BOOK REVIEW : Poignant Walk in ‘The Other California’ : THE OTHER CALIFORNIA; The Great Valley in Life and Letters <i> by Gerald W. Haslam</i> Capra Press / Joshua Odell; Editions: $9.95 paper; 175 pages

The pencil line of Interstate 5 from the Tejon Pass to Oakland or Sacramento is as much of the Central Valley as most of us ever see. “It is not a tourist’s dream,” concedes Gerald W. Haslam in “The Other California.” But Haslam invites us to slow down and take a closer look at what he calls “the Heartland.”

The Valley, Haslam insists, is California.

The Central Valley, consisting of some 15 million acres along the Sacramento and the San Joaquin river systems, is California’s own Midwest. Nearly 6 million people live and work there. The Central Valley includes two-thirds of all tillable land in the state, and produces some 235 million barrels of oil each year. And, as Haslam points out, “the Valley” has its own rich artistic tradition: William Saroyan, Joan Didion, William Everson, Luis Valdez, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, Richard Rodriguez.

The 13 short pieces collected in “The Other California” first appeared in an odd mix of periodicals, ranging from “Aperture” to “California State Library Journal” to “The Nation.” As a result, Haslam speaks in a variety of voices: historian, geographer, ecologist, literary critic, autobiographer, memoirist. Of all these voices, I was most attracted to the latter, and it is Haslam’s intimate reminiscences of childhood and adolescence in the Central Valley that give “The Other California” both heart and bone.

As a novelist and critic who was “born and blooded in the Valley,” Haslam cannot resist the temptation to celebrate the place. He is perfectly capable of waxing lyrical over the “palpable sweetness” of the fields at dawn, “a fragrance of life, of hope.” He aches with nostalgia for the pristine days when the Central Valley was “an American Serengeti,” and Lake Tulare filled and emptied with the rhythms of the Sierra snowmelt.

But Haslam is no mere booster, and much of “The Other California” is a lament for a California that has been despoiled or driven out of existence. Today, Haslam reminds us, the elk, the condor, the grizzly and--remarkably--Lake Tulare itself are all gone. Haslam blames the manifest destiny of agribusiness for the exhaustion and pollution of the soil and the water in the Central Valley.

“Suffice it to say that the annual value of this area’s farm production exceeds the total value of all the gold mined in the Golden State since 1848,” Haslam writes. “Unfortunately, these efforts have also produced the seeds of their own doom.”

All of the emblematic sights and sounds of the Great Valley are summoned up and described by Haslam: tule fog and cotton fields, the “Oakies” and the Armenians, Highway 99 and I-5, the California Aqueduct and Shasta Dam, Saroyan and Steinbeck. But the book only begins to sparkle and, occasionally, to sting when Haslam draws on his own experiences, as when he recalls with bemused horror that, as a 15-year-old boy in 1950, the Kern County Library demanded that he get a note from his parents in order to check out a copy of “The Grapes of Wrath.”

And, Haslam reveals, his parents refused to give him the note.

“It’s a filthy book,” his mother said, “and I won’t have you reading it.”

The very best piece in “The Other California” is only incidentally set in the Central Valley. “Father Comes Home,” Haslam’s appreciation of his aging and ailing father, is a faintly comical tale that is almost mythic in its appeal and significance. A man in middle age is called upon to care for his own father in his dotage. “Dad,” Haslam’s young daughter asks in a moment of almost unbearable poignancy and pain, “will this happen to you?”

The point of “Father Comes Home” is that respect must be paid, memories must be cherished and honored, and the truth must be told. “I hope you know who this guy was,” an old man admonishes Haslam when he brings his father to a “pioneer picnic.” “I hope you know . . . . “ And that, I suppose is the whole point of “The Other California.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Traffic and Laughter” by Ted Mooney (Alfred A. Knopf).