★ 11/22/2021
Straight’s ambitious return to fiction (after the memoir In the Country of Women) takes an empathetic look at members of Southern California’s Latinx community who face the dangers of fires, earthquakes, ICE raids, police brutality, and “la corona.” There’s Johnny Frias, a 40-year-old motorcycle cop who lives with the secret knowledge of the rapist he killed and buried in Bee Canyon 20 years earlier; Ximena, a young undocumented Mexican woman working as a maid at a desert spa, who comes across a newborn infant abandoned there; Merry Jordan, a neonatal nurse whose teenage son, Tenerife, lies brain dead in the hospital where she works, having been shot by a cop; Matelasse Rodrigue, a harried mother of two young children, whose husband, Reynaldo, has left them for a new life practicing capoeira; and Mrs. Bunny, a mysterious wealthy woman living in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz neighborhood, whose fate is improbably intertwined with those of Johnny and Ximena. The author’s love of the Inland Empire and its people shines through on every page, and there is a Didionesque quality to Straight’s depiction of SoCal characters living in the shadow of prejudice and poverty, but in place of Didion’s free-floating anomie there is fierce compassion. This evokes the best California fiction. (Mar.)
"Straight showcases intricate intersections of personal and familial histories to create a wide and deep view of a dynamic, multiethnic Southern California . . . Susan Straight is an essential voice in American writing and in writing of the West, and Mecca is a meaningful addition to this canon. She heralds important ways of storytelling that shift how we see the land and one another." —Caribbean Fragoza, The New York Times Book Review
"A terrifically engaging novel about a network of people related by blood, love and duty . . . what might be most impressive about this novel is how large it becomes without ever feeling bloated by extraneous plotlines or too neatly sewn up . . . Remarkably, the most persistent impression here is not one of suffering but of determined survival, even triumph." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"[Straight] succeeds mightily in writing a new novel to be savored by not just Californians but all Americans who’ve been around the last couple of years . . . Mecca is a hymn of love and lamentation." —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
"A fine set of interwoven tales from her California . . . [Straight's] writing is both luminous and sharp and told, as usual, through richly layered family histories." —Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR
"Triumphant, polyphonic . . . the working people behind the glamour of the Golden State are revealed in all their multiplicity, with Ms Straight’s trademark tenderness and humour . . . Like those of Louise Erdrich and William Faulkner, Ms Straight’s novels have created a fictional universe rooted in one community and place . . . Hers are true American tales, at once intimate and epic." —The Economist
"Straight connects us with her characters through her masterful, non-sentimental telling of their stories." —Barbara Lane, San Francisco Chronicle
"Straight draws together a diverse family—some by blood but many chosen—for a big-hearted and often wrenching saga . . . The act of listening and the powerful precision of language surface again and again in Mecca . . . [Straight] normalizes the grandeur of lives that might otherwise be lost to history." —Lauren LeBlanc, Boston Globe
"Straight has the great virtue of being genuinely interested in her characters. She’s best in times of quiet, when she can live in their thoughts, and over the course of this involving novel nearly all of them come to stand out on the page." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"An ambitious story of interconnected and diverse Southern California lives, and we’re drawn into it with ease . . . The joy, here, is falling into the rich, specific details of the characters’ lives . . . Mecca makes an argument for empathetic, formidable belief in people and place." —Heather Scott Partington, Alta
"Immensely complex, deeply atmospheric . . . a wonder of a canvas depicting one of modern America’s most dimensional societies, rendered with a beautiful authenticity." —Drew Hart, The Arts Fuse
"The author’s love of the Inland Empire and its people shines through on every page, and there is a Didionesque quality to Straight’s depiction of SoCal characters living in the shadow of prejudice and poverty, but in place of Didion’s free-floating anomie there is fierce compassion. This evokes the best California fiction." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A sweeping and kaleidoscopic work . . . Her focus, as it has long been, is on people to whom the stereotypes of sun and speed and reinvention do not apply . . . This is a novel that pushes back against the clichés of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath." —Kirkus (starred review)
"Mecca is a masterpiece. So elegant and beautiful, but muscled with the blood of the past—and its echoes to all things—in a sun-bleached future. Susan Straight conjures the dusty back roads and arroyos of a California where destiny is as fraught as the desert flowers on the side of the 10 freeway. This is a wonderful book." —Michael Connelly
"Against the alternating currents of boosterism and doom-speak so often associated with California, Susan Straight's Mecca focuses on the people who don’t usually appear in literary and cinematic depictions of a place so big it could be a country. A heartbreaker from beginning to end, Mecca both shocks and moves in its powerful and unrelenting portrait of this sunny, fiery state." —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer and The Committed
"The grasslands and desert, the endless blue skies torn by the Santa Ana winds and the fires that will burn it all away. Susan Straight has written a hymn to all that have called the Golden State home. Spoken in a multitude of languages, Mecca is about America's dream and finding the perilous pathways through its history." —Walter Mosley
"Mecca is beautiful, richly layered and full of a California that feels uniquely itself—but also as a stand-in for the richness of American history and our cultural mélange." —Attica Locke, author of Heaven, My Home
"Susan Straight writes like a dream. In Mecca the landscapes and the passions of California come vividly and unforgettably to life, adding another triumph to her oeuvre, and one more gift to the literature of the West. Once again, Straight shines a light on the people at the margins of our seemingly prosperous country, illuminating their lives with her boundless empathy." —Héctor Tobar, author of The Last Great Road Bum
“Mecca is an essential California epic—layered and vibrant—that is as anchored in the past as it is alive to the present. Susan Straight’s novel amplifies voices too often unheard and conjures an unforgettable vision of the golden state both heartbreaking and glorious that is destined to be canonical.” —Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women
"Mecca blows out of the California mountains and deserts with the scorching power of the Santa Ana fire winds. Susan Straight never lags in her deft portrait of the heart of the drylands of Southern California, far from beaches and Hollywood. This book speeds down the freeway like the motorcycles of her Highway Patrolman hero." —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
“Susan Straight knows intimately the So-Cal terrain, dry, fiery, and windy, as well as its extraordinarily beautiful weirdness. With this novel Straight invites you into its wondrous snare.” —Luis J. Rodriguez, author of From Our Land to Our Land
"Susan Straight’s page-turner of a novel Mecca corrals contemporary Southern California life while simultaneously allowing readers to see previously invisible histories. Straight’s remarkable empathy for all her characters shows her to be a loving novelist, honestly respecting the people she captures so masterfully. Just like the highways and freeways that make up the arteries of California, Straight reminds us of our collective geopolitical bloodlines, and does so with great, imaginative power." —Helena María Viramontes, author of Their Dogs Came with Them
10/01/2021
Descended from both the Indigenous people and the Spanish colonizers of California, Johnny Frias feels completely at home in its small town, canyons, and byways, and his story as unwound here by the sharp-minded, lush-voiced, multi-award-winning Straight creates a portrait of the state itself. Johnny works for the California Highway Patrol, ticketing speeders whose racist insults he brushes aside and trying to forget an incident from his rookie year. At the time, he killed a man who was assaulting a young woman, and two decades hence the consequences of his actions are exploding. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
★ 2022-03-02
Is Susan Straight the bard of Southern California literature?
In her eighth novel—she has also written a memoir and a collection of linked stories as well as a book for young readers—the author stakes her claim. A sweeping and kaleidoscopic work, it begins (how could it not?) on the freeway, “a Thursday in October,” a highway patrol officer named Johnny Frias tells us. “Santa Ana winds, ninety-four degrees. Fire weather. People were three layers of pissed off. Everyone hated Thursday. Wednesday was hump day, but Thursday was when people drove like they wanted to kill each other.” Johnny is one of several protagonists in Straight’s novel, which flows from first to third person and life to life as if to embody the instability of the region it evokes. The notion of Southern California as elusive, beset by wind and traffic, is hardly a new one; it infuses the work of writers such as Joan Didion and Carolyn See. Straight, however, is operating in a different register, one attuned less to Los Angeles than to the sprawl that surrounds it, extending into the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley. Her focus, as it has long been, is on people to whom the stereotypes of sun and speed and reinvention do not apply. Here, that means not only Johnny, but also Ximena, an undocumented domestic worker, and Matelasse, whose husband leaves her with two young sons not long before the Covid-19 pandemic begins. “Black acres of sandy field,” Straight describes the landscape, “the corral where his grandfather’s horses and the bull named Coalmine used to live. Then the arroyo, and the foothills.”
This is a novel that pushes back against the clichés of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.
Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Patricia Floyd, and Frankie Corzo create an ensemble of narrators almost as diverse as the many characters in this sprawling and impassioned novel. It focuses on the lives and heritages of the “other” Americans who make up the backbone of Southern California. There’s the highway patrolman who is a descendant of the first Spanish settlers. A nurse whose ancestors arrived in New Orleans as slaves. And a young Mexican-American woman who toils at an upscale spa. These characters aren’t crossing borders; they’re already home. As the stories and voices interweave, the narrators save some of their most affecting performances for the passages dealing with the heartbreaking early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dynamic, contemporary listening. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Patricia Floyd, and Frankie Corzo create an ensemble of narrators almost as diverse as the many characters in this sprawling and impassioned novel. It focuses on the lives and heritages of the “other” Americans who make up the backbone of Southern California. There’s the highway patrolman who is a descendant of the first Spanish settlers. A nurse whose ancestors arrived in New Orleans as slaves. And a young Mexican-American woman who toils at an upscale spa. These characters aren’t crossing borders; they’re already home. As the stories and voices interweave, the narrators save some of their most affecting performances for the passages dealing with the heartbreaking early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dynamic, contemporary listening. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
