Roiling days on our western front

READING “Love and War in California,” Oakley Hall’s latest in a long line of engaging novels, is like catching one last glimpse of San Diego and its glistening harbor the moment the sun disappears with a green flash below the horizon. You see the line of hills forming a backdrop to the newer towers with their glittery lights, and looking toward the beach, the now-ancient angles of the Hotel del Coronado emerge sharply against the darkening sky.

Hall takes you to a California barely remembered now, a land looked upon with amazement by the men and women who swarmed to its shores during World War II and never went home again. He portrays an underpopulated province burgeoning into empire in all its innocence and naivete, a part of America so sure of itself and insouciantly confident of its future.

Hall’s tale is carried by Payton Daltrey, an adolescent rowing awkwardly into young manhood as the book opens on Dec. 8, 1941. His parents had owned a one-story Spanish-style house in Mission Hills (the San Diego neighborhood of the author’s childhood), overlooking a bay, but they lost it in the Depression. His new girlfriend, Bonny Bonington, still lives in Mission Hills, but in a two-story house.

As we follow them through 60 years, Bonny always lives in the grander house, Payton in the lesser.

The novel is one long account of sexual tension. Sex and its consequences hung over the boys and girls who became men and women during the war years, an ever-present desire for a kind of nirvana. Sex was a subject of endless speculation, jokes and extreme awkwardness -- less natural, more momentous than it is today. Hall’s description of desire frustrated and fulfilled in the 1940s is sensitive, sometimes raucous and definitely authentic.

His description of infantry firefights during the Battle of the Bulge is especially fine, conveying the right mix of confusion and fear. Oddly, his presentation of a street brawl in San Diego lacks the same true ring. So does his labored rendering of Payton’s left-wing politics working for a socialist newspaper. The author seems to have felt obliged, for the sake of authenticity or historical completeness, to present the full sweep of Southern California life circa 1941.

For example, Errol Flynn’s burnished yacht appears in San Diego Harbor, speaking eloquently of the prewar years of Hollywood-style luxury. Less successfully, the novel takes us to Manzanar and shows us some trouble with zoot suiters.

Hall, whose novels include “Warlock” and “The Bad Lands,” spent 20 years building UC Irvine’s highly regarded creative writing program, which has produced such writers as Richard Ford, Alice Sebold, Aimee Bender and Michael Chabon. A founder and director emeritus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hall also wrote “The Art & Craft of Novel Writing” (1995), so he knows what he is talking about, mostly.

He’s at his best here with the exterior landscapes of Southern California and the interior passions and confusions of its inhabitants as they are buffeted by the turmoil of a war whose full dimensions they sense but cannot altogether grasp.

Hall gives the women a fuller understanding of what is happening than he does to Payton and the other men. We see a woman standing inside a front door just after learning that Payton’s brother has died in a Navy airplane training flight: “This terrible war!” she says. Those words were spoken, most often by women, across America from 1941 through 1945. The novelist brings back those anguished years, making them real and urgent, even as our memories of the era slip away forever.

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Anthony Day is a former editor of The Times’ editorial pages.