Love and War in California: A Novel [Hardcover]

Oakley Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2007

The Sweeping Novel of a Twentieth-Century California Life
 
Love and War in California tells the story, through the eyes of Payton Daltrey, of the last sixty years of an evolving America.
The award-winning author Oakley Hall begins his newest work in 1940s San Diego, where his endearing, wide-eyed narrator must define his identity in terms of self, family, and World War II. As his classmates disappear into the war one by one, he becomes obsessed with abuses of power and embroiled with the charming, dangerous Errol Flynn; with the Red Baiting of the American Legion; with the House Un-American Activities Committee; and with the Japanese interment at Manzanar. Nevertheless, Payton, too, must go to the war, where he is a part of the invasion of Europe and that proving of the American soldier: the Battle of the Bulge. After war's end and time in New York, he returns to California as a writer and a seeker, whose old, long-lost love rises from the ashes to show him who he really is.
Hall has been called a "master craftsman" (Amy Tan) with "one of the finest prose styles around" (Michael Chabon), and he has received the PEN Center USA West Award of Honor and the P&W Writers for Writers Award. Coming on the heels of Hall's San Francisco Chronicle bestseller (a reissue of his classic Western, Warlock), Love and War in California is more than a novel about a young boy who grows old. It's about how the passions of youth become the verities of age, and how we evolve as a nation, a country, and a people during times that are all at once turbulent, dangerous, and stirring.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hall's sure-handed latest (after 20-plus novels) features Payton Daltry. who is a junior at San Diego State when Pearl Harbor is bombed on December 7, 1941. His friends and elder brother, Richie, join the service; Payton attempts to finish his degree and cultivate a faltering love affair with the fair and wealthy Bonnie, pregnant by a former boyfriend. Payton cements their tie by helping her find an abortionist, while he also tries to reconcile his profound social consciousness with the jingoism of a nation adjusting to total war. In short order, his work with a socialist newspaper, the Brand, puts him, for the next two-thirds of the novel, in conflict with almost everyone he knows. (There are entertaining cameos by Erroll Flynn, Jack Warner and others.) The last 100 pages summarize with little sense of character or progression: the novel jumps ahead to 1944 with Payton as a GI invading France. Hall (Warlock) glosses the combat experience wherein Payton's ideals are finally destroyed and his outlook shifts to fatalistic and melancholy acceptance. The story is eminently enjoyable for its splendid detail, but Payton's actions are seldom justified by his feelings, and as a narrator he never quite comes off the page. (Apr.)
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Review

  "Eminently enjoyable for its splendid detail."--Publishers Weekly
 

"When I read the first ten pages of Love and War in California, I had that heady sense of falling in love. My amazement grew as I read long into the night. Everything about this book sings to me. Oakley Hall evokes the story of a young man's soul and that of his town and his country in a time of great change and uncertainty. It is both intimate and universal, graceful and exuberant. It reflects on human desire and belonging, the complexities of honesty and loyalty, truth and fairness, the unraveling of ideas and passion, and the emergence of something greater. Hall accomplishes this with compassion, honesty, and the occasional wink. This is a book for our times, a book that will surely stand out as an enduring masterpiece of American literature."--AMY TAN

 

"Love and War in California is classic American story-telling, in the manner of James Jones and the Norman Mailer we first loved. It is made for a reader who wants to sit down with a book, stay up all night and not quit until the end."--RICHARD FORD
 
"Oakley Hall's Love and War in California is in so many ways a culmination, a fulfillment, a peak: of Hall's artistry, of his lifelong exploration of the recurring motifs and topography and mythology of the American west, and of the great post-Chandler novel itself, that epic romance of disillusion and of promise betrayed, of which Hall is, as this book proves, our greatest living master."--MICHAEL CHABON

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (April 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312357621
• ISBN-13: 978-0312357627
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,526,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful story about people and WWII, May 8, 2007

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love and War in California: A Novel (Hardcover)

Perhaps the best thing about Oakley Hall's latest novel Love & War in California is how clearly he brings to the page the passage from sheltered youth to experience. The action begins just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Payton Daltrey is surrounded by college friends, ready to fall in love, and trying to figure out his place in the world, like most people his age. His family has fallen apart, leaving him on his own, working hard at two jobs, losing time for his fraternity, and entranced by a beautiful fellow student, Bonny.

The war that is growing with every week and month, takes his friends and his brother, leaving him to help a friend's pregnant girlfriend, and being in charge of another friend's "working girl." Payton tries to keep hold of all the strings attached to all of his friends as they embark on paths that will inevitably take them away from him. College is that interlude when we are choosing the direction of our lives, or at least direction we can start pursuing.

In 1942 California, the world war pulls Payton, like most of his generation, right out of the straight path of his life. He fights, survives, loses friends and fellow soldiers, and his blissful youth. He gains the maturity he probably would have had in time, though that time might have drawn itself out longer. He goes on to the write novels as he dreamed of doing. Late in life, he is honored for that writing, and finds that life's surprises are unending and always unexpected.

Hall brings to this novel the ability to capture both a 20-year-old's innocence in the brief period between Pearl Harbor and going off to war, and the experiences that same young man will have as he lives through the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of a concentration camp. He shows great compassion for Payton's youth and idealism, never condescending to it, just faithfully rendering life-size and beautiful.

Armchair Interviews says: If you're looking for strong writing and a tale that is rooted in a time and universal at once, then try Love & War in California by Oakley Hall.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memory & Obsession, September 3, 2007

By 

Robert W. Weiss - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love and War in California: A Novel (Hardcover)

A wonderful immersion in another time, Love and War in California, on the surface, may seem an unbalanced narrative - 70% in San Diego at the beginning of the war, 20% during, and 10% for everthing since. Yet that may be the right formula for many of our lives, in terms of the experiences that shape us and seem most significant in retrospect. The dialog and situations in early 40's California seem right on the money (without anyone calling anything "swell"). Hall obviously has an easy time slipping back into his youth, the naive and not so naive as well. The war and everything after is merely preparation for his reunion with lost love Bonny. And why not? Don't many of us yearn to tie up all those broken relationships and atone for our perceived misdeeds? Perhaps even obsess about them in the midst of the more humdrum progression of our lives? Hits all the right notes for me. With an ending that arrives at the right time, not abruptly leaving us unsatisfied, or dragging on in the name of "balance". Oakley Hall is quite the old codger to be publishing something this fresh (at least to codgers like myself), and it is a fitting capstone on quite a varied career.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars War and cliches in California, June 23, 2007

By 

Peter Lorenzi (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love and War in California: A Novel (Hardcover)

Oakley Hall has written what seems to be a semi-autobiographical book -- my guess, you decide -- about an author who writes a semi-autobiographical book. The protagonist author, Payton Daltry (reads like two last names, sort of like Oakley Hall) has his own Boswell in the form of his college literature professor who eggs Hall - oops, Daltry - to greater things.

There is a bit of Hemingway in the sparse yet direct, uninhibited dialog and limited coloring of the background scenery. Hall and Daltry seem obsessed with sex, divorce, profanity, prostitution, pimping, sex with animals, older woman fantasies, abortion, and Errol Flynn. After a few pages, these profane clichés begin to wear thin. Along his way to maturity, Daltry manages brief, unexpected, almost intentionally meaningless sexual encounters with beautiful women. He seems more surprised than aroused, more forgetful than reflective, and his sexual relationships are forgettable.

After an intense period following Pearl Harbor, of sexual awakening, some intrigue, tire smuggling, sex between a young girl and a pony, a brief encounter with the dashing Mr. Flynn, a prostitute friend's telegraphed suicide, and an inscrutable squabble between Daltry's brother and a Flynn groupie (198 pages), the book shifts suddenly to Daltry's time in the European theater (forty-nine pages, where he runs into his college professor in Paris), with short, somewhat revealing scenes about Daltry's real maturation. Then the books speeds through the post-war years (thirty years in ten pages) before taking another leap. In 1985-86, old friends and lovers re-unite for a time around the semi-autobiographical Daltry book, Daltry reflects a bit on his dysfunctional marriages and fathering, and limited success as an author, to come full circle (thirty pages), with a plot contrivance that was telegraphed almost as clearly as the hooker's suicide.

Having read this, you might think I did not like the book. It did have likeable color, coming of age charm, melodrama set against the start of the war, and news headlines to show the forlorn state of the war in the first few months. So you might like it. For me, it fell flat.