Mecca. By Susan Straight. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 384 pages; $28
AS WELL AS the holy metropolis of Islam, Mecca is the identify of a speck on the map within the Coachella Valley of southern California. It lies within the Inland Empire, the irrigated desert area the place Mexican farmworkers harvest cantaloupes and grapes. Writing about its denizens, Joan Didion waspily riffed about “ladies for whom all life’s promise comes right down to a waltz-length white wedding ceremony costume and the beginning of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi.”
These “dreamers of the golden dream” have been curiosities to Didion, unimaginably distant from her enclave in Malibu. Susan Straight, a novelist born and introduced up in Riverside, not removed from Mecca, was shocked by these disparagements. Ms Straight “knew a model of us, of the women and girls right here, that was not in [Didion’s] essay”, she wrote in a memoir. “Women descended from Mexican and black households arrived within the Nineteen Twenties, and white households arrived from Arkansas after the Korean struggle.”
In “Mecca”, her triumphant, polyphonic new novel, the working individuals behind the glamour of the Golden State are revealed in all their multiplicity, with Ms Straight’s trademark tenderness and humour. By way of the braided, typically heartbreaking tales of half a dozen individuals of African-American, Mexican, Mixtec and Spanish descent—cop and cleaner, florist, butcher and basketball star—she attracts readers right into a wealthy however ignored world.
She begins from the perspective of a motorway patrolman, as if to point out that behind each badge or label everyone seems to be human. Johnny Frías has his personal sorrows and secrets and techniques. He's additionally a part of a tight-knit group of mates whose lives and households the novel charts. Every is lovingly drawn, regardless of—or due to—their difficulties.
Matelasse is deserted by a husband dreaming of a flashier life. Dante, a younger boy petrified of shedding his dad and mom to covid-19, takes solace within the stars. Ximena toils in each day terror of an immigration raid. Horrible occasions abound, together with a police capturing, thefts and rape. What saves these characters, and uplifts the reader, is their internet of mutual help.
Like these of Louise Erdrich and William Faulkner, Ms Straight’s novels (9 in all) have created a fictional universe rooted in a single neighborhood and place. The writer herself moved away from Riverside simply as soon as, to review inventive writing below James Baldwin. The deep historical past of southern California is her topic: the tales of these whose households have inhabited it for hundreds of years, whether or not they have been indigenous or first introduced as slaves by Mormons or Spanish explorers. Hers are true American tales, directly intimate and epic.
By the closing pages of the guide, the reader sees why Ximena thinks Mecca, California, is a “holy place”, too. Set on tribal land in an historic lake mattress, it's, like its namesake, a spot individuals try to achieve, and a spot of refuge. ■
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