Not Everything Turns to Gold
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West.” The Rough Rider’s koan has been widely viewed as a celebration of the limitless California adventure, but it’s also a reminder of the dizzying, vertiginous rootlessness of a state whose populace simultaneously draws on history and seeks its repudiation.
“The Golden State,” San Francisco novelist Lydia Kiesling’s dazzling debut, takes on the legacy of distinguished Western predecessors — including Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From” and Mona Simpson’s “Anywhere But Here” — with a deep dive into the often forsaken areas of rural California, ignored by those
