A Californian Bildungsroman
Oakley Hall's memoiristic novel, "Love and War in California" (Thomas Dunne, 280 pages, $24.95), looks back over a life lived in different genres. A late master of literary Westerns, Mr. Hall became director of the writing program at the University of California at Irvine, published several manuals, completed a line of mystery novels, and, in his new book, surveys a life that is itself part teenage melodrama, part social novel, part war novel, but mainly a bildungsroman. A sunny mélange of American boy-lit — the Hardy Boys, Ambrose Bierce, plenty of Hemingway and Fitzgerald — Mr. Hall's vision is as far from the unities of New York as that of Haruki Murakami.
Three paragraphs will indicate the range of action in the novel. In the first, young Payton Daltrey is trying to pick up his date, Bonny. He's seated in the living room, waiting with her parents, but he can spy Bonny, two rooms away, making cocoa.
Through the unlighted dining room with its thicket of chair and table legs, I could see her bare legs in the bright slice of kitchen doorway. I admired the perfect H's of the backs of her knees, and the ascent of her thighs into her shorts. I stretched and tried to feel a proprietorial ease, but there was something jagged in the air.
The perfect H's are a perfect image: Mr. Hall's skill as an American appreciator of women, the kind of imagist you'd like to have a beer with, is on display here. Boasting and wonder come in the same breath: "Nothing made you grow up so fast as giant women in your life."
In the cocoa scene, Bonny's parents are listening to news of the war in the Pacific — hence some of the jaggedness in the air. Period detail abounds — "no more Desmond's suits and shell cordovan loafers, no more coffin-hood Cord car" for one character, who leaves Hollywood for the Navy. One of the most fascinating things about this book is the way adolescent lives are winding up as the novel begins; couples dissolve as the boys enlist (and perish). A quality of constant denouement, coupled with Mr. Hall's bleached San Diego cityscape, keeps the novel from becoming a Technicolor romp.
In a second sample paragraph, Payton has joined the Army. His patrol, racing across Western Europe in the disorganized offensive that ended in the Battle of the Bulge, encounters a young German-speaking girl. They give her a candy bar. But then a German patrol appears, and the little girl innocently betrays the Americans:
Next to me Tallboy let loose with the Schmeisser like a deafening zipper punctuated by the timed whack-whack-whack of Ned's bar. The Krauts went down like blocked defensive backs in some crazy football game, with shouts and screams and a few shots coming back. We wiped them out.
The schoolgirl lay facedown with her jacket turned to a bloody rag.
The presence, in what has become a war novel, of 200 preceding pages about California college life, makes the football simile, which would otherwise be dull, relevant. Elsewhere, Mr. Hall's language may sound familiar or simply clichéd, but it never sound tired. His craftsmanship is exemplary.
Indeed, Mr. Hall's work as a teacher becomes, via Payton's writerly ambitions, part of his protagonist's consciousness. Just after Bonny has made a subtle comment about her previous boyfriend, Payton reflects:
It was the style I'd been trying to understand, where she didn't have to say exactly what had happened, his pants and her slip and her garter belt or whatever girls wore, or any of that; because just the idea that it was a trick, and she had known it was a trick, carried it along so that I could feel the outrage with an ironical twist to it.
It is this level of self-consciousness that carries the novel, making the page-turner into something more rewarding.
Mr. Hall's 1958 reputation-making classic, "Warlock" (NYRB, 471 pages, $16.95), reissued last year, finds a different way of being self-aware: It recombines the elements of Westerns, imagining a single, localized epic of American bloodshed. Again, Mr. Hall's characters find a way of thinking about the written sentences in which they swim: "He had fled this hard and aimless callousness where a human life was only a part of a game, and never, so far as he had seen, a fair game." Every fictional gunfighter must have had the same feelings, at one point or another. But whereas this self-consciousness is almost a joke, that of "Love and War" is baldly autobiographical, and actually more exciting.
