Stories get at the heart of California

Headlines about California often focus on the outsize. If it's not wildfires and drought raging, it's the tech giants and celebrities who are either improving or forever ruining its culture, depending on who you ask.

But there's an area within the heart of the state that often goes unnoticed: California's Central Valley. This massive region is full of fruit orchards, almond groves and dozens of quiet, dusty towns of hard-strapped people doing their best to make ends meet. This quiet loneliness — a gnawing solitude and yearning for more — runs through the heart of “The Consequences,” an achingly prescient collection of 10 short stories by Manuel Muñoz. The entire book reverberates with longing and just-under-the-rim sadness that captures the heart and doesn't let go.

Muñoz grew up in Dinuba, a

medium-size town 30 minutes outside Fresno. His parents, both rich storytellers, spent time working in the fields, as did he and his four siblings. Imprints of their experiences and those of other Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers — the resilience and connections they maintained and the trauma they often endured — are on every page.

Set mostly in the 1980s and ’90s, the stories feature characters whose strength lies in their ability to keep going despite their strained circumstances.

The O. Henry Prize-winning “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” follows two strangers seated next to each other as they travel from Fresno to Los Angeles by bus. The women hope to be reunited with their men who were rounded up on payday by la migra (green immigration vans) and taken to Tijuana to “start all over again.” Natalia, in white stilettos and a tight purple dress, is a first-time visitor to Los Angeles and new to the deportation-and-return routine, while Griselda, dressed in drab clothes and worn sneakers, clearly considers both old hat. When Griselda gives a distraught Natalia some money and her sneakers to wear while they wait, it highlights just how tender a selfless act of generosity can seem in otherwise harrowing situations.

In the incredibly moving autofictionstyle “Fieldwork,” a son passively listens to his father tell stories about the old days while he’s recovering in a county rehab center after a stroke. The son’s patience with his father’s rambling — and his mother’s periodic nudging about what to do and how to get better — are picture-perfect portraits of family dynamics. (The mom’s last line is both telling and classic: “Men don’t know how to suffer.”)

Two standout stories in the collection, “The Consequences” and “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” are linked. In the title story, Mark, a bored-to-death clerk at a water company, falls hard for a young hustler named Teddy (Teo), who moves from the “neon intensity” of L.A. to humdrum Fresno to live with him. When Mark finds out Teo has AIDS and asks him to leave, saying, “You need to start thinking about going home ... if you’re really sick,” the fallout from this action — the slicing remorse Mark feels — hits him months later, only after the long drive to Teo’s funeral. (The latter story about Teo’s sheltered upbringing in rural Texas before his “impatience ran him away” and he started experimenting with men is told from the perspective of Teo’s protective older sister; it’s a stunner.)

From deportation fears and the complications of teenage motherhood to the search for belonging and the healing power of kindness, “The Consequences” covers the full breadth of human experience and gives voice to a segment of the population too often stereotyped, taken advantage of or made invisible by our larger society.

Simply put, Muñoz’s stories are as observant as they are revealing — full of nuanced subtext and bracingly honest depictions of vulnerability and hope, love and regret, and everything in between. They deserve all the attention they can get.

Muñoz