THE CALIFORNIANS

Two families navigate a century of art, commerce, and estrangement.

Castleberry’s second novel opens with a would-be art heist: In 2024, Tobey Harlan, the ne’er-do-well son of a California real estate mogul, is planning to steal three paintings by Di Stiegl, an acclaimed artist who emerged in the 1980s downtown New York scene. Out of this plot spills a complex history involving the worlds of visual and fine art. Stiegl’s grandfather, Klaus von Stiegl, was a German-born film director who was in demand during the silent era; the talkies, plus a scandal or two, sidelined him until the ’60s, when he directed a TV crime drama, Brackett, starring Tobey’s grandfather. (A provocative final season, dark in the way that anticipated The Sopranos, made Klaus a critical darling and cult figure.) The novel luxuriates in epic sprawl in the mode of Jonathan Franzen, Nathan Hill, and Garth Risk Hallberg. And it’s rich in time-shifting, stylistic flourishes; interstitial sections mimic blog-speak, Hollywood trade papers, art world chatter, and more. While the varying fates of the Harlan and Stiegl clans gets convoluted, Castleberry’s message is straightforward: Wealth facilitates art but also undermines it (a studio kills Klaus’ magnum opus, Di loses years to a coke habit), and can be even more ruinous to families. Percy, Klaus’ son and Di’s father, exemplifies the wayward, money-grubbing personality that threatens to undermine the family. And Castleberry suggests that as a culture, we’re subsisting on an inheritance and nearing bankruptcy: “Did anyone actually create anything anymore? Weren’t we past all that to just pure consumption?” This novel, of course, is determined to serve as a counterweight to that idea, even if stuffed nearly to the breaking point.

An admirably ambitious, if knotty, all-American saga.