The Ruins of California

A rakish bachelor and his introspective daughter survive the 70s — California style.

The Family Ruin, as described by the precocious young Inez Ruin, is a complex one. Her father, Paul, is selfobsessed, intrusive, opinionated, and profligate. He's also brilliant, adoring, magnetic, and liberating. Unable and unwilling to sustain a monogamous relationship, he's divorced from Inez's mother, Connie, and claims that he will never marry again, since "marriage is a bad deal for everyone — particularly women." His intriguing personality and movie-star good looks mean that he's never alone, and many varied female identities are paraded before Inez in the form of a never-ending string of girlfriends that her father loves and then leaves.

Inez swings between two worlds — one represented by her mother, Connie, an ex-star flamenco dancer, and Connie's mother, Abuelita, a Peruvian immigrant whoworks devotedly as a housekeeper for a recording-industry executive, and the other by Paul's mother?old-money Grandmother Ruin, who invites Inez for horse-riding outings and tea parties that are really lessons in refinement. Bouncing between an innocent, secure life with Connie and Abuelita, and premature, though thrilling, exposures to an ultrasophisticated and unregulated life during her visits to her father in San Francisco, Inez attempts to find a reality that is somewhere in the middle.

As Inez progresses through high school, we are witness along with her to the preoccupations of Californians of the age: drugs, sex, art, surfing, love beads, Nixon, motorcycles, and the goal of not making a big deal out of anything. Inez encounters them all in her climb toward maturity, culminating in a trip to Hawaii that becomes a perilous slide into drugged oblivion. She makes it out in time, but her beloved half brother doesn't — and her ascension to adulthood occurs in the task of rescuing him.

Martha Sherrill's ability to reconstruct time and place in absolute pitch-perfect detail allows for a remarkable rendering of an exhilarating and confusing decade of American life.

"With this eccentric coming-of-age story, Sherrill (My Last Movie Star) offers an interesting, if emotionally distant, window into California culture of the 1970s as well as an almost clinical examination of one extended family. Inez Ruin is a girl caught between suburban Los Angeles, where she lives with her mother, Connie (a former dancer), and her working class grandmother Abuelita, and San Francisco, where her sports car-driving, guitar-playing computer scientist father, Paul, parades a series of beautiful girlfriends. This unconventional family also includes a rich paternal grandmother (an artist's model in her glory days) and an adored hippie surfer half-brother, Whitman. Though Inez's evolution from passive observer to active participant in her colorful world is the story's driving force, the novel lacks a substantive structure. Sherrill describes Inez's world with reportorial precision, but the accumulation of detail doesn't always contribute to the narrative's momentum, giving the story a memoirish rather than a novelistic feel. By the end, however, the relationship between Inez and her father blossoms into the emotional center of this offbeat tale. Agent, Flip Brophy. (Jan.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"It's not a memoir, but it very much has that feel." Portland Oregonian

"One of Sherrill's strengths as a novelist is how she makes use of all these very disparate and racially diverse characters as metaphors for the reality of life in California." Los Angeles Times

"Californians in their 40s, in particular, will be knocked out by nostalgia." San Francisco Chronicle

"Sherrill's re-creation of California in the '70s is impeccable, and her story of how a girl trapped in a theatrical family manages to transform herself from an observer into the star of her own life is absolutely irresistible." Booklist

As Inez progresses through high school, readers are witness to the preoccupations of Californians of the 1970s: drugs, sex, art, surfing, love beads, Nixon, motorcycles, and the goal of not making a big deal out of anything.

Sherrill has been a staff writer in the Style Section of The Washington Post since 1989, covering politics and the arts.