Mysterious to easterners for whom California means only Los Angeles and San Francisco, Santa Barbara--far enough from L.A. to escape the Tinseltown and Lalaland labels, wealthy and sophisticated, off the beaten track--has drawn its share of writers, such as Kenneth (Ross Macdonald) and Margaret Millar, Salvatore LaPuma, and T. Coraghessan Boyle. The contributors to this collection have all lived there, some (Wallace Stegner, Nicholson Baker, John Sayles) only briefly, others (Dennis Lynds, Gayle Lynds, Catherine Ryan Hyde, John M. Daniel, Shelly Lowenkopf, Sheila Golburgh Johnson, and Marvin Mudric) for years. Their stories have all been previously published: Boyle's "She Wasn't Soft" in the New Yorker, Baker's "K.590" in the Little Magazine, Sayles' "Old Spanish Days" and Stegner's "Women on the Wall" in volumes of their authors' short fiction, and others in relatively low-circulation journals. Vivid journeys to a place most know only through fiction. Mary Carroll
Review
CITY PROVIDES AMBIANCE
Although Santa Barbara has always attracted artists in droves, weve never had a writers colony as such. We have, however, been consistently blessed with a flourishing population of exceptional writers who find in this place, for a few months or for decades, something that nourishes their work.
From the body of published work of writers who have lived here and written stories inspired by our area, the renowned anthropologist Steven Gilbar has assembled a wonderfully varied, bakers dozen of short stories that span over 50 years.
Gilbars problems were interesting: Often some of the finest writers in our area havent written short fiction or their short fiction is set somewhere else. So Gilbar has not simply assembled a roll call of the the biggest names, but rather a lively collection of stories that reflect this place and the people who live here.
John Sayles, the multi-talented writer, director, and actor, lived in Santa Barbara in the 1970s and has written perhaps the collections most powerful story in Old Spanish Days which plays the comradeship and desperation of illegal immigrant men working as lavoplatos in a local restaurant against the compulsively upbeat announcements about a costumed breakfast, invitation only mayors reception, rough-and-tumble rodeo and annual party hosted by the womens club. This story evokes the disparate layers of our social strata and what we choose to celebrate and to ignore.
In The Women on the Wall, Wallace Stegner describes a writers idyllic vision of a group of women during WWII who sit on a stone wall each morning to wait for the postman, for any news of or from their husbands. Only when the waiter actually encounters these women, who have followed their men to the Pacific Rim and still gaze yearningly west, do the complex and unpleasant realities of their various situations become clear.
Find the Woman, by Ross Macdonald, holds up well as more than a neatly compressed, hard-boiled mystery. Macdonald, one of the acknowledged trio of masters of the hard-boiled crime novel in the company of Hammett and Chandler, lived in Santa Barbara for decades and most of his Lew Archer novels centered around this place. In this story he visits his favorite psychological territory of families with dark and painful secrets.
Relatively recent Santa Barbara transplant T.C. Boyle contributes She Wasnt Soft and employs his vivid and straight-faced sense of irony to characterize several local types. He takes on the good-natured, indulgent dissipation of trust fund babies, this time in the persona of an ever-mellow owner dude of a surf-shop underwritten by his highly affluent parents.
As romantic counterpart and foil to the surfer, Boyle conjures a female superathlete driven to prove herself and to win an upcoming triathlon in preparation for the Hawaiian Iron Man: She wasnt tender, she wasnt soft, she wasnt sweetly yielding or coquettish, and she was nobodys little woman and never would be.
Nicholson Baker contributes the graceful and amusing K.590 in which a string quartet struggles to practice Mozart in the refreshment room of a large Isla Vista apartment building complete with intermittently cascading fountains, a clucking and wistful landlady, and cheerfully vacuous coeds.
Music also plays a role in Dennis Lynds The Girl in White about a woman obsessed and quietly unraveling after a divorce.
John Daniel, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Sheila Golburgh Johnson, Salvatore La Puma, Shelly Lowenkopf, Gayle Lynds and Marvin Mudrick round out this collection with surprisingly diverse stories.
One of the particular pleasures Gilbars collection offers is watching different writers describe our local ambiance. In Macdonalds dark story, our sunset sets the mood: The sun, huge and angry red, was horizontal now, half eclipsed by the sea and almost perceptibly sinking. It spread a red glow over the shore like a soft creeping fire. In Boyles upbeat satire, the cocktail hour becomes the time when, the light stuck on the underside of the palms, everything soft and pretty and winding down toward dinner and evening, the whole night held out before them like a promise.
Overall, Santa Barbara Stories is an engaging collection of fiction inspired by this place that takes you on invigorating dips into the lives of a wonderfully disparate and lively set of characters. In addition, Patricia Chidlaws beautiful painting of the train station at moonrise after a rain graces the cover and lets the reader effectively judge the book by its cover. -- Santa Barbara News Press
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