately follows Klaus and Dianne. While they are interesting characters, they are unlikable. I never felt fully invested in their story and they make up the bulk of the plot. I kept waiting to go back to Tobey's story, which doesn't happen until the end and at that point it had lost my interest. Di's story is interesting at the start, and then my interest in it waned.

This might have worked better for me if it followed a linear timeline rather than jumping between characters and time periods. This would have helped with following the individual characters stories and their connections to each other. The Interstitial sections (various news stories, articles, etc. concerning the characters) that appear occasionally through out the novel could have been kept.

I liked parts of The Californians very much, but didn't love it. Thanks to Mariner Books for providing me with an advance reader's copy via Edelweiss. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.