Pasadena on His Mind

Pasadena is where author David Ebershoff grew up, the place he couldn’t wait to leave, and the place he eventually turned to as the source of his success.

The city symbolizes all of Southern California in his epic new book, he says. And when he writes about the staggering physical beauty that existed here until a generation or two ago, it’s clear he’s not just writing fiction, but also history.

Until about 75 years ago, Los Angeles was the largest agricultural county in the United States, says Ebershoff, who lives in New York but was back in town to promote “Pasadena” (Random House). And for many years after that, the coastal cities’ outskirts remained pristine, offering vistas that lured travelers with their visual siren song, compelling them to settle here.

In the time frame of his nearly 500-page story, extending from the late 1800s to the 1940s, orange groves pushed up to the edges of Pasadena, the road to San Diego was open scrubland leading to untouched foothills that led to dramatic bluffs overlooking the sea.

But when Ebershoff, 33, was growing up, all that was gone. Most weekends, he would ride in the back of his mother’s station wagon from their Pasadena home to their place in Carlsbad, and it seemed that every inch of ocean-adjacent property had been built up, he recalls. All, that is, except for the stretch from Camp Pendleton to the San Onofre nuclear power plant --land disturbed only by the freeway running through it. After years of taking this weekly drive, the boy began to realize that this piece of land was the only vestige left of what once had been miles of beauty.

Eventually, he imagined the struggling onion farm, high on a bluff over the Pacific, which his novel’s heroine would inhabit until she took the dusty train ride to the more civilized world of Rancho Pasadena, where she would meet her fate.

Ebershoff addresses the issue of nature despoiled--and many other issues--in his sweeping new work. It is a book of passions, people and places in flux, of the untamed landscape that defined those who lived in it--a force so dominant that it becomes one of the most important characters in the book.

Like “East of Eden” and “Wuthering Heights” (two of Ebershoff’s favorite reads), “Pasadena” throbs with a sense of place and with all kinds of desire, much of it thwarted. It is, at heart, a passionate love story that pulses through decades--one in which two perfectly mated souls yearn and reach out for each other, reinvent themselves to better suit one another, and yet, ultimately, fail to connect.

It is a classic story of love gone wrong through missed cues, wrong choices and bad luck. And all set against the scene of two fast-transforming locales: Pasadena, once a place of huge ranchos and luxury hotels where the wealthy wintered, and the coastal onion farm where both protagonists started out.

The idea of two people who are meant to connect but fail to “haunts the book,” he says. It is a concept at the core of much 20th century literature, and it is still a concern today.

“I look at daily life, see how one has to struggle to connect and stay connected. We have all this technology to help us connect, yet it seems even more and more difficult to do so. It’s so much easier to mis-or disconnect.”

The idea of two properties that dominate his story and his characters’ identities came from “Wuthering Heights,” Ebershoff says. “That was also a tale of two locations and painful choices.” Emily Bronte’s heroine “left Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights for marriage and the civilized life at Thrushcross Grange.”

By the end of Ebershoff’s tale, thousands of wilderness and farm acres have been paved over for the roads and housing tracts to come, freeways are in the offing, and a strange yellow, sulfurous haze has been seen hanging above the valley. The first smog.

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An Abundance

of Rich Detail

The book is rich with descriptive nature details, with so many textures, colors, shapes, sounds and smells of so many trees, flowers, fish, birds, fruit, shrubs and brush that, at times, it seems no breeze blows without a full description of everything it blows upon.

This has not pleased all the reviewers, unused to plowing through such verbose terrain. When Ebershoff appeared at Vroman’s Bookstore recently to read and autograph his new work, an audience member, with well-thumbed book in hand, tried to phrase her question delicately. “Your sentences are, uh, ... so much longer in this book than in your last one.”

“I did that for a reason,” he said, explaining that he used language that properly evoked the era. And he used the coast’s lush landscape to “describe the characters’ internal as well as external lives,” much as Bronte did in “Wuthering Heights” and John Steinbeck did in “Grapes of Wrath.”

He says he wanted to re-create what Southern California looked like until so recently, to get the specifics of its natural history down on paper, “to say this is a world no longer with us, to have it captured definitively. I thought that you cannot do a history of this area without doing the natural history of it. The two are inseparable.”

Ebershoff is publishing director of the Modern Library at Random House in New York--a prestige division that reprints the world’s great books along with new ones. And that’s just his day job.

In his spare time, he writes at his hay farm near the Vermont border in upstate New York, and in a writing room in midtown Manhattan, overlooking a Fed Ex depot. At least four times a year, he says, he comes home to Pasadena, where he works in the incomparable Old World elegance of the main branch of the public library--a lamp-lighted, woodsy, Renaissance Mediterranean structure. It is where he spent much time in his youth.

In the library’s sun-drenched, red tile patio cafe, Ebershoff leaned back in a wire chair, lifted his face to the sky and seemed to draw sustenance from the scene of birds chirping as palms swayed and bookworms studied in the sun.

He loves New York, he says, “but New York doesn’t fuel me, doesn’t feed my imagination the way California does. The images I absorbed as a child, with an arroyo at my corner, the way the sunlight hits California, which is so much different than on the East Coast. You don’t really get sunsets in the East the way you get them here. I had no idea that was something I would miss.”

The library is just a few blocks from his parents’ baronial brick home on a leafy street that dead-ends at an arroyo. And it is just a few blocks from Pasadena’s renowned Polytechnic school, which he attended from pre-kindergarten through high school.

“It was a liberal school that taught us how to think; it was in Pasadena, but not really of it,” he says in a kind of code decipherable by those who know how conservative at its core Pasadena can be.

In his book, he describes the social life of upper-crust Pasadenans in the early 1900s--an exclusive group with clubs and societies to which even the wealthiest outsiders could not gain entry unless they had the proper pedigrees. Things are not all that different nowadays, Ebershoff says, about today’s inner circle of Pasadenans who live on exquisite sylvan streets and belong to the same clubs named in his book that thrived so long ago.

Writing Began

in High School

Ebershoff started writing in high school, where he edited the school paper. His highly acclaimed first novel, “The Danish Girl” (Viking, 2000) is based on a true story of the first transsexual surgery.

It traces the metamorphosis of a marriage as a Danish artist transforms himself into a woman with his wife’s consent and assistance. The wife is from Pasadena. Ebershoff’s book of short stories, “The Rose City” (Viking, 2001), also featured Pasadena as a locale.

Four of his former Polytechnic teachers turned up at the Vroman’s reading, along with some of his mother’s Junior League colleagues, his father’s law firm colleagues, the family eye doctor and a variety of other associates from his past. The author is a local hero now, of sorts. But he wasn’t always so accepted or acceptable, he says.

Although his parents were community pillars, and his school experience was “wonderful,” he was an outsider in many ways.

A boy who thought too much--partly because he was smart and partly because he was gay and felt isolated from his peers. “I was always looking for a world beyond the world I was from.”

The Pasadena library became his refuge, he says. It is still where he writes when he comes home. “This is the time of year I remember most,” he says, sitting in the library patio. “It was summer and I was bored, and it was unbearably hot and smoggy. I’d come here and read. I was 15 or 16 when I began to realize that this place I thought of as a boring suburb has a history.

“But it was only when I got to college [Brown University] that I began to have a sense of the specialness of the place I’d left behind. I began to think of California writers in a different way. The summer I was 19, I read all of Joan Didion and John Steinbeck. I admire his use of landscape, of the natural world to tell his stories. I wanted to come back and find out what that was all about.”

His book gives new meaning to the term “mixed reviews”--a phrase usually indicating that some reviewers liked a book and others didn’t. In Ebershoff’s case it means that many reviewers are so torn between intense admiration and irritation that their reviews flip-flop from pro to con within the space of a few paragraphs--a sure sign that something extraordinary is going on in the saga that traces the evolution of Southern California, in general, and Pasadena, in particular, from untrammeled backwater to smug and smoggy boomtown within the space of a generation or two.

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A Wide Range of

Reviewers’ Comments

The book has been called everything from “an immediate classic” to “florid hocum,” with almost all reviewers (including the “hocum” guy) in agreement that Ebershoff writes brilliantly and tells a compelling tale.

Any complaints seem to be that the book is so densely and digressively descriptive, so multilayered in theme, so rambling and emotionally intense that it defies glib analysis or definition.

Some reviewers claim that Ebershoff’s vivid descriptions of nature are the emotional heart of the book. Others say it’s the lush descriptive passages that slow the book down.

The book makes you think, they say. It’s an endangered quality that was once the hallmark of all serious literature and that seems to be the most significant characteristic of the author himself.

One of his main characters in “Pasadena” is always reading Gibbon, the great 18th century historian who wrote about the downfall of the Roman empire. Gibbon is one of his favorite authors, Ebershoff says, his expression suddenly turning somber.

“In the last year, I’ve been thinking about history a lot. And Rome is something that I, and a lot of people I work with, keep returning to. In light of all that has happened and is happening, it seems that Rome is in the air. A sense of decline, the question of how an empire sustains itself. How does a civilization that is so grand and far reaching go away? How does it fall apart?”

Perhaps he tried to find some answers by writing his book? He does not respond quickly. “I only know that Rome is an example you cannot ignore.”