cover image California's Over

California's Over

Louis B. Jones. Pantheon Books, $24 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-679-42334-8

In a droll yet often poignant tale of abandoned ideals, lost places and forgotten eras, Jones (Ordinary Money; Particles and Luck) looks back to the small, literally hidden, Northern California town of Seawall in the early 1970s. When a 17-year-old boy calling himself ""Baelthon"" arrives at the soon-to-be-condemned home of the late poet James Farmican, he is only seeking to make a little rent money by helping to clear out the large house as the family prepares for a move. But immediately he is drawn into the bohemian lifestyle and complex family dynamics at work within the house. The poet's beautiful widow has remarried a rich, flaky sometime idealist who has transferred their estate into a tax-shelter church and hopes to move the family to a rural retreat in Oregon. The Farmicans' daughter is discovering the power of her burgeoning sexuality. Their temperamental younger son writes bad poetry. And their eldest son--put up for adoption as an infant--has returned to meet his family and claim his share of a bequeathed, likely defunct casino in Void, Nevada. The narrative is told largely in the present-day voice of Baelthon, now a cynical English professor living alone in a suburban development. He has been recently reunited with the Farmicans in a scheme to wrest their father's estate from the church. Jones employs a discriminating eye for detail, playful symbolism and evocative, often lyrical prose. While making sport of his characters' youthful pretensions, he nonetheless insightfully demonstrates that neither their ideals nor their bonds to each other--however tenuously founded--have faded as completely as they may themselves imagine. 25,000 first printing; author tour.(Sept.)