The spirit of John Steinbeck haunts the world of Mark Arax, the award-winning author and journalist from Fresno, California whose latest work—The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California—continues the investigation of land abuse and human tragedy in California’s Central Valley that began with The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003) and remains, like Steinbeck’s style of dudgeon in The Grapes of Wrath, both detached and intensely personal. A restless son of Fresno’s substantial Armenian community, Arax first reported on Central Valley life for the Los Angeles Times while pursuing the people behind his father’s 1972 murder in the 1996 memoir, In My Father’s Name, that made Fresno feel more like Blue Velvet, the 1986 movie by David Lynch, than The Human Comedy, the 1943 novel by Steinbeck’s contemporary and the Arax family’s neighbor William Saroyan. Like The King of California (co-authored with Times colleague Rick Wartzman), Arax’s third book—West of the West: Dreamers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009)—followed the founding crimes of overbuilding, exploitation, and genocide from their roots in Gold Rush greed to the case of “The Last Okie in Lamont,” the Central Valley town that stimulated Steinbeck’s spleen in The Grapes of Wrath. A splendid sequel to West of the West, The Dreamt Land is Arax’s longest book to date, and—for fans of Steinbeck’s ghost—his finest.
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