A Year in Reading: Piper French
I spent a lot of this year driving up and down my adopted state and reading about it too. I grew up coming out here twice a year to visit my grandfather in San Diego, but I only got the sunny side of Mike Davis’s famous sunshine/noir dialectic: my California back then was just splashing around in his kidney bean-shaped pool, the house’s sliding glass doors and cool, dark interiors, the dry canyons behind his tidy suburban development like the back of a movie set.
The noir, it turns out, is everywhere’s about the massive expansion of California’s penal system, and started noticing prisons everywhere on these drives. I read , a deliciously pulpy tale of old money and rot in Sacramento, and reread most of This summer, lounging next to various bodies of water, in Pasadena or Malibu:a deranged, magnificent account of the Manson murders, which doubles as one journalist’s account of the magazine story that becomes your entire life and, for a while, ruins itI also read some books not really about California on these drives: which I did not love, perhaps because I read it in a freezing Airbnb in a prison town in the depths of winter, and , first in Inverness and later sprawled on the banks of the river that runs through Yosemite. It floored me: a profound and perfect novel of one man’s imperfect, circumscribed life, hard to really even describe.
