A lot happens on California freeways. On any given weekday, a hot wind might steal through cars, around motorcycles. Across poorly packed trailers—some with people inside. Traveling down one such freeway at speed, a driver may not be entirely conscious that the land rushing by is many thousands of years old, even if strip malls now occupy it. If you’re heading toward the Inland Empire, people might call the freeway the 91, but it has had other names given by other people. Some of the other people are still here, centuries later—only to be told lately to go home.
In Mecca, Susan Straight has made an epic California novel out of the stories of three people whose ancestors made homes on contested land. Intersecting and overlapping in this dazzling story are a California highway patrolman of Mexican and Indigenous heritage; a cleaner at a high-end spa for women getting over plastic surgery who comes from Oaxaca and is of Mixtec background; and a Black woman trying to raise kids during the worst period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you’ve read Straight’s novels before, the pleasure and power of Mecca is instantly recognizable. We are in the territory of Rio Seco, her fictional Riverside, or “dry river” as the joke of its Spanish has it. A place of hot canyons and old citrus groves and mile after mile of broiling tarmac. For decades, she’s been making this landscape and its arroyos flow with stories and people, some of whom, in this book, have appeared elsewhere in major and minor ways, as do characters in the work of Louise Erdrich.
People in this novel speak as they do in life, across several languages and with a dart toward humor. They work. They love deeply. The land all around them rises up in glorious, specific splendor. Straight is not a poet of vistas and overlooks, but instead of wild grass and creosote, of the date palm and the humble oleander. When a Santa Ana kicks up in the opening pages of this book, it is not an abstract Inland Empire that moves across its buffeting, but one so real you almost stick your head out the book’s window.
Straight’s previous novels have had a stricter definition of multigenerational. History and family lineage come together in books like her National Book Award finalist Highwire Moon and the sweeping A Million Nightingales, the tale of a mixed-race enslaved girl. One forms the other. A pattern becomes a line. This is not to say these books are descriptions of social conditions, but lineage, in each of them, has been key. Mecca presents the first time that a major novel of the author’s has worked mostly through juxtaposition: The cast of this novel come into sharper focus as their predicaments and lives are seen side by side.
We begin on the freeway as Johnny Frías rumbles up and down the 91, lighting up motorists who casually weave back and forth in traffic, speed, and cross in and out of the car pool lane. Quickly, one after the other, we get their stories, and then slowly, his. Johnny learned to ride horses from his father when he was young, growing up in a worker camp its owner preferred to keep under the radar. Developers were beginning to circle then. Decades later, at age 39, a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer for many years now, he still flexes his right leg when he changes gear on his Harley, as if it’s a living being he rides.
Johnny doesn’t think of himself as a cop, but as a man who writes tickets to people who are occasionally irate when they encounter him. This is a pose but an important one. He has learned to be watchful, to see what other people see in him: a move Straight’s casts have had to perfect for their own safety. A debt to a coyote can be brutal—and it has been for Ximena. At work, at the spa for women who want to get surgery outside of the public eye, she’s careful: A casually dropped accusation about stealing would be enough for her to lose her job forever. She is always suspect. When ICE comes, if they come, all they have to shout is, “Where are you from?” She learns to provide her answer: the city of Mecca.
In the meantime, Matelasse, whose family came to California from Louisiana, has been abandoned by her partner, Reynaldo, whose experiences we learned more about in a previous novel, Between Heaven and Here, published by McSweeney’s in 2012. She knows how dangerous life is for her Black teenage sons and comes right up close to this fact when a cousin’s son is shot. Her two kids are equally vulnerable, and even though Reynaldo had planned to be in the CHP and earn a great living, all that is gone, and she now must rely on a much wider social net to keep her sons safe.
All of Straight’s characters are in the care industry in Mecca. But we are a long way from Paul’s letter to the Galatians in the New Testament. Whether it’s Johnny providing safety or Ximena cleaning a room, the industry requires them to remain invisible. The plot of Mecca tends to move along in swirls and ambitious orbits, and then surge into action when Straight’s characters are thrust into visibility. Their juxtaposition holds greater power here because one sees just how many people like them carry the costs of people above them.
It’s 2019, and in Trump’s America, motorists wonder to Johnny’s face if he’s the “bad hombre,” not them. That’s on top of the usual dangers of pulling over a stranger, who may or may not have a gun under his seat. As in hotels, people on freeways have an illusion of being invisible—while simultaneously treating someone like Johnny as if he is invisible. There’s a lot more to him than meets the eye, including a secret buried not very deeply on the roadside, a body he put there two decades ago for good reason.
Moving between these characters, their exposure to danger flashing like metal hit by the sun, their protection enlarged by social networks, this book beautifully turns into a story. Mecca is a novel in revolt of validation achieved through heroic acts. Indeed, a fire comes, bringing Straight’s disparate characters into contact with one another. Ximena rescues an abandoned child, and her solution to this unsought responsibility means that her life eventually collides with that of a family Johnny’s act of violence kept whole.
And yet there’s so much to Mecca beyond these moments of contact. The novel’s greatness lies in the elegant way that its errant asides lay down a foreground that many people—glimpsing any of these characters in passing—might never conclude. Who would think that Ximena was dying to study Hockney, or that Matelasse could flirt so authoritatively with a new man after being treated so badly, or that the wild world Johnny grew up in could stay so deeply embedded in him? Leaping under the pressure he presses down on it with, like a horse that has never been forgotten.•
Join us on June 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Susan Straight will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Gustavo Arellano to discuss Mecca. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
