California is renowned for its cornucopia of blessings: vaunted universities, Malibu volleyball, Michelin-starred restaurants, Lake Tahoe. It’s also notorious for biblical plagues: droughts, runaway wildfires, tremors jarring the San Andreas fault.
Review: ‘The Californians’ include a painter, a film director and an art thief
Fiction: Brian Castleberry’s epic is an exuberant romp through the art of the American Century.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
March 8, 2025 at 5:00PM
A woman I knew during my MFA days, a Los Angeles native, once workshopped a pair of companion poems, “Explaining Earthquakes to People” and “Explaining People to Earthquakes.” Anything can happen in the Golden State, and often does.
That limitless sense of possibility and peril animates Brian Castleberry’s exuberant “The Californians,” segueing between two entwined families and timelines that span a century of shared history.
The novel opens in 2024 as a fire ravages the town where lackadaisical Tobey Harlan lives with his ex-girlfriend’s cat. He escapes to the luxurious home of his father, tycoon Track Harlan, and then absconds with paintings by elusive Di Stieg, whose grandfather, German-Jewish silent-film auteur Klaus von Stieg, had collaborated with Tobey’s grandfather on a television series. Tobey hopes an illegal sale to an oligarch will turn around his own fortunes. Cue multi-generational saga!
Back in the 1970s, Di and Track grew up together in Palm Springs, a pseudo-sibling relationship that threads the author’s disparate sections. Castleberry toggles from Hollywood’s Golden Age to the punk-era East Village to present-day SoCal, spicing his narrative with tabloid gossip, newspaper headlines, typed letters and blog posts. With its polished sentences and rollicking rhythm, “The Californians” immerses us in an elaborate plot, despite a glut of detail and a few sluggish patches.
Di and Klaus are the main attractions here, their lives arching from the silent movie era to the long wake of Trump. Klaus dies in a freak accident in Palm Springs when Di is an adolescent; she only discovers his legendary status later. Both exalt art as a calling.
After a movie collapses as a result of a scandal, Tinseltown’s moguls blacklist Klaus, who flees the advent of the talkies, marries an heiress and schemes a comeback. Di plunges into the ’80s downtown milieu, cultivating both collectors and a taste for drugs. In the new millennium, Tobey studies these enigmas, one degree of separation away.
“The Californians” is a bold, ambitious book. Castleberry ticks off his boxes, borrowing bits from Jonathan Franzen (“The Corrections”), Hernan Diaz (“Trust”), Patti Smith’s “Just Kids‚” even a scene pirated from the Coen Brothers’ “Barton Fink.” Title notwithstanding, the novel’s finest moments unfold in New York; through Di’s eyes he conjures a time and place so close and yet so far.
“In the cab she chewed a piece of Juicy Fruit,” Castleberry writes. “The city was all lights and noise, streaking past, and it seemed that not only was the cab window made of glass but so were the streets and people and fire hydrants. A dog made of glass on the end of a glass chain led by a Black man in a glass tracksuit. Two glass prostitutes smoking glass cigarettes next to a glass trash can.”
Like his protagonists, Castleberry is obsessed with what our creative impulses reveal about our inner and outer landscapes, tilting his story to dizzying effect. He mulls the purpose of art at a moment when the American Experiment teeters on its axis, musing, “Maybe it reflected back the chaos, the ambiguity, the vertigo of living.”
Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Californians
By: Brian Castleberry.
Publisher: Mariner, 364 pages, $28.99.
Nonfiction: Todd Almond, a former student who sang at the Walzes' wedding, is the author of “Slow Train Coming.”
