CALIFORNIA PALMS
A Collection of Short Stories
“In her first collection of short stories, Jameson has created a colorful montage of people and life reflective of her California heritage. These tales—filled with the poignant inequities of aging, the numbing loss of a parent’s self in wrenching grief for a dead child, and the painful estrangement of a father and son—all share a common knowledge of our inner selves. Delving into this shared humanity, Jameson offers an unsettling and painful glimpse at the callous superficiality of daily life.”
—Mary Romano Marks, Booklist
“Reading California Palms is like walking in a hall of shiny little mirrors, catching glimpses of yourself—some amusing and some more than a little frightening. In her collection of seven short stories, Marnell Jameson captures us in frozen moments of fear or failure. She reflects back our collective humanness and vulnerability. The stories make you stop and think and say, ‘Yes, that’s the way it really happens.’
“Six of the short stories take place in the affluent world of Southern California and its distinctive culture. The seventh takes place in the overcrowded and oppressive New York City. Each setting creates an atmosphere that mimics the action in the story. In ‘Shadows, bartending Oscar paces the noisy, busy streets of Manhattan as he tries to sort through the confusion of a failing marriage. In ‘The Gas Station,’ slow-witted Danny watches the Mercedes and Peugeots rush past him, just as his own father rushed past him.
“Jameson is blunt and to the point. She has a clean and simple writing style that makes for fast reading. Her stories are short, the longest being 13 pages, yet they are filled with gems. In ‘The Art of Being Neighborly,’ she describes the typical California suburbanite. ‘And we were especially careful to please our immediate neighbors Ted and Veneta (we privately called her Velveeta because she seemed so much like a product of process) because with them we shared a common wall and driveway. Velveeta was a predictable sort, always dressed as if she could leave for the country club, in California-casual, usually designer sweats. Her two-year-old Seville bore a Marriage Encounter bumper sticker and had a hot-pink puffball for a key chain.’
“There is a diversity of style and intent in California Palms. The diversity makes each story a unique experience. The correspondence between mother and daughter uncovers a family secret of sexual abuse in ‘The Legacy.’ This story consists of 11 letters about the therapy of daughter Suzanne. Yet it is the most chilling of the seven stories. ‘Peace Time,’ set on today’s college campuses, is a cryptic message about the Vietnam War and student protests.
“Dropping us into the midst of all despair, Jameson makes us laugh at ourselves, poking fun at our frailties in ‘Façade,’ where an aspiring actress finds herself locked into the philosophy of the make-up counter. This book is too short. Reading the stories is like eating chocolate bon-bons; you always want more. Diversity and a complex simplicity make California Palms thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable reading. Don’t be surprised if you are still thinking about the stories days after you have put down the book.”
—Elizabeth M. Gabel, The Albuquerque Journal
“Rather than titling her first collection after one of its stories, Marnell Jameson has chosen a distinctive collective title, California Palms. This naming of the group suggests the interesting idea that there’s a master plan for the book. But, no matter the claim of the back cover blurb, Jameson hasn’t just gathered her stories into ‘a colorful montage of people and life reflective of her California heritage.’ She takes her book’s title from a description of characters in her lead story, ‘The Art of Being Neighborly’: ‘They were the kind who got involved, invested, with their long tap roots like the California palms that reach down to the center of the earth and grab hold.’
“It’s surprising and tremendously pleasant to find a book better than its blurb. ‘Montage of people and life’ is fair to say, but saying its unity comes from California settings is wrong (one story takes place in New York, another in a generic American college town) and, worse, oversimplifies matters. Five of the collection’s seven works deal primarily with people getting involved and feeling an investment, good or bad, with each other; the other two imply interpersonal involvement as they explore characters’ personal values and their potential, or inability, to reach out.
“The central character of ‘The Art of Being Neighborly’ tells how her neighbors teach her that the Art runs deeper than keeping up polite appearances. The narrator and her scarcely characterized husband move into a neighborhood with its own comfortable patterns of socializing, and they try not to fit in, not to let those patterns infringe upon their lives. Only when politeness obligates her to listen to the strong emotional responses to a loss in the community does the narrator realize her instinct for personal investment. In the beginning, the narrator describes the neighborhood as an idyllic place full of contented lives. But her tone carries the sense of distance she (and her husband) felt from these old-blood families. As the narrative progresses, however, the intricacy of the relationship between her and the story she has to tell comes to light. She wants to separate herself from her earlier, narrower self, implicitly criticizing her attitudes and repenting for them by ironically reporting her promises to get involved with her neighbors: ‘But next time, not now.’ Further, keeping the narrator closer to an imperfect but aspiring human being than to some embodied lesson about selflessness, there is a slightly defensive note in her voice—an edge distancing us from her so we look at her instead of through her to her story. ‘The Art of Being Neighborly’ builds from a slice of suburban life to a discovery of the simple need for interaction and its complement, the fulfillment of answering that need.
“A strength of California Palms is the variety of narrative personae Jameson successfully employs. As the stories change subjects from the achievement of sharing life to painful recovery from another’s cruelty to growth of admiration out of apathy to compensation for failed relations, the telling voices change markedly, adopting different capabilities, values, and tones.
“The least successful technique in the book is the epistolary form of ‘Legacy.’ Avoiding an active, controlling narrator, Jameson is trying to compact too much of a family’s history and too much emotional torment into a few letters, mostly between a traumatized woman and her concerned mother. The enormity of the issue of psychological and sexual abuse wears out the conventional expressive style of the letter form, leaving passages of awkward exposition and abrupt, discursive commentary—some of the mechanism of narration showing through. This is not to say the story fails. It conveys the very disturbed nature of this family’s life and ends with a postcard note of well-executed avoidance on the mother’s part.
“’Peace Time’ is told as a folk tale informed by the effects of Vietnam-era alienation. Perhaps the hero of this story is actually heroes—the students of a nameless university. A wise old man—here, a Vietnam vet—lives among them and they have come to take him for granted. But his actions change them, and by the time he restores contact in a way approaching the old balance, they have shifted their interests from anti-Khomeini sentiment through introspective but minor campus concerns to demonstrating against U.S. presence in El Salvador. Is this a maturation? Students of the ‘80s attaining a ‘60s consciousness? Is it a lesson about cycles? It’s hard to tell whether ‘Peace Time’ is more social fiction or new folk tale carrying that form’s disinterest in didacticism, but it is a good read.
“One more example from Jameson’s gathering of narrative voices—in ‘Gas Station,’ when the central character, Danny, has difficulty understanding his father’s failure to fulfill his fatherly role, the third person point of view identifies very closely with his confused senses of loss, bitterness, and hope, but the voice takes a more articulate stance than Danny could manage, able but not overeager to judge and comment on the situation Danny finds himself in as he is brought to deal with his father’s influence on his life. Though an abstract storyteller, the voice cares for Danny and his self-protecting, make-do feelings.
“The beauty of California Palms doesn’t come from loving depictions of happiness; the stories are as often careful presentations of unease as they are chronicles of satisfaction. This collection of diverse fictions comes together in the impulses of involvement and investment moving the stories—a fine and generous harmonizing force.”
—David Major, Cimarron Review
“Although these are not very cheerful stories, it is a refreshing book. Refreshing in the sense that it is a collection of well-crafted stories. Some are painful looks at the way people live and the difficult relationships they get involved in. The characters and setting are authentic and the general concept of the stories is both original and highly creative. Short story writing is a special art and takes a certain kind of talent. Jameson has that ability.”
—Marcia Muth, “Book Chat,” Enchantment
“Wouldn’t you like to read about two young girls’ first feelings for boys in Costa Mesa? You can find this tender, affecting short story in California Palms by Marnell Jameson. California Palms is a collection of short stories that are substantial, piquant and sweet (not to mention critically praised in the Albuquerque Journal and Booklist). Jameson, a native of Orange, is the kind of culturally and locally precise author who’ll note that mid-1970s adolescents’ cruiser bikes ‘had probably been ripped off from Mesa Beach Rental’ and that the boys wore ‘drawstring pants and hooded sweat jackets’ when not busy making love to the local girls to the strains of ‘Smoke on the Water.’ As the Journal’s Elizabeth Gabel wrote, ‘The stories make you stop and think and say, ‘That’s the way it really happens.’”
—Orange Coast Magazine