I don’t believe in the Great Southern California Novel. So many great novels have been written about the region that it seems like folly even to consider winnowing the list to one. The concept itself is archaic. The very notion that one definitive novel might somehow explicate the essence of the region feels like a form of literary manifest destiny, especially in regard to a territory so diverse and nuanced.
But I’m willing to make an exception for Susan Straight’s 2022 novel, Mecca, which is among the most essential and revelatory works of Southern California literature that I know. The key, I’d suggest (or one of them), is Straight’s recognition that the terrain may be most fully comprehended not by way of its coastal communities but rather through the vastness of its interior. Set for the most part in the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley, and revolving around three central characters, Mecca takes place in what has been referred to as the other California, a zone “haunted,” in Joan Didion’s phrasing, “by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.”
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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And yet, what is this other California? In reality, no such thing exists. There is only California, with its promise and its emptiness, its glitter and its grit, its fantasies and fugues. Straight, who grew up and still lives in Riverside, understands this at the level of her soul. “My mother worked at a bank in San Bernardino,” she wrote in a 2021 Los Angeles Times essay, occasioned by the death of Didion. “My father had settled with his new family…in Claremont, and my aunt Beverly lived in Ontario with her third husband and my three cousins.”
Here we see in a nutshell the beauty and the range of Southern California literature, the continuing conversation of it, the geographic and aesthetic ebb and flow.
Mecca is all about that sense of movement. There is opportunity at stake, or the hope of it, as well as the crushing burdens of the past. There are looming threats: the pandemic, for one, which is on the horizon, and the presence of ICE. Most of all, there is an awareness of history and an abiding connection to place. “Fall winds,” one character reflects, “always made me think of my mother, holding me tight in the old redwood chair my father had tied to the porch railing, up in Fuego Canyon, while the Santa Anas blew in the black night.”
What Straight is invoking is not new. It is the voice of the landscape itself. The Great Southern California Novel? Perhaps—although I still think that’s beside the point. More important, Mecca reveals the region from the inside out: complicated, contradictory, and, on its own terms, full of grace.•
