West of the West, by Mark Arax, (New York: Public Affairs Books; 2009), 347 pages.
West of the West is a collection of essays written by former Los Angeles Times journalist Mark Arax about the lives of some of the Golden State’s least known residents. Arax doesn’t write about the lives of the glamorous or the famous, but the lives of some of the forgotten or overlooked peoples of the vast population patchwork that is California. Arax combines journalism, essay, and memoir to capture the lives of Asian immigrants seeking to make a better life for their families in the United States, and in particular, one family in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley. He also writes on the varied lives of people in California: the life of the United States’s largest pomegranite grower; the lives of hippies (both old and young) using their entrepreneurial skills in the marijuana capital of the United States; a somewhat disturbing F.B.I. investigation and prosecution of a terrorist suspect in Northern California; and, among other stories, the deeply personal epilogue to the murder of his father in California’s Central Valley more than 30 years ago.
This book is the first book in some time that I’ve failed to finish. The stories are well written, and at times tend to emphasise the bleak, troubling and disturbing sides of life. This may be the author’s intention, to alert the reader that like anywhere, life in the Golden State is not all glamor and glitz, or peaches and cream. My choice not to finish this book is not a reflection of Arax’s skills as a writer and the quality of this book. Rather, its a reflection on me and the fact that at the moment, I’d rather read something a bit lighter. Plus, I have a large pile of other books to read, and I have to get this one back to the library to avoid the overdue charges.
