SEARCHING FOR STEINBECK’S SEA OF CORTEZA Makeshift...

SEARCHING FOR STEINBECK’S SEA OF CORTEZ

A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja’s Desert Coast

By Andromeda Romano-Lax

Sasquatch Books: 288 pp., $16.95

“Sea of Cortez” was John Steinbeck’s answer to the fame that almost ruined his life after the publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1939. In the spring of 1940 he lit out for the territory with his close friend the biologist Ed Ricketts. Steinbeck, 38, had just left a fraying marriage, and Ricketts, 42, a bad affair. They went tide-pooling for six blissful weeks in the Sea of Cortez, trying to “avoid adventure,” wrote Steinbeck, and to see “what is,” wrote Ricketts.

Andromeda Romano-Lax, a journalist, and her husband, Brian, an environmental educator, read from Steinbeck’s book at their wedding. For them, it established the principles of life, science and creativity that they wanted in their own lives. In the spring of 1998 they decided to make the same trip with their two children, then 2 and 5. The vessel they chose was a 24-foot sailboat manned by a depressed captain. They traveled the 800-mile-long gulf by sailboat, kayak and car, stopping at the same 23 tide pools that had captivated Steinbeck and Ricketts. They discovered nothing that they had expected.

They found themselves not flooded with ideas but exhausted. Instead of encountering wanton environmental destruction, they came across surprisingly rich and intact ecosystems. Instead of running away from home, they found that they were running toward home. No epiphanies. No scientific breakthroughs. A few adventures, a few small changes in the marriage. Romano-Lax writes evenly about the inner and outer voyages. It is a testimony to the power of knowing one book well and living it.

*

SPITTING OFF TALL BUILDINGS

By Dan Fante

Canongate Books/Edinburgh:

154 pp., $13

Even if Dan Fante weren’t the son of John Fante, author of one of the classics of L.A. lit, “The Road to Los Angeles,” his novel “Spitting Off Tall Buildings” would deserve attention. Oddly enough, just as Fante senior’s was a quintessentially Southern California novel, Fante junior’s is 100% New York novel, down to its inflections.

“Spitting Off Tall Buildings,” about a complete loser, Dante Bruno, who moves from L.A. to New York and ends up quitting or being fired from every minimum-wage job that city has to offer, stuck to my hands. The language is vulgar. The main character is a stupid, arrogant drunk, and the action takes place entirely in his decaying mind. Trying to like him is like climbing a concave rock face: To get any kind of hold you have to bend over backward.

Fante breaks every rule of human and literary decency. Bruno tells himself and his captive audience that he has moved to New York to write a play, but this is a lie. He works as a night manager in a residence hotel, an airport bus driver, an usher, a window washer, a street peddler (“other than the cold, the main drawback to the job was the frequent arrests”) and a taxi driver, and in one stint is even paid to remove staples from documents.

He drinks so heavily that he often blacks out and finds himself in porn theaters or in emergency rooms with his wrists cut up. He talks and thinks (because there is no separation between the two acts) like a cross between a frat boy and a pimp. There is no redemption, no indication by the end that anything will change in Bruno’s life. Yet you feel that the author has told you the truth about something, about these jobs and about the drinking life.

*

SKIN OF THE EARTH

Stories From Nevada’s Back Country

By Art Gibney

University of Nevada Press:

144 pp., $16

“We all got to live where we can see the sky, right here on the skin of the earth. We’re connected. The air I breathe out, you breathe in. Right on down the line.” This is cowboy philosophy, and there’s a lot of it in these stories, but Art Gibney does a good job of showing his readers where it comes from: the landscape, a heritage or some worrying scar in a character’s past. There is a strong sense of home in all these stories, a pure love of place, especially when it has to be fought for and even when it has to be left.

In the title story, a couple--who have petitioned the local government to let them continue to live in their cabin--arrive home after a frozen trek to the city to arrange the paperwork. “Then we laid on the bed, listening to the fire and to the snow against the window as the cats rolled on the floor and the lamplight made their shadows big on the wall.” It’s simple writing with a fine cadence that pays quiet homage to the fact that we get to live at all, much less care for others and find ourselves loved.