It’s 2024, and Tobey Harlan, college dropout and temporary waiter recently dumped, steals from the wall of his father’s house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey’s just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to a notorious tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon.
A hundred years before, Klaus Aaronsohn, a German-Jewish immigrant and resident of the Lower East Side, inveigles his way into a film studio in Astoria, Queens. In love with silent cinema, Klaus will restyle himself Klaus von Stiegl, a mysterious aristocratic German film director. In true Hollywood fashion, he will court fame, fortune, romance, and betrayal, and end his career directing Brackett: a radical, notorious 60s-era detective show.
Weaving between Tobey and Klaus is the story of Diane “Di” Stiegl: Klaus’s granddaughter, raised in Palm Springs, who claws out a career as an artist in gritty 1980s NYC. As America yields the presidency to a Hollywood cowboy, as Diane’s grifter father and free-spirited mother circle in and out of her life, Diane will reflect America’s most urgent and hypocritical years back to itself, uneasily finding critical adoration as well as great fame and wealth.
The Californians by Brian Castleberry will be published March 11, 2025. Mariner Books provided an early galley for review.
Castleberry teaches literature and creative writing at the College of William and Mary; learning that I had high expectations for this novel.
I have noted this previously, however, that I am not a big fan of novels where the narrative arc jumps around between a variety of viewpoints. It can be challenging when not done right. Jumping around between time-periods as well just adds to the complexity. Again, hard to pull off. Given the author's credentials, I was hoping he would do so.
Even though the writing itself is solid, when the parts are put together in the whole it falls off for me. It very much likely is the ordering of the parts that is throwing me. I just couldn't get past that. Maybe reading it "out of order" (i.e. focusing on each of the three characters separately) might work for me; that experiment would be better served with a physical book than a digital galley. Maybe I'll try that later.
For the right readers, I am sure this will be a fantastic read. I'm just not that type of reader.
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