Staff Pick
His entertaining 14th book, The Great Birthright: An Oregon Novel, marks Matt Love's first foray into fiction. Self-described as "a work of pseudo pulp historical environmental detective socialist metafiction" or "a quasi pulp fiction historical polemical class-warfare thriller" or a "supposedly pulp historical detective work of 90-percent real-life environmental Marxist crime fiction" or "a pulp environmental historical crime regional revenge thriller" or "an ersatz Oregon-centric historical conservation-themed political playback thriller that no one's going to read!" or an "ostensibly pulp historical detective novel [come] quasi historical inspirational utopian egalitarian fantasy fiction" or "so-called romance documentary Edward Abbeyesque fiction," The Great Birthright melds all of the elements that have long made Matt Love's non-fiction writings so ardent, educational, and rousing.
As has been his career-spanning ethos, Love celebrates The Great Birthright that is every Oregonian's "free and uninterrupted use" of our public beaches. Imagining a grave, capitalistic, and not altogether fictional threat to Oregon's beaches, The Great Birthright unfurls into a detective thriller where a pair of unlikely heroes (the author himself and the grandson of Governor Oswald West) battle the pernicious forces of greed, entitlement, and unfettered commercialism in an attempt to sustain the public-interest efforts spearheaded by some of the state's most revered figures. With all of the iconoclasm, probity, unabashedness, and biting humor that characterize his nonfiction, Love draws both a figurative and literal line in the sand, entreating his fellow Oregonians to never yield in their fight to protect what might well be the Beaver State's most enduring (and forever threatened) heritage. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
His entertaining 14th book, The Great Birthright: An Oregon Novel, marks Matt Love's first foray into fiction. Self-described as "a work of pseudo pulp historical environmental detective socialist metafiction" or "a quasi pulp fiction historical polemical class-warfare thriller" or a "supposedly pulp historical detective work of 90-percent real-life environmental Marxist crime fiction" or "a pulp environmental historical crime regional revenge thriller" or "an ersatz Oregon-centric historical conservation-themed political playback thriller that no one's going to read!" or an "ostensibly pulp historical detective novel [come] quasi historical inspirational utopian egalitarian fantasy fiction" or "so-called romance documentary Edward Abbeyesque fiction," The Great Birthright melds all of the elements that have long made Matt Love's non-fiction writings so ardent, educational, and rousing.
As has been his career-spanning ethos, Love celebrates The Great Birthright that is every Oregonian's "free and uninterrupted use" of our public beaches. Imagining a grave, capitalistic, and not altogether fictional threat to Oregon's beaches, The Great Birthright unfurls into a detective thriller where a pair of unlikely heroes (the author himself and the grandson of Governor Oswald West) battle the pernicious forces of greed, entitlement, and unfettered commercialism in an attempt to sustain the public-interest efforts spearheaded by some of the state's most revered figures. With all of the iconoclasm, probity, unabashedness, and biting humor that characterize his nonfiction, Love draws both a figurative and literal line in the sand, entreating his fellow Oregonians to never yield in their fight to protect what might well be the Beaver State's most enduring (and forever threatened) heritage. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
In his fiction debut, Love bends and twists the detective novel genre with hilarious, unexpected and political results. The premise: a Los Angeles developer is trying to privatize Oregon's publicly-owned beaches, its vaunted "great birthright," and only one washed up detective and self published writer can stop him.
"I've been writing about the sacrosanct great notion of Oregon's publicly-owned beaches for years, but wanted to take a new run at the subject and have a little fun with it," said Love. "I also wrote the novel as a warning to all Oregonians that the fight to protect our beaches from privatization and prudery is never over."
In The Great Birthright, a slick and tanned Los Angeles developer, Ronald Ryan, colludes with medieval US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to have Oregon's famous 1967 Beach Bill declared unconstitutional as a violation of the 5th Amendment's just compensation clause. Once the Beach Bill disappears into the ashbin of history, say "hello" to the New Jersey and Malibufication of Oregon's beaches: boardwalks, espresso stands, security guards, fences, no dogs, no bonfires, no fort building, NO TRESPASSING signs. Welcome to hell.
In 1994, Scalia had planted a demon seed of a dissent that sought to overturn the Beach Bill. In this case, he was on the losing end, but now he's back with Ronald Ryan trying to undo the very thing that makes Oregon awesome — never having to pay a cent to use the beach.
Matt Love, a writer and teacher living on the Oregon Coast, catches wind of the conspiracy and enlists a private detective for help. The detective, Tom West, has given up on life, lives in a trailer, hangs out the Mad Dog Country Tavern, and drinks Rainier all day. Love convinces West to join the cause, and together they hatch an outrageous plan to crush their foes by unleashing a weapon of mass destruction against privatization — Oregon's unique and passionate relationship to its "great birthright." As Ryan and Scalia learn, don't mess with Oregonians when it comes to their beaches.
"When someone finishes this novel," said Love, "I hope the reader is ready to go to war to protect our beaches." The Great Birthright includes 37 photographs, a candid admission that most of the novel was written on the taxpayer's dime, a bibliography, and an unprecedented call to action for Oregonians to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Beach Bill on July 7, 2017.
About the Author
Matt Love is the author/editor of 14 books about Oregon. In 2009, Love won the Oregon Literary Arts' Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for his contributions to Oregon history and literature. He lives in Astoria.
Matt Love on PowellsBooks.Blog
The premise of my debut novel,
The Great Birthright, is that a Los Angeles developer wants to privatize Oregon's publicly owned beaches, and only one washed-up detective and self-published writer can stop him. That writer would be me, writing about myself in the third person just like Norman Mailer...
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