The Californians

October 1, 2024

Castleberry (Nine Shiny Objects, longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award) offers an epic spanning from the Golden Age of Hollywood to the 1980s NYC art scene up to today's NFT market, as three characters spin out their lives, trying to create--and become--something. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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January 6, 2025
Castleberry’s vibrant if overstuffed latest (after Nine Shiny Objects) shifts between the lives of a filmmaker who, in the early 20th century, has trouble transitioning from silent films to talkies, and his granddaughter, who makes a name for herself in New York City’s art scene in the 1980s. In 1925, German Jewish immigrant Klaus Aaronsohn renames himself Klaus von Stiegl and heads to California to make expressionistic films. Half a century later, his granddaughter Di reverses the journey to become a successful artist in New York whose paintings tackle the AIDS crisis and environmental concerns. Their alternating stories are bookended, briefly and unproductively, by that of wealthy slacker Tobey Harlan, who, after being driven from his house in present-day California by a wildfire, impulsively steals three of Di’s paintings from his father’s home and sells them. Castleberry interlaces scenes from his characters’ lives with newspaper clippings, term papers, and other ephemera along with glimpses into the lives of their friends and relatives. Though vivid and credibly detailed, the individual scenes don’t add up to a coherent whole: Di’s story in particular peters out after she achieves success. This portrait of narcissistic artists frustrates more than it illuminates. Agent: Chad Luibl, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

January 15, 2025
Two families navigate a century of art, commerce, and estrangement. Castleberry's second novel opens with a would-be art heist: In 2024, Tobey Harlan, the ne'er-do-well son of a California real estate mogul, is planning to steal three paintings by Di Stiegl, an acclaimed artist who emerged in the 1980s downtown New York scene. Out of this plot spills a complex history involving the worlds of visual and fine art. Stiegl's grandfather, Klaus von Stiegl, was a German-born film director who was in demand during the silent era; the talkies, plus a scandal or two, sidelined him until the '60s, when he directed a TV crime drama, Brackett, starring Tobey's grandfather. (A provocative final season, dark in the way that anticipatedThe Sopranos, made Klaus a critical darling and cult figure.) The novel luxuriates in epic sprawl in the mode of Jonathan Franzen, Nathan Hill, and Garth Risk Hallberg. And it's rich in time-shifting, stylistic flourishes; interstitial sections mimic blog-speak, Hollywood trade papers, art world chatter, and more. While the varying fates of the Harlan and Stiegl clans gets convoluted, Castleberry's message is straightforward: Wealth facilitates art but also undermines it (a studio kills Klaus' magnum opus, Di loses years to a coke habit), and can be even more ruinous to families. Percy, Klaus' son and Di's father, exemplifies the wayward, money-grubbing personality that threatens to undermine the family. And Castleberry suggests that as a culture, we're subsisting on an inheritance and nearing bankruptcy: "Did anyone actually create anything anymore? Weren't we past all that to just pure consumption?" This novel, of course, is determined to serve as a counterweight to that idea, even if stuffed nearly to the breaking point. An admirably ambitious, if knotty, all-American saga.

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February 1, 2025
Beset by complicated families and the crises of their eras, artists nevertheless strive for beauty and truth over a century of American life. Displaced by an apocalyptic Northern California wildfire, down-on-his-luck Tobey Harlan is pulled into a scheme to steal valuable paintings from his rich, politically exasperating father. Famous for her haunting 1980s portrayals of AIDS patients, painter Diane "Di" Stigl underscored the country's moral shortcomings and battled her own demons. Castleberry reaches further back, to Di's grandfather, silent-film auteur Klaus von Stigl, who "celebrated the dark and individualistic forces" of his adopted nation while harboring personal secrets. As the artists' stories unfold during the turbulent twentieth century, their trajectories intertwine in complex and bewildering ways, yet the artistic striving and loss they represent is unambiguous. Fire, representing creativity and destruction, becomes a recurrent motif. Is theft the key to freedom, loss the key to renewal? Castleberry (Nine Shiny Objects, 2020) animates his characters' lives with a longing for meaning and a commitment to historical detail. The result is a novel as ambitious, beautiful, and precarious as the Golden State itself.

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