A roadway runs through the heart of Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue, but don’t let the title fool you. For while the stories assembled here form a novel set in and around Santa Rosa, specifically in the neighborhood of South Park, and we pass Grand Avenue many times in these pages, the real map of this book isn’t made of asphalt. It is made of water. The way Grand Avenue moves tales within its tales is a lot like the way a river is made of currents. Eddying, swirling, drawing us forward with a force that feels like gravity.
It’s an apt element for a place like Santa Rosa, where a huge network of creeks, wetlands, and underground basins knits the area together—right beneath the surface of all that concrete. But the deeper reason for this narrative metaphor is the way Sarris, who has Pomo, Miwok, and Filipino ancestry, understands the place. In Grand Avenue, Santa Rosa doesn’t emerge as a character, or a collection of buildings, but a place where people gather, where their stories emerge, where their pasts catch up to them. Pull them under.
And what an extraordinary assortment of personalities fills these pages. Has there ever been such a short, vast book? In just over 200 pages, Grand Avenue introduces us to two dozen members of several loosely connected families. They are young and old; they are sick and well. Their ancestors are American Indian, Portuguese, Black, Filipino, and white.
Some have lived itinerantly, working at the dairies and on orchards within a short drive from Santa Rosa. Others have been in and out of the canneries in town, trying to hold down apartments. The pride they express when they do tells us a lot. “I got my own place,” says Albert, the narrator of “Joy Ride.” “It wasn’t much, a studio in a converted motel way down Santa Rosa Avenue. But I fixed it up good.”
Albert is mid-flashback at this point in the story. He is describing the moment he turned his life around, met the woman he would come to marry. But the undertow is upon him already. We know this because the story begins with Albert picking up a young Native girl, maybe part Chinese or Filipina, on a street corner and going for a ride with her. Something about her looks familiar, and by the end of the story—and the ride—we understand the tragic reasons why.
We read this book not to find out what happens next but for the way we come to know a community: by finding out who is linked to whom and how. For example, earlier in the book, in the story “The Progress of This Disease,” we meet Albert’s wife, Anna, who is taking their daughter Jeanne to and from the doctors. Jeanne is dying of cancer. She knows it and Anna knows it, but their relatives haven’t given up, and they come by the house to pray. It is during one of those moments, his house crowded with relatives trying to will the unstoppable, that Albert goes outside and drives around the block.
The scale of compassion Sarris has for his characters defies description. All of them have secrets, and most of them are desperate to unburden themselves. One after another tell their stories to us. We hear it all: They make bad decisions, and some do terrible things. They lurk in areas where bad things are prone to happen, like in slaughterhouses and in bars after that turning hour—when the vampires come out.
They also do kind, generous things and in retrospect see one another with an understanding and clarity that borders on the revelatory. For a crowded book, some people are so lonesome it makes you hurt to hear their tales. And they see it in one another. “I didn’t know it then,” Anna says in one story of her mother, “but she was a hundred feet under water in her own loneliness.”
It is so impressive how this 32-year-old book, Sarris’s first work of fiction, channeled so many voices. There is Jasmine, who says it like it is; Nellie, who is so used to being a bridge between Indian knowledge and the present that she talks with a weariness born of isolation. Alice is watchful of everyone but herself. Steven, who is Pomo, and his Apache wife, Reyna, worry about familial and tribal boundaries. There’s a family tree at the opening of the book, but it won’t be of much help, because not all the secrets are reflected there. The affairs, the disputed heritage, the longing and love, the abuse. But when you read Grand Avenue, you will find yourself turning to it the way a riverboat guide might have turned to a map made on imperfect information.
However, Grand Avenue itself serves as the proper map, the one that shows us where all the tributaries connect and where the deep secret water has lodged itself. Where the sledge of a riverbed could hold someone under forever. The effect of the book’s duality is destabilizing. Everyone in this book is desperate to be seen, to hear their story told properly. They talk and talk and then talk some more. Meanwhile, there are forces at work here—medicine and poisoning, blood and water, heritage and colonization—that do not map neatly onto the page or into the English language. And when this book was published, none of these forces had been written about in an urban environment. To the cast of Grand Avenue, these forces bring love and chaos, spirits as old as the great trees nearby. In these tales, Sarris has written a lyrical record of their awesome power over a group of people in and around Santa Rosa who simply want the best or to survive, which is perhaps the same thing.•
