California dreaming
A fine fiction debut is marred by the author’s fondness for tricksy language, finds Anna Rogers.
We’re in California in 1968, the height of the Vietnam War, and the huge events of this extraordinary period are seen through the lives of Jeannie and her brother Kip, who have been adrift in the world since their mother’s death a few years before.
Their father does his best but cannot tether them safely. Jeannie’s solution is to marry Billy, a doctor with a snobbish and domineering mother, and to give birth to her beloved son, Charlie. Kip, who has slipped into an aimless life of petty crime and vandalism, decides to join the Marines and go off to fight.
Each gets caught up in the war and its force field, Kip at the front and Jeannie in a suspect part of the anti-draft movement. Each, in a different way, betrays those around them.
The Outside Lands is, in many respects, a remarkable fictional debut and a considerable imaginative achievement. Hannah Kohler is a talented, intelligent and observant writer, able to get inside the minds and emotions of her characters, the physical climate and surroundings of the Californian setting and the atmosphere of that strange, difficult time in American society and politics.
She understands the power of detail to build memorable evocations of people and places. The prose is often arrestingly good and original, and the Vietnam sequences are impressive. The reader feels the inescapable fear, the unrelenting heat, the merciless imperatives of military life.
The book does, however, sometimes betray its first novel status and would have benefited from a stronger and wiser editorial guiding hand. It’s a hoary old adage, but less almost always is more, and Kohler’s fondness for metaphor and adjective can becoming wearing. She has yet to learn, or be advised, that simplicity has impact. Not everything has to be qualified or described; plain verbs and nouns work too.
When, for instance, Jeannie checks out the contents of her husband’s medical bag, it doesn’t need to be ‘‘lying on its belly in the hallway’’ and she doesn’t need to ‘‘parse through’’ his things. When she relaxes and trusts herself, the writing sings. The list that follows is spot on: ‘‘a stethoscope, a pair of medical gloves, several ink-bleeding pens, a half pack of Fruit Stripe gum’’.
Her overuse of nouns as verbs – someone ‘‘brisking’’ along, for example – is too often merely tricksy and irritating. One or two inauthentic, Hollywood passages, needed to go under the editorial knife.
Kohler is someone to watch – no less an author than Jim Crace thinks so – but it’s to be hoped that she finds an editor who will be a little tougher, who will help her to make the hard judgment calls that fine writing requires.