If, like me, you’ve been part of Alta Journal’s California Book Club, reading John Freeman’s California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature is a trip down memory lane. That’s because the collection is largely made up of essays published by Alta in the lead-up to each club event. Freeman, now an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, has been the CBC’s host since its inception in October 2020.
Yet what’s most compelling about the work gathered here isn’t what it has to tell us about our past, however recent, but what it has to say about the present and the future of California’s restless and insurgent literature. Even a glance at the table of contents reveals the forward-looking nature of the project: essays on more than 50 writers, including both up-and-comers and established talents, spanning the length and breadth of the state.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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A few of these essays—one on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another addressing the work of Kay Ryan—were not written for the CBC, but that only bolsters the argument. What else are we to do with a literature as capacious as California’s but keep the conversation going? To give the collection a shape and a structure, and to provoke new associations, Freeman has chosen to organize around thematically constructed sections. “The Suburbs,” “Exploding Fantasias,” “Who Is a Citizen?”: Each of these rubrics speaks to both what we think we know and what we need to know. That these are often not the same is the point. In that, the writing provides what I have come to imagine as the most essential lens through which to examine California, as a place where every observation, every bromide, is by turns true and false. The essays here seek to prize out something inchoate and complex.
At the book’s heart is the necessary notion that literature is dynamic, living, that it changes and develops as we do, that it can show us who we are. Such is the faith embodied by every writer represented in these essays, which speculate on where we’re going by mapping all the myriad ways we define ourselves.•
CALIFORNIA REWRITTEN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE GOLDEN STATE'S NEW LITERATURE, BY JOHN FREEMAN
