Reviews
of California Fault
His enthusiasm is infectious... he entertains and illuminates, writing gracefully, and with a fine sense of irony…The
book is so deftly written, so relentlessly good-humored, that I gobbled it up…He’s funny and he’s fair and
he swims well against powerful cultural cross-currents.
New York Times Book Review
Move over, Alexis de Tocqueville...Thurston Clarke...elevates himself to the first rank of America’s social observers.
Los Angeles Times
The author has an unerring
ability to search for exactly the right despoiler, utopian, or local eccentric to illuminate the history and character of
each stop along the way. The result is a vivid and continually surprising narrative.
The New Yorker
He has a nice touch and a close eye. Like novelist John Updike, he has the ability to raise the stature of the mundane
and to make an interesting prose purse out of a sow’s-ear situation.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Clarke’s acerbic wit and vivid description are a pleasure throughout…As tough in its critique of the Golden
State as it is shrewd in its understanding, California Fault is a book to savor.
Seattle Times
Witty, engaging... It gave me much pleasure.
Washington Post Book World
A wonderful book from one of our best travel writers.
Portland Oregonian
A nearly edible travelogue -- smooth as mousse, full of savory tidbits, and memorable.
Kirkus
Provocative and absorbing... Clarke’s clean, punchy prose and his novelist’s eye for detail make California
Fault a breezy, trenchant read.
Santa Cruz Sentinel
I lived in the Golden State in the Seventies, just before the tarnish, the fool’s gold, and Proposition 13. Now
comes Mr. Clarke, an adventurous investigator. In his persistent wandering he uncovers a cornucopia of America’s disappointed
dreams. We hear the voices of wanderers, settlers, ex-communards, and working philosophers. The closeness of dream and dread
is still thrilling and comes through. I wiped my eyes.
Andrei Codrescu
This is a brilliant, mordantly funny book, and Clarke’s vision of the San Andreas Fault is powerful and true.
He’s a dark millenarian who’s given us a beautifully complex metaphor, and if California at century’s end
is America’s future, then we’re all living on the Fault, and the Big One’s due any minute.
Russell Banks
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California has always symbolized the good life. Yet social problems
and natural disasters have tarnished the image of the Golden State. To ind out what happened to the California Dream, Clarke
sets off on a remarkable journey down the San Andreas Fault searching for earthquakes and good news.
From the
“sensitive” whose headaches predict earthquakes with uncanny precision to a determined dreamer at the Salton Sea
who hopes someday to built a blue-collar resort along the abandoned shores, Clarke introduces us to a memorable cast of eccentrics,
asking each the provocative question: What is it like living in a place—no matter how beautiful—that might suddenly,
while you opened the cereal, combed your hair, or bathed the baby, strike you dead?
From California Fault
Along the north coast, gas stations had been good places for meeting people, but here they were designed to protect
employees from customers and you paid a cashier in an upright Plexiglass coffin before you pumped, a double reminder of how
little you were trusted. It was no good trying to talk to people at the K-Marts or Long’s Drugs either. They were not
places to linger, and the clerks were busy and bored. Most towns no longer had thriving downtowns because, despite the advertising
nostalgia for Norman Rockwell Main Street America, Californians were like most Americans: cold-blooded community killers.
Ready to administer the coup de grace to merchants who had sponsored decades of Little League teams and high-school yearbooks
in order to shave some pennies off a tube of Colgate.
[Berkland] had become a clearinghouse for seismically sensitive pet stories…The week before the 1980 Eureka earthquake
they fielded 853 complaints of dogs wandering on highways and cows on the wrong side of a field. A Dr. Deshpande in India,
who had documented abnormal animal behavior before subcontinent earthquakes, sent him a paper by Soviet scientists mentioning
how an hour before the 1988 Armenian earthquake, ‘a very tame pet hamster bit his owner for the first and only time.’
A veterinarian reported crystals forming in the urinary tracts of cats just before an earthquake…A pigeon fancier in
Danville called to report a ‘smash race’ from Nevada… It seemed obvious the magnetic energy preceding an
earthquake was disturbing the pigeons’ sense of direction.
South of Gilroy I smelled garlic, not the bitter stink of a cheap ethnic restaurant, but a gentle garlic perfume. I
opened the windows and filled my lungs….Don Christopher’s sheds were...several stories high and reeking of garlic.
Cloves overflowed wooden crates, boiled away in kettles, and rolled down conveyor belts to women in masks for sorting and
cleaning. Even their names made me smile. There was Flor, Giant, Jumbo, Extra Jumbo, Super Jumbo, Colossal, and Super Colossal.
I chewed on a Colossal and felt as if my sinuses, closed for weeks by pollen and pollutants, had been irrigated by high-pressure
hoses. I was suddenly lightheaded, drunk on garlic.
The
next morning [Taft] was a bleak, blue-collar town of deep porches, rusty air conditions, and small windows, a place built
for scorching summers. Pumps pulled oil from one of the richest fields in North America and the air smelled of asphalt. It
was so unlike anywhere else in California that I declared a vacation, staying another night in my twenty-five-dollar motel,
lunching on perhaps the cheapest and best nonfranchised burritos in California, and reading that in 1926 a “mouse army”
of thirty million had swarmed into town, terrorizing the oil-field roustabouts and devouring sheep. State officials had dispatched
an exterminator named Piper.
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another book by Thurston Clarke
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