Californian criticism: art, money and Hollywood collided

“When everything turned into a rank?” Ask a young man named Tobey halfway from “The Californians” by Brian Castleberry, an ambitious novel and a big screen on the ugliness that often follows when art and trade collide. In 2024, Tobey was a dropout from the university which was driven out which was driven out of its apartment building in northern California by forest fires. Deducing for money, he signed to a program that his brother concocted to steal three precious paintings at his father's home in Palm Springs. What is supposed to happen after the flight is misty for him – something nft, something crypto – but he is desperate.

In this way, Tobey answers his own question: the grade occurs when we do not pay attention to what we destroy for a dollar.

To explain how it happens, Castleberry covers about a century of activity between two families whose fortune and failures are linked. Tobey is the grandson of Frank Harlan, a television and film actor with a stone face best known for having played the main role in a detective program from the 60s, “Brackett”. The character of Columbo-Esque was designed by Klaus von Stiegl, a filmmaker who came to America from Germany and was acclaimed as a silent film director. His granddaughter, Di Stiegl, painted the works of art that Tobey flies, made during his peak of the 80s to highlight AIDS and moral bankruptcy of the 80s.

All this to say that a lot is happening, and a large part takes fire, literally or metaphorically. The family tree that opens the book covers family relationships, but almost everyone is distant or tense in one way or another. Given this, many of the Harlan and Stiegl lines replace the affection with money, which wants what they kiss or abandon it. Time Fickle Way deals with art also has an impact. Klaus was a pioneer at the silent era – think of Lubitsch or Lang – but he cannot succeed in making the transition to Talkies and relies on the generosity of his wife heiress. DI's paintings have been acclaimed by downtown New York, but changing times and a debilitating cobinal habit have wreaked havoc.

“He came to the west dreaming that he was an artist and was immediately cog in the machine of someone else,” thinks Klaus, but he is not the only one to undergo this destiny.

A large part of the action takes place in Palm Springs. It was there that Klaus filmed an alleged masterpiece on his own lot, an artistic allegory “Hansel and Gretel” that MGM refused to release, then tries to burn in a fury. This is where DI as a child developed his shimmering photorealistic style and where the Harlan clan continued real estate development when art has not been completely covered or turned into hacking. “Maybe art has not put anything in order,” thinks rightly so at a given time. “Maybe it reflected chaos, ambiguity, the vertigo of life.”

At this point, Castleberry continued the delicate task of creating an ordered novel whose theme is chaos. There are places where it is not entirely up to the task, where the different lines that extend through and through family trees can feel like triple for the reader. The disappearance of a mother enters the story, then fades; A son who has trouble doing arrives, then leaves the scene. Castleberry means supervising Klaus as hard at the point of cruelty. A woman of her life, a prized silent actress, is pushed to commit suicide by jumping from the Hollywood sign – a tragedy which, in addition to being a little on her nose, is softened by more convincing stories on the rebirth of Klaus at the end of her career via “brackett”, her writer during the red cracquet and genius. Castleberry can make you ask you which reprobate cares the most, what sin causes the most harm.

“The Californians” by Brian Castleberry is an ambitious novel about the ugliness that often follows when art and trade collide.

(HarperCollins)

But the defects of “Californians” reflect ambition and overexation, not relaxation. Castleberry strives to realively capture how money constitutes or permeates all kinds of creative efforts: Hollywood, television, fine arts and more. Realism is reinforced by interstitial chapters featuring reports, blog articles, long -term articles and other ephemerals that approach the life of the characters, while suggesting that the official history that these pieces help to create are always mistaken. He desperately makes you wish that you can see the fourth season of “Brackett”, where the head becomes dark and thugs in a way that anticipates “sopranos” by decades.

“In America, art is always paid by someone and seized by someone else,” said Klaus at the end of the novel for DI. “Sometimes something lost, people see it, people like that, their life is changed by an infinite degree. … If you are really lucky, you can earn a living by looking at all of this and making sense and communicating it to others. In the context of history, he inspires a young DI to pursue a painting of painting. But in the world of the novel, Castleberry tries to honor art making – including the writing of a novel – to a world that wants to reduce it to questions of profit and loss. Art is often only a business, but dangerous: to change people with an infinitesimal degree, Castleberry knows it, has a means of distorting and completely destroying human lives.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest”.