California's Over - Softcover

Jones, Louis B. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679746005 ISBN 13: 9780679746003

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1998

Synopsis

California's Over leads us down an unmarked road to the coast and then deep into the rotten, labyrinthine house where James Farmican, the famous poet, shot himself to death years ago, leaving behind a legacy of adulation and bankruptcy. Now his family is leaving, and the young narrator--who calls himself Baelthon--has been hired to haul the furniture onto the lawn and sort through the attic and basement. But as Baelthon excavates, he also discovers layers of family mystery and comedy and cruelty, all of it piled too deeply for anyone to sort out: the unexplained disappearance of Farmican's ashes, the unfinished novel that may actually be his suicide note, the opera about cannibalism that his son is writing to rescue himself from obscurity, and, finally, the family's migration to the Nevada desert to claim their inheritance.

And Baelthon discovers Wendy, Farmican's sixteen-year-old daughter who keeps her checkers pieces taped to the board where she and her father left them before he died. Emerging from her chrysalis of baby fat and self-loathing, Wendy is destined to be both the love of Baelthon's life and the object of his betrayal.

Twenty-five years later, from the perspective of mid- and middle-class life, Baelthon recalls the mistaken selves he and the Farmicans once inhabited. What he doesn't expect--or think he deserves--is the redemption and abiding against-all-odds love that await him.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

With all due respect to Allen Ginsberg, California's Over is substantial proof that Louis B. Jones is one of the best minds of our generation."
--Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

"Jones is an absolutely wonderful writer, and he has written yet another terrific book."
--Anne Lamott, author of Crooked Little Heart

"In Louis B. Jones, as in no other writer working today, a sense of moral outrage, that rare thing, is yoked, oddly and with extraordinary power, to a thrilling gift for lyrical prose. The result is a sad, elegiac family comedy, a Marin County Fall of the House of Usher, a post-Woodstock Morte d'Arthur, a hand of literary blackjack dealt with the shuffled perspectives of a classic Altman film."
--Michael Chabon, author of The Wonder Boys

"California's Over is wonderfully written, and so evocative of the seventies that it re-animated all my anxieties about that odd period, a period that benefits from his ironic hindsight, though Jones has a certain affection for it too--as we all did. Jones is a versatile and surprising writer."
--Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce

About the Author:

Louis B. Jones is the author of two previous novels, Ordinary Money and Particles and Luck. He lives in California with his family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679746005
• ISBN 13: 9780679746003
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336