The Cleft Rock

"The Dodd family, rich and powerful because of its extensive land holdings in the Central Valley, faces an unexpected crisis in the early 1920s. The youngest son, Edward, has returned from a short stint as a business agent in China with a young Russian wife, Katya. Neither Edward’s domineering father, Jeremy, nor his manipulative mother, Beatrice, wants the family sullied by an association with a refugee of uncertain background. They demand a divorce. The young couple seeks refuge with Edward’s grandmother, who lives near Fresno. But the move proves temporary, since it derails Edward’s hope for a legal career. Edward finally returns to the Bay Area and agrees to divorce Katya, unaware that she is pregnant. The two then lead separate lives -- one in statewide politics, the other in small-scale ranching. In completely different ways, both eventually confront water distribution issues raised by the Central Valley Project. This is one of those plot-driven novels that occupies a place between genre tales and “literary fiction.” The Cleft Rock tells a serious story about real-life problems, both personal and social. Indeed, it’s probably the only novel that attempts to illuminate issues surrounding the allocation of water in the Central Valley. The plot, however, has a scattered quality. It occasionally relies on unwarranted contortions and ultimately lacks clear resolutions to its problems. The story keeps moving by tracking the activities of a wide array of characters, who arrive and vanish with disconcerting frequency. The author may have intended them as representative types, whose plenitude would make up for their shallowness. All in all, the book offers one of those big-picture stories, like The Octopus by Frank Norris or The Ford by Mary Austin, that deserves credit more for ambition than execution. For all its shortcomings, The Cleft Rock could find a small but appreciative modern audience." -from Reading California Fiction (http://readingcalifornia.typepad.com/)