Customer Reviews

The End of California

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I usually read books written by women because there are so many wonderful female authors out there now than there were when I was younger. But every now and then I find a book that has been written by a man that interests me. THE END OF CALIFORNIA was one of those. I was visiting my son in Atlanta when I found it and he said he'd looked at it too. I picked it up, put it down, picked it up again, and finally added it to the pile. I'm so glad I did. This is a book that is just plain good.

I love books about people. I don't need adventure or mystery or romance. I like reading about how people are feeling or thinking. I like reading about relationships. I like reading about people who have done something to change their lives. And this book covers all of those things and more.

I started it when I was in Atlanta, finished it today, and will now put it in the mail to send to my son. In the meantime, I'll go back in time and check out some of Mr. Yarbrough's other books and see what I've missed.

In the meantime, Mr. Yarbrough, write on!

I think the negative reviews here are missing some of the subtleties of this book. Although some of the intertwined relationships may seem 'pat,' in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, there isn't much of an alternative, given the limted population. And that's a great strength of the moral lessons this book has to teach, whether you're from McGhee, MS or Manhattan. It seems like Yarbrough's point is that every action has consequences that reverberate down the years through a community--so that what Edie DePoyster did 25 years ago would have (and has) haunted her son Alan all that time. Thus, his fracture is hardly pat but rather as inevitable as a kettle boiling over, given the chain of events set in motion by Pete Barrington's return to Loring. This is really a book to be read slowly, with an eye toward all the nuances of the conversations, the significance of every action being observed in a fishbowl of a town. Read it like the old men sitting around the courthouse watch the action on the square and you'll find it richly rewarding. Yarbrough is one of the best southern writers we've got.

I finished reading this book a couple of days ago and I'm still thinking about it - the characters and the setting.

I grew up in the Mississippi Delta, about 30 miles from Indianola (Loring, Miss.). Yarbrough captured the essence of small town life in the Delta. This is a well-written and riveting read.

This is supposedly a story of the consequences of flawed character and excessiveness, whether it be in the realm of marital fidelity, morality and religion, or settling scores. The return to Loring, Miss, of Dr. Pete Barrington sets the story in motion. Apparently sexual indiscretions with a patient(s) forced him out of his practice in Fresno, CA, but the damage to his family remains and is merely transferred to Miss.

The story is simply full of convenient coincidences. As a teenager, Barrington had a scarcely concealed fling with an older woman, the mother of now grocery store manager, Alan Depoyster, a high school classmate of Pete's. Pete's daughter, Toni, as the new girl at the local high school finally finds a friend, that being Mason, son of Alan. If this is not enough, Pete's wife Angela, completely disaffected by turns of events little discussed, becomes involved with another former high school friend of Pete's, dissipated lawyer Tim Kessler.

Other than vague references to past indiscretions, the reader is given no opportunity to really understand the central character, Doc Barrington, not to mention his wife Angela. Was he a serial cheater? What were the impacts at the various times? Exactly what were the circumstances of his leaving CA. We never learn that. Likewise for Alan: he is a devoted family man, churchgoer, and community pillar, and had long since come to grips with his wife, as a teenager, having an incestuous relationship with her brother. Why after twenty-five years, is Alan obsessed with Pete's arrival in town? What actually occurred years ago that seemingly precipitates his violent actions?

The only character that seems real is Chief of Police, Henderson, a black man in a little city once ruled by racist whites. We understand the chief and watch him work.

Things are too pat in this story. The author seems to think that relationships in small towns are practically incestuous. Furthermore, if A happens, B must follow. The characters are almost stereotypes, not really capable of deviating from the script. The book, heralded by some, is really a disappointment.

Another remarkable, confident book by one of the best writers out there. As good as PRISONERS OF WAR is, this is even better. This is the real thing--a compelling, fascinating story perfectly written, perfectly told.

I was on the Amalfi Coast in Italy when I read this book. It was so riveting that I could barely look up and out to the sea until after I had finished the last page! It's beautifully written but has the suspense and tension of an airport thriller. A perfect combination of gripping storyline with wonderfully-crafted prose. The characters are fascinating, flawed, compelling. They're like people we know and love (or hate) who are involved in a drama that we all hope will never play out in our own lives.

I just recently found this book and purchased it on a whim. I hadn't read any of Yarbrough's other books and wasn't sure what to expect. Well, I wasn't disappointed--this is a wonderful novel with beautiful, concise prose and complex, sympathetic characters. It's been a long time since I read a book that I thought measured up to this one. I'm halfway through another of Yarbrough's novels, Visible Spirits, now, and so far, it's great, too. Check this writer out.

This is my first exploration into the writings of Steve Yarbrough and the weekend I devoted to this book was well worth the time. His characters are rich and complex and the small town descriptions and duty to detail made this character driven book exceptional. Redemption, guilt, loneliness and forgiveness are explored in a way that does not seem contrived or unrealistic. I wanted to know more about Toni, Mason, Pete, and especially Alan- what drove them to their torment and how they daily reclaimed their life and often threw what they loved most away. I especially liked that Yarbrough teased the reader with unanswered questions, and the characters with unanswered prayers. This book was a real find!

Pete Barrington is returning to his hometown in Loring, Mississippi, after having escaped it twenty-five years ago via a football scholarship. He's lived in California and become a successful doctor, but his part in a scandal sends him back to the only other place he knows. His lovely wife and teenage daughter have never been anywhere but the West Coast and are full of trepidations about their new hometown.

There was also a quiet scandal when Pete moved west all those years ago. He'd had an affair with the mother of one of his high school friends. Her husband divorced her soon after he left town and his friend, Alan DePoyster, always blamed Pete for the break up of his family. Alan had tried to leave Loring, but ended up successful on the small town scale as the manager of the local Piggly Wiggly supermarket. He tried to be thankful and live the life he heard preached about in the church where he was an active member. He did it easily until Pete Barrington came back to town.

Steve Yarbrough is a storyteller. Using the same sets of words we use in everyday life, he creates characters who move into the loft in your mind for a stay; tension so thick you can't drive through it in a Mack truck; and clean, flowing, evocative dialogue. He writes real characters whom seethe quietly with rage caused by bygone pain. He draws pictures with an undercurrent of anguish in everyday life, as if the shopkeeper, accountant, teacher or taxi driver you encounter could very well be living life in search of redemption from their desperation as they carry on normally. Even his incidental characters deal with the undercurrents of racism, ageism, and class distinctions.

Armchair Interviews says: Yarbrough, a professor of creative writing, is a powerful writer with things to say and prowess to say them well.

Writing in a clear and graceful prose, Yarbrough dramatizes a cast of diverse characters who are driven not so much by the claustrophobic environment of small-town Mississippi as by their inner states of rage, guilt, and grief. The godless and the god fearing alike seem equally adrift. Neither the law, symbolized by the state trooper who appears in the first pages of the novel, nor the church, represented by the young Baptist preacher out of touch with his congregation, offers a stay against the moral chaos that unfolds in this tense, gripping novel. Because Yarbrough is from Mississippi and because he writes of the South, he is often compared to Faulkner and other Southern writers, but I think his roots go back even deeper, back to the dark forests of Nathanial Hawthorne. Yarbrough's characters, like Hawthorne's, are trapped and tormented by their own psyches. For the most part they are self-consuming and lost, apparently incapable of accepting themselves as members of the brotherhood of sinners. But perhaps at the end it is the protagonist's daughter, Toni, who knows the way to redemption.

The novel sometimes raised the hair on the back of my neck. I wish it were twice as long.