California's Over

In this funny and elegiacally virtuosic novel of the 1970s, a seventeen-year old self-described novelist who calls himself Baelthon turns up at the decaying house of James Farmican, a renowned poet who killed himself three years before. Farmican's heirs hire Baelthon to haul off Farmican's chattels as they prepare to sell the family house and decamp for a Free Ranch in Oregon or an as-yet-to-be-erected casino in Nevada -- anywhere that isn't California.

Soon Baelthon finds himself entangled in the Farmican family's scams and secrets -- and falling in love with the poet's sullen teenage daughter. Twenty-five years later, the lovers are ambivalently reunited. And out of the juxtaposition of past and present, idealism and greed, California's Over conjures up an entire era of American disillusionment.