Word: barich
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...Bill Barich and his readers had a good thing going. They paid him to do their traveling. He caught the planes, sat out the cancellations, endured bores and bacteria. Then he chucked out all the bad stuff and wrote lovely, whimsical books about the rest: horse racing, trout fishing, quirky people who turn comical, not sodden, after a glass or two. Traveling Light is the title of one of his airy collections, and Barich seems as if he is about to continue with such beguiling folderol as he commences Big Dreams (Pantheon; 546 pages; $24), which records a long meander...
...what's coming. Barich ages another 25 years and his marriage takes sick, as the state suffers severe economic megrims and rattles with real earthquakes, not toy ones, and realists among its population head for Oregon, where they are cordially requested to go away. Travel writing for such a pilgrim, over such terrain, is not going be a record of lotuses eaten and pretty girls embraced...
...proves. Barich starts at the Oregon border and works his way south through the failed fishing and lumber towns of the north coast. What he finds there, and virtually everyplace else in the great coastal kingdom -- on through Yuba City, Copperopolis, San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, the Salton Sea, San Isidro -- is the hunkered down, fearful middle-aged and the resentful, nihilistic youth who see no future and no present worth the trouble. Prisons are the state's sole growth industry. "More prisons were being built in California," Barich writes, "than anywhere else in the world. Frequently, they were...
...Barich is still an interested, accurate observer, a brave striker-up of conversations with unpromising locals, but his goofy optimism is mostly gone. Part of it is perspective, of course; he and the other Haight-Ashbury kids were looked on by their elders as nihilistic and futureless a quarter-century ago. Now he's an elder, not quite a senior, but no longer a prankish sophomore...
NONFICTION: The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, edited by Robert Kimball ∙Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, Joseph Frank E.B. White: A Biography, Scott Elledge ∙Tales from the Secret Annex, Anne Frank ∙Traveling Light, Bill Barich ∙The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Jackson J. Benson...