Several years ago, a taxi driver in Bali asked if I was visiting from America. When I said yes, he added, “There’s America…” He paused, waving his hand dismissively in the air. “And there’s California.” I was happy to agree and said, “Yes! I’m from California.” He pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Sac-AR-mento!”
Sacramento serves as the capital of our state, but it’s hardly the first California city you’d imagine would come to the mind of a taxi driver halfway around the world. For this reason alone, Devyn Defoe’s debut novel, Burnside—in which the urban neighborhoods of Sacramento function as characters unto themselves—is a welcome entry into the canon of California literature.
Several well-known American writers hail from Sacramento, but not many have chosen, as Defoe does, to depict their birthplace as a kaleidoscope of 21st-century drift and perdition. “We were, by and large, mistrustful and cold people,” she writes. “We didn’t want our heads touched by anyone’s errant thoughts, not even our friends’. When we passed one another on the street we kept our eyes down, no smiles here, no hellos, no anything. It was our way of saying, I want nothing of your life, and you can have nothing of mine.”
In the book’s loose plot, an unnamed narrator and her roommate, September, try to make their way in “the bowl,” otherwise identifiable as Sacramento by recognizable locations. We learn about the roommates’ part-time jobs—September works in a feminist juice shop where she doesn’t make as much money as she does from her subsequent job at a Hooters-style “breastaurant.” The narrator toils in a rare-book store where very few people ever go unless it’s been rented out for an event. They confront “the future that had opened to us when we were not looking, a scummed door to the rest of our lives, not the one we’d believed in as immature girls but the one that would let us sustain ourselves in return for half our monthly income, in which we were women who knew better than to believe what we were told.”
The two women also deal with boyfriends they openly despise. September hangs out with a DJ who has two broken arms after breaking up with someone else’s husband, known only as “the thinking man,” one who “had a look like he was twirling a mustache, though he had no mustache, only the face he would have if indeed he had a mustache and was twirling it repetitively, obsessively, into little cornered circles.” The narrator tolerates a hobosexual actor until she gets a break when he leaves for the desert to film propaganda videos for a prominent alien cult. The women talk about moving cities without their boyfriends. “We could leave them behind like old clothes, and therein lay their appeal.” Occasionally, when they’re not drinking coffee or cocktails, the women attend a local college.
Burnside portrays a contemporary California marked by the tragedies that plague the state. Fires burn off the page, polluting the air and causing the narrator’s plans to be canceled. Serial murderers run rampant. We learn very little about Burnside, who lends his name to the book’s title, but both the character and the book call attention to California’s housing crisis. His presence in the narrative seems designed to show the nightmarish reality of how society treats a pariah it perceives as unhoused. He is repeatedly thrown out of establishments “for the crime of being a menace, a scourge, a general pest, theoretically for bothering unsuspecting women who didn’t want to be bothered or the possibility of fires trailing in his wake, but in reality usually for nothing more than sitting at a table, minding his own business but recognized for his history of nuisance and booted before the thought of trouble could cross his mind. In every instance, the crime seemed to be less the crime of bothering women and more the crime of taking up a table, along with the additional crime of having nowhere else to go.”
The novel is reminiscent of a genre of books that emerged in the 1990s that painted Los Angeles as a playground for young people seeking identity through music, drugs, body modification, and sex; here, young people seek distraction through video games, wine bars, reality TV, books about dogs, and obsession with true crime. “Eventually we struck a compromise,” the narrator tells us. “Deciding that September would remain playing Wagon Trail Archnemesis on the console, and I would watch Celebrity Autopsies on my laptop.” The characters speak in philosophical exchanges that sometimes spiral into bleak absurdity and sometimes capture the world that has been left to the younger generations with painful precision. “But there’s nothing surprising about an attack anywhere; either you’re in a place where it’s expected, like the boxing ring, or you’re an inhabitant of the world, which is a boxing ring in everything but name and additionally is riddled with actual boxing rings.”
Where this surrealist and atmospheric novel struggles is in its plotting. It is not clear what the inciting incident of the story is. Is it when Burnside grabs September’s arm violently, leaving scratches from his ragged fingernails in her flesh? Or is it when the body of a former friend of the narrator, known only as “the cinephile,” is found dead in the river? However intentional the novel’s desultory quality, the spell of fiction is broken when threads are not initiated or resolved in a traditional manner. The novel experiments with narrative, evoking David Lynch or Leonora Carrington, and the lack of a standard plot sometimes makes it a challenge to stay invested.
Still, I felt a palpable excitement in watching Defoe play with language and ideas at the level she does. Her sentences snap with an electrical charge as they describe the world of Burnside. “There was a fire an hour north. We learned of it on the news the next day, because it wasn’t a smell in the mind. It was a town in the air. Not a few buildings, a swath of forest, but a whole town. We inhaled the people, their houses, hospitals, schools, the insides of cars left shelled on the roadsides, abandoned when the flames slipped through the streets. All the time—this day, the next day, days after days for two weeks—we breathed in the town.” Readers who want a straightforward, conventional story should probably look elsewhere, but those who seek a mirror in which to see compatriots striving for an explanation of the despondent world that burns around us may discover a home in Defoe’s Sacramento.•
Chris Daley has written about books, cults, and heartbreak in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light, Essay Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Collagist, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She publishes the Submission Sunday newsletter on Substack and designs author websites at chrisdaley.com.
