Customer Reviews

Love and War in California: A Novel

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I was assigned this book for Freshman English. I though it was kind of boring. Some of it was inappropriate and unpleasant like such as the horse and the girl in Mexico. The book also made it seem that back then in that time period all the teenagers were sex crazed. I wouldn't recommend it for leisure reading.

On December 7, 1941, Payton Daltry attends San Diego State University. When Pearl Harbor is bombed, Payton's friends and older brother Richie join the military. On December 8, 1941, a junior at the college, Payton decides to complete his degree and make it with wealthy Barbara "Bonny" Bonington, whom he jus met, and is inconveniently pregnant by her boyfriend Johnny Pierce.

Payton courts Bonny and helps her meet an abortionist. However, her family rejects him as his ambition to write goes against the belief that Bonington males are doctors and Bonington females are doctors' wives. They split up as her parents are too influential and eventually he goes to war. Years later they will meet once again tied in a way that neither could have predicted when they first met in the "caff" at SDU the day after the day of infamy.

In many ways Payton is a poor selection to serve as the prime focus of a novel yet it is just because he is a pitiable choice, he makes this predominantly war years' story line work. The story line focuses on Payton as he makes decisions that differ from just about everyone around him as they sacrifice their way of life and perhaps ultimately their lives while he chooses to continue his current path with the only major change being his courting of Bonny. Well written LOVE AND WAR IN CALIFORNIA emphasizes the need for sacrifice by everyone including giving up at least temporarily love when the disruptiveness of war occurs; Oakley M. Hall contrasts WWII in which almost all Americans were engaged in the war cause in some way to President Bush's failure to demand Americans outside of the soldiers and their families sacrifice butter for guns make that protective armor.

Harriet Klausner

I think books sometimes find you. For the last year or so, whenever I stopped at a bookstore or my library, Love&War in California always seemed to be there: on display, by itself on a cart, or standing alone on the "Good Reads" shelf.

Realizing I might be up against something bigger than coincidence, I tucked it amongst a slew of others and saundered off to sit in the sun. Sure enough, it floated to the top and I found myself engrossed in a two-day read that captured the essence of living in southern California in the early days of WWII.

Oakley Hall does a commendable job of keeping the war a secondary, but intrigate detail, of the period. Instead of rehashing the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, he gives you a different version of families encouraging their sons to war. Instead of painting people pulling together, he sketches the hopelessness of vagabonds and the less fortunate struggling to cope.

The book is comical enough to raise a smile, tragic enough to bring a sigh, mysterious enough to lift a brow, and historic enough to create a nod. It had all of those emotions.

I've found that I don't write reviews of oh hum books. Those that I do comment on are ones that are usually so bad I hope no one struggles through them, or are entertaining enough that I would pass them on.

Love&War is one of those I feel good enough about to put on my "read" list.

After having read the Corpus of Joe Bailey sometime in the 1950's, I put the book down as insignificant. As a newcomer to San Diego, I could see why it might excite local interest because of the placement of site names and allusions (however disguised) to living people. Having been written more recently, Love & War in California is in several respects, a revision of the earlier novel (?). The question mark suggests the curiosity and confusion both novels evoke... Author Oakley Hall hints here and there in his latest recapitulation of San Diego's people and setting that, compared to the writings of giants William Faulkner and Marcel Proust, his writing is mediocre... Indeed, his citing of other writers and his quotations from poets to amplify his narrator's predicaments are the most tantalizing parts of his book.

Without going into specifics, the novel (?) has the character of a memoir or diary with accounts that seem to be derived from actual occurrences. The most engaging sections of the book are those that deal with the narrator's youthful sexual arousals. How one recalls the experience of an erection while dancing close-to-close with a beautiful partner or the cataclysmic thrill of premature ejaculations. The coming-of-age foibles and exclusions of an adolescent group of privileged and less-than-privileged students are convincing. Also, the contrast between wealth and poverty as manifest in the son of a former well-to-do family who is enduring a decline in creature-comforts and social status is a sympathetic (though not original) subject. (Read Theodore Dreiser's The American Tragedy..) The use of headlines, borrowed from Dos Passos, brings to the fore the shattering military setbacks at the beginning of America's entry into World War II.

Less successful are the demise of the narrator's. brother at the Battle of Midway, the suspense that doesn't arrive at a solution concerning the death of a motion picture starlet with or without the looked-up-to brother's complicity; the re-appearances of Calvin, a black football player, a pimp, a zoot-suit victim, an assailant of a U.S. sailor, an AWOL soldier, and a factotum of an anonymous mayor of San Diego. Weak spots in the narrative are put in to be topical or to keep the plot moving, such as the visit to an American-Japanese relocation camp at Manzanar and the liberation of a slave-labor [extermination} camp near Linz, Austria, a sub-camp of Mauthausen-Gusen though the author does not say so. (This writer recalls meeting a former member of a slave-labor camp in Brussels, Belgium, though he did not have the foresight to inquire about his experience. Perhaps it was for the best!) Author Hall repeats the story of a lampshade made of human skin though there is no documentation that this grisly item was discovered at Mauthausen-Gosen. The lampshade was supposedly made by Ilse Koch, "the Bitch of Buchenwald;" however, students of the Holocaust. who testify to its otherwise horrible realities, regard the story as a myth. The discovery of a granddaughter of the star-crossed, rich-girl and poor-boy lovers at the end of the novel is as expeditious as the fortuitous ending of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet without the latter's tragic overtones. How one hears the wheels grinding!

While I would not describe the writing as turgid (quite the opposite) it has the sparse quality of one who is content to glide over surfaces, with flippant and snappy dialogue taking the place of depth-diving prose. Allusions to Martin Eden require knowledge of literature the average reader may not have. Actor Errol Flynn comes across as an affable host with a suggestion of unstated menace. One feels like hissing whenever his thin mustache is mentioned. There is more of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler in the novel than there is of William Faulkner or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the comparison is more to the impromptu, and casual Hemingway than to the writer of scorching explorations into male and female entanglements, or to the death-diving encounters with nature in such works as The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and. The Sun Also Rises.

As a San Diegan my verdict, is to give the book three stars. I suspect that for a non-San Diegan the rating would be lower

whoah, i looked at some of the other reviews for this book here, and boy, are they long. who has that kind of time? not me. and besides, when i look at amazon reviews, i just want it short & sweet. no showing off. did you like the book or not? that sort of thing. anyway, mr oakley hall was responsible for the classic western "Warlock," published in 1958. here it is 2007 and he's got another fine piece of work out on the bookstore shelves. the man certainly has staying power. "Love & War in California," follows protagonist Payton Daltry from the outbreak of WWII, into the war, out of the war, and on up to 1986, through multiple relationships and deaths and a career as a novelist. it's a well written and interesting ride through time that mr hall takes us on. the characters are compelling & the WWII (especially) atmosphere is finely layered. this book and warlock are the only 2 oakley hall books that i have read. i will have to add some more of his work to the inside of my brain. this author is 2 for 2 in the good stuff category of my life. i recommend this stellar work of fiction wholeheartedly.

It's a dog eat dog world, and Oakley Hall condenses it nicely in his tight, personalized panorama of young love, power, influence, and coming of age in San Diego. A literate hero, surrounded by luminous characters, brought to life in tumultous times by an insightful, questioning author makes for fine reading and a memorable experience. There's an "Ah Ha!" moment around every corner, and it all fits together in the end like fine carpentry. Hall's writing style is very compact,his staging is vivid, and his timing is perfect. A light-hearted romance this is not. This is one of those books you will compare to all the other books you'll read for years to come, and the others will fall short.