Golden State of hypocrisy

When you remember your mother, more than 50 years ago, saying that California was too regulated, too taxed and too expensive, isn't that exactly the same emotion that led to the recall?

Exactly. That's what people thought in 1978 when they voted for Prop. 13. I mean, I was amazed this time. I hadn't been out there for a while and I really hadn't gauged the depth of the anger. I didn't think all the people who had signed the petitions would show up at the polls. I just thought they were walking through the parking lot on the way to the car and they thought they could send a message. It was amazing to me that the actual recall happened. Somehow I thought there would be a separation between signing the petition and actually voting.

I mean, the car tax. I did not know what the car tax was. I had never heard of the car tax. Finally someone explained to me: It's the vehicle registration fee! It's just so insignificant.

You also point out that the geographical separation of the state -- north from south, and the inland areas from the coast -- is nothing new in California history. People reacted to that with the recall like it was some revelation.

No, no. There was a moment there when PSA [the now-defunct Pacific Southwest Airlines] was flying back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco for $12. They had a midnight flight back. You could go for dinner. PSA brought the whole state together in a way it had never been. And then it went away.

I haven't thought about that for years. I remember those silly airplanes...

With the silly smiles! Quintana was very small then. She loved to go on those planes.

As far as the separation of the inland areas from the coast, certainly as far back as I can remember I think it was encouraged. At the time I went to Berkeley, there were certain sororities that girls from the Valley joined, and others that girls from San Francisco joined. We didn't have that many people from Los Angeles, so it didn't figure.

Did you join the sorority that the Sacramento girls joined?

I did, yeah.

The Tri Delt house, is that right?

That's right. There were certain places people from the Valley went -- we went to Carmel. It was a very isolated kind of life.

Part of what you argue, very convincingly, is that the essential nature of California hasn't changed -- it's always been about boom and change. But isn't there an objective element here? The wilderness has been destroyed to build suburban sprawl and McDonald's and Denny's franchises. That is a tremendous difference from 20 years, 30 years ago.

That's certainly true. That's what my mother meant when we said, "Where did it all go? It's all San Jose." But then the whole idea of "California as it was" -- it brings you to that question, which you can't avoid: If we could see it "as it was," how many of us could afford to see it?

What California is, for better or worse, is something that has come to support huge numbers of people and their various dreams for the future. As much as I might like, theoretically, to see it restored to what John Muir saw, I know that's not the right thing. Yes, we can have better planning than filling it with Wal-Marts. But, but, but! Who's going to make that decision? What elite do you appoint? I'm not comfortable with that.

So is there a way for us to ask, without surrendering to nostalgia, "What the hell have we built here? Is it really a good thing?"

Or, as they used to say, what has the railroad brought us? If one wanted to make that study, I suppose the Irvine Ranch [one of the last of the original California ranches, today the Orange County city of Irvine] is the perfect place to make it. That was developed intensively, in a very controlled way.

I mean, planning commissions mostly have no idea what they're doing. The whole planning process in California -- you can't call it urban planning -- no one seems to have given it any serious thought. Theoretically, the Irvine development was different, and what you got was Fashion Island [the enormous mall].

I don't know that there's a good answer here. It's one of the big questions that I failed to answer. It's a big question in my mind.

Well, we don't get central planning authorities in America, whether we want them or not. That's not how it works.

Right. We get the planning commission, and then it's kicked up to the local board of supervisors, which is where the payoff happens.

Has that cycle of permanent change and permanent boom come to an end?

I don't think so. How could it? You mean, because at this moment there are no jobs?

Well, you talk about the fact that California has become a state of poverty more than a state of wealth, and how the schools have been defunded while the state has built dozens of prisons.

Well, it is hard to know how you get out from under that. On the other hand, my brother believes that a new industry always comes along. And for a minute it looked like one had: Silicon Valley. It is hard to know how you get past having basically dismantled the school system. It makes it a different kind of place. Of course you can send your children to private school; I suppose we'll have vouchers to do that soon. But it's not the same kind of place and it doesn't do the socializing. That's not what the state was about. I mean, the U.C. system was an amazing concept.

Right. I feel like I was raised in that Pat Brown welfare state, and that is permanently gone. Maybe some new wave of innovation and wealth is just off the horizon, but it's hard to see right now.

It's hard to know. You have to have faith, like my brother does.

Did you have any personal experience with the dot-com boom, which was maybe the shortest of those cycles in history?

Well, that was a shorter cycle than most. It was clearly going to be a shorter cycle, because it wasn't like building airplanes. The product was so intangible that it wasn't too surprising when it went. In 1996, I was in San Francisco. I had just published a book, and I was scheduled to do a Salon interview with Dave Eggers. I had to call up and ask what Salon was.

We were brand-new then. And that was Dave Eggers before he became famous, too. How did he do as an interviewer?

I thought he was great. I hope he still is, because he's interviewing me onstage next week in San Francisco, at a public event at the Herbst Theater.

When you talk about the "crossing story," the story of coming across the plains to California, you raise a moral conundrum: Does the California experience, the promise of redemption it seems to offer, always entail the abandonment of others?

I think it does. That was the heart of the crossing story: leaving people behind. Not just on the trail, but the people you leave behind when you leave wherever you were from. There were two things that struck me about it, the more I started thinking about it. One was abandonment. The other was the fact that it's an enterprise the whole point of which is survival. There's something missing in survival as a reason for being, you know?

Did that contaminate the history of the state in some way? Is that idea still there? You write that California has not "encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another."

I think so, yeah. I think this willingness to abandon others is still fairly notable.

A state that builds prisons instead of schools.

Yeah, exactly. And I was struck by that book I talk about which had all the great statistics on the commitment of the insane in California. That's a willingness to abandon at a dizzying rate. I mean, the notion of taking care of other people who might or might not be troubled, which people all over the world do, seems not to have entered into it.

You write wonderfully about Frank Norris, the great California novelist and arguably one of the little-known great American novelists. You make a strong case for "The Octopus."

Oh, it's an incredibly complicated, ambiguous work. I guess the right people didn't look at him, or write about him. And I think you had to be interested in California to read him and to know what he was talking about. If you didn't know that this was a more complicated situation than his characters do, you might read it in a different way. The thing that was surprising to me when I started re-reading it was that the Octopus doesn't even turn out to be the railroad. It turns out to be nature!

To go back to Wallace Stegner for a second, one thing that really hit me hard about him was that when he died wanted to be buried in Vermont, where he owned a summer place, rather than in California. He wasn't from Vermont or anything. But he thought Vermont would stay the same, would remain recognizable, much longer than California would.

My mother planned for her ashes to be in a little church she liked in Monterey. They were going to build a little place for ashes. But a year after her death they still hadn't built it, and her ashes were still at my brother's house. So we put them finally at St. John the Divine [the Episcopal cathedral in New York's Morningside Heights], I guess on the same theory: It will be there.

When you look at the future of California, what we're leaving for future generations, do you see it as a hopeful prospect in any way?

I don't think it's unhopeful. You know, it won't be ideal, but there will still be the place, or enough of the place. Yeah, everything is all San Jose, but there's still a lot left, which gives everybody a pass on really doing anything about it.

The cliché is that the West is a place of optimism. Stegner called it "the native home of hope." Does the landscape, the light, the space, have something to do with that? Does it have a psychological effect on people?

I think it does, yeah. The sense of space. I actually have to see flat horizons. It started with the Valley, I suppose. And then later we lived on the ocean. When I hang pictures, there has to be a flat horizon in sight or I get really nervous.

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