California Time (Western Literature Series) - Hardcover

A well-crafted but narratively undercooked story of life in California's Central Valley during the three decades following WW I. Finney, as in his previous fiction with California settings (Flights in the Heavenlies, 1996, etc.), deftly evokes both time and place with appropriately vivid descriptions--e.g., the way raisins are made and strawberries picked--but the story told here by his various and sundry characters is more like a motley collection of sketches than a full rural saga. It begins in 1928, when the wounded sailor Peter Hart arrives in the Valley to manage the town's hotel, and it ends in Italy during WW II as Julian, a young Italian American reared in the Valley, now a war hero and embryonic journalist, changes his mind about going AWOL and decides to return home, sickened by the pointless carnage. In between these tales fits another about three families--the Portuguese Brazils, the Italian Palestinis, and the Japanese Hamadas--and their relations with one another and the locals in changing times. Their story is told by a range of voices, including that of Hortense Brazil, who has admired Julian since they first rode the school bus together; schoolmate Grayson Hamada, whose elder sister Reiko is Hortense's best friend; and Fred, an orphan from ``dust bowl Oklahoma'' who is helped by Peter and soon falls for Reiko. The action takes in hunts in the mountains for bear and deer, organized by Ray, Reiko, and Grayson Hamada's irrepressible grandfather; the sharing of labor at harvest time; the travail of the Depression; and farming setbacks and triumphs. Also dealt with is the outbreak of war. The Hamadas are summarily put in a remote camp in Arizona, and Reiko and Fred's love is destroyed by her rage at her family's internment. Nice vignettes, but little more. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Vestiges of East of Eden and A Farewell to Arms haunt this earthy chronicle about ethnic synergies in California's Great Central Valley during the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Through the first-person narratives of Patrick Hart, the hotel manager in a dusty farming town in California's Great Central Valley, and the children of three families?Japanese, Italian and Portuguese?working neighboring farms, Finney shows us the dreams of these first-generation Americans as they grow to adulthood in a fertile but often unforgiving land. The Japanese siblings endure the hardship of a Depression childhood only to find themselves banished to a relocation camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the same time, their Italian neighbor makes a "separate peace" when he is sent back into battle (after winning a medal in the Pacific) on the Italian front, while the teenage daughter of a Portuguese dairyman and her Okie friend are left behind to protect their neighbors' fields from opportunistic real estate sharks. This poignant picture of the American system at its best (the WPA) and very worst (the relocation camps) is the work of a fine, if sentimental, storyteller. While Finney seems to divine the underlying sense of heroism and to understand the quiet drama in the workaday lives of his characters, the first-person narration is curiously more expository than personal, and Finney never quite brings his novel to life. (Mar.) FYI: The ethnic range of faces in an old school photo he found in a secondhand store inspired Finney's cast of characters.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.