A Fierce and Complicated Compassion

Alix Christie considers Susan Straight’s challenging yet crucial portraits of an “overlooked” California.

By Alix ChristieDecember 9, 2025

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

THE FICTIONAL TOWN of Rio Seco is a hot, hardscrabble place, bound by the Santa Ana River, San Bernardino Mountains, and Chino Hills, sliced by innumerable secret canyons, and traced, at their base, by a black ribbon of California freeway. Fifty miles inland from Los Angeles, this is a region scoured by the Santa Ana winds and the flames that inevitably follow. Ash and dust layer olive and orange groves, used car lots, and barbecue joints; dried palm fronds scratch the walls of squat bungalows and ancient adobes.

Those who call this place home include Filipinas working the hospital night shift, Mixtec cleaners from Oaxaca, African American florists and butchers, Native and immigrant workers scaling the palms further east to hack down ripe dates. Readers who enter Rio Seco also become intimately acquainted with coyotes and crows, longhorns and opossums, the silver sickles of eucalyptus leaves and sharp scent of pepper trees lining the river bottom. This is a vast and unvarnished world, rooted in hundreds of years of Californian history—a world portrayed with extraordinary richness over 35 years of stories by the author Susan Straight, herself a native of Southern California’s Inland Empire.

Since her first book, Aquaboogie, was published in 1990, with a dedication to her early teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, Straight has written nine more, all but one embedded in this community modeled on the real-life California city of Riverside, where she was born and raised, and (with the exception of two years at the University of Massachusetts) has lived for all of her 65 years. In that time, Straight has received an Edgar Award, an O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, a Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal for Fiction; was a finalist for the National Book Award; and received the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times. Nor does she lack for admiring readers, judging from online reader reviews. (I myself am not impartial: I wrote about her ninth novel, 2022’s Mecca, for The Economist, and consider it a masterpiece—the same word used by Michael Connelly, great crime writer of the Southland—and Straight has endorsed my own novels.)

In spite of these accolades, Straight isn’t yet a household name. Nor is her standing uncomplicated: in 2005, reporting the forthcoming publication of her sixth novel, A Million Nightingales, the Los Angeles Times wrote that “Susan Straight doesn’t experiment with narration or construct bizarre linguistic puzzles, but she does venture into territories that some have thought inappropriate—namely, that of being a white woman in her 40s writing about the interior lives of black characters.” (A similar concern was raised at a recent book festival, according to one former director.) Though Straight is deeply entwined in her mixed-race Riverside community, the idea that she has less legitimacy than “authentic” voices from these communities remains.

What then, on the occasion of her newest novel, Sacrament (2025), do we make of Susan Straight? In a review of Mecca, The New York Times called her “an essential voice in American writing.” Critics rave about her “fierce compassion” for characters rarely depicted in mainstream American letters; following the publication of Mecca, the Los Angeles Times dubbed her the “bard of overlooked California.” As glowing reviews start rolling in for its sequel, it’s worth considering what makes her work powerful, often exceptional, despite—or perhaps because of—her controversial conjuring of a range of identities.

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Regardless of genre or style, there is a quality of “realness” that characterizes any great work of literature; Elena Ferrante calls it “literary truth.” This she describes as “directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence”; in works that are, as she puts it, “alive and true,” we are wholly consumed by the people depicted and the human dramas they enact. Characters in a Straight novel have this effect: they are so honestly drawn, their circumstances and experiences so precisely and lovingly described, that they become alive and true in our minds.

Take Johnny Frias, a bowlegged and beautiful man of Mexican and Yuma descent who may be the first California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer you have met on the page. He spends much of Mecca trying to decipher why, in American English, it’s “holy cow” and never holy chicken, or “holy mackerel,” never holy trout. Or Mrs. Bunny, a wealthy and deranged white woman in the Hollywood Hills powering her white Cadillac through the pandemic-stilled streets, a gun close at hand. There’s Serafina, an undocumented Mixtec girl torn from her baby daughter and deported, whose odyssey to reclaim her child is as dogged as a salmon’s drive up its native stream. Or Matelasse, a mixed-race mother of two boys whose school trip to a Spanish mission breaks her open, revealing the racial violence underpinning the California dream.

For as up-to-the-minute as her stories are, Straight is keenly interested in the past. All of her books circle around deep history and the question of immigration: Who came to California, when, and how? Who is allowed, in essence, to “belong” in the so-called Golden State? She writes not of the nouveaux riches of Hollywood and Silicon Valley but of the bedrock on which California was built and still runs: the often invisible individuals who harvest our food, clean our houses and clothes, keep us safe in the hospitals and on the highways. Straight would seem, in fact, to be a poster child for the kind of writing celebrated in a new guide to “the Golden State’s New Literature,” California Rewritten, which was published this fall. After all, these are stories, writes the book’s author, John Freeman, “that acknowledge the depth and complexity of families and individuals who are, as I write these words, being berated and hectored by the president of the United States. Threatened with unlawful deportation.” Given this, the omission of Straight’s work seems bizarre.

What does seem clear is that her focus on the marginalized peoples of California is both what sets her work apart and what makes some observers uncomfortable. She writes about blue-collar people from mainly African and Mexican American communities. Her subjects are self-made and calloused, struggling and often desperate, intelligent but rarely college-bound. Such characters, I would submit, are mostly foreign to literary gatekeepers in academic or publishing circles, which—for all that they now claim to celebrate nonwhite voices—remain overwhelmingly white and middle-class. And here, I suspect, is the real rub: what is this white woman of Swiss and Canadian descent doing writing about Black and Brown people? Her biography confuses. Yes, she is a child of poor immigrants, working-class people themselves barely scraping by. Yes, she was married to an African American man and has three biracial children. But as legitimate concerns about identity and appropriation have swept the cultural sphere, Straight’s subject position has come under scrutiny.

The doubt is understandable—and, frankly, important. As I write, open racism is being normalized online, from the White House on down, while a recent Supreme Court decision allows immigration authorities to racially profile Latinos. Straight, like all authors, creates stories rooted in her own perspective and experiences. She, like all of us who write characters with backgrounds that differ from our own, is ultimately speculating, for good or ill. Such is the nature of fiction. Whether she oversteps the line of cultural appropriation is for people of that cultural background to judge. It would be interesting, I think, to know the racial background of the students and professors at her MFA program in Amherst who Straight says questioned her choice of subject matter from the very start. As she relates in her best-selling 2019 memoir, In the Country of Women, some asked why she didn’t write about more “typical” California folk (surfers, for example). Others objected to her use of Black vernacular. “Why do you keep writing about all these working-class people?” one graduate student asked with a sneer. (Straight says she’d never heard the term before.) Later, at book events in New York and Boston and Chicago, once she began collecting prizes, other white writers were “appalled that [she] lived in a place where people killed pigs and grew marijuana and were routinely shot at by police, gang members, and criminals.”

Yet Straight’s stories read as a testament to her interest not in mining others for material but in honoring the complexity and beauty of the community in which she has lived and continues to live—even when that means moving across risky racial lines. She is, in fact, writing what she knows. Her extended mixed-race family is huge; according to her memoir, she is called “Auntie” by at least 100 young people in Riverside—where, as in Rio Seco, she soberly writes, “kin keeps people like us alive.” Perhaps nowhere is that commitment to blood and chosen family clearer than in Sacrament, which couples her literally remote Inland Empire terrain with the more figuratively daring terrain of the COVID-19 novel. Here, Straight’s attention is devoted to the concrete reality of those dealing head-on with the virus. This is no self-reflective musing on lockdown but a story about the struggle to maintain life amid a daily toll of death. Told through the perspectives of intensive care nurses Larette Embers and Cherrise Martinez, the novel (like all of Straight’s writing) ricochets between high and low registers, illuminated with shafts of poetic description. In the hot and horrible summer of 2020, for example, the world is “reduced to dark hallways, each ICU room lit up like an aquarium with one person inside swimming through the air trying to live.”

In this precise rendering of little-known worlds, Straight celebrates the moral clarity and everyday nobility of people doing hard, often undervalued jobs: Frias and Larette’s husband Grief expertly rope a maddened bull, for instance, while Larette and Cherrise minister to the dying. Larette, a singer with a voice like Mary Wells’s, is asked by grieving families to gift their dying relatives a song: “She checked the ventilator tubes, IV lines, the catheter. Very little urine, dark as tragic Kool-Aid, the color Larette always saw when the body was dehydrated. She held her phone. She only knew the first verse by heart.” These first responders are—despite the flaws that render them human beings on the page—objectively heroes, selfless and dedicated. Straight gives a wink to this in her inclusion of Paulann Petersen’s poem “A Sacrament,” discussed in Cherrise’s daughter’s online English class: “The poet is saying that we can have the divine even in the ordinary,” the teacher remarks.

Straight gives equal care to revealing the complexity of her characters’ interior worlds. Narrating his own life, Frias is keenly aware that his CHP testing officer considers him Mexican and stupid. Larette acts out, bitchily at times, and makes the unforgivable mistake of hiding Cherrise’s illness from her daughter. Manny, a kid stuck in virtual school, reports this withering take on privilege in lockdown: “My mom said all the rich people are learning to make bread. She said she was making fifty tortillas every morning when she was seven.” Straight thereby illuminates her corner of California in the same way other great writers have illuminated theirs, from Maine to Minnesota to Nebraska. Her work is no more “regional” than that of any of her peers: these are essential—and painfully timely—American stories, constructed intimately, with great affection, and, above all, respect.

It may well be, in fact, that precisely because she is attempting to render people with identities different from her own, Straight probes even more deeply and responsibly. On the page, readers will encounter prose that, surging out of the historical and contemporary trauma of Southern California, is imbued with Ferrante’s “literary truth.” It was that same achingly real quality in Straight’s stories of “ordinary hardworking human” life on the margins, on city buses and dangerous backstreets, that so impressed James Baldwin decades ago in Massachusetts. He saw that the disarming simplicity of Straight’s prose opened up worlds of astounding depth, heartrending events related with exquisite, exact tenderness. She was then, as she remains today, a writer apart, someone who confused the categories, who did not fit the mold. But she must continue writing, Baldwin told her at age 22: it was “imperative” that she continue writing. We are unaccountably lucky that she has.