Art, commerce, Hollywood and family drama collide in ‘The Californians’

“When did everything turn into a grift?” asks a young man named Tobey midway through Brian Castleberry’s “The Californians,” an ambitious, widescreen novel about the ugliness that often ensues when art and commerce collide. In 2024 Tobey is a down-on-his-luck college dropout who’s been chased out of his Northern California apartment building by wildfires. Hurting for cash, he signs on to a scheme his brother has concocted to steal three valuable paintings from his father’s home in Palm Springs. What’s supposed to happen after the theft is hazy to him — something NFT, something crypto — but he’s desperate.

In this way, Tobey answers his own question: The grift happens when we don’t pay attention to what we’re destroying for the sake of a dollar.

To explain how that happens, Castleberry covers about a century’s worth of activity between two families whose fortunes and failures are intertwined. Tobey is the grandson of Frank Harlan, a stone-faced TV and film actor best known for playing the lead role in a ’60s detective show, “Brackett.” The Columbo-esque character was conceived by Klaus von Stiegl, a filmmaker who came to America from Germany and enjoyed acclaim as a silent-film director. His granddaughter, Di Stiegl, painted the artworks that Tobey is stealing, made during her ’80s heyday of putting a spotlight on AIDS and the moral bankruptcy of the go-go ‘80s.

(Mariner)

All of which is to say there’s a lot going on, and a lot of it catches fire, literally or metaphorically. The family tree that opens the book covers family relationships, but nearly everyone is estranged or strained in some way. Given that, many of the Harlan and Stiegl lineages replace affection with money, who wants what from it, and what they embrace or forsake for it. The fickle way time treats art has an impact as well. Klaus was a pioneer in the silent days — think Lubitsch or Lang — but he can’t successfully make the transition to talkies and relies on the largesse of his heiress wife. Di’s paintings were acclaimed by New York’s downtown set, but shifting times plus a debilitating cocaine habit took a toll.

“He’d come west dreaming that he was an artist, and immediately been made a cog in someone else’s machine,” Klaus thinks, but he’s not the only one suffering that fate.

Much of the action takes place in Palm Springs. It’s where Klaus films an alleged masterpiece on his own back lot, an artsy “Hansel and Gretel” allegory that MGM refused to release, and then attempts to burn down in a fury. It’s where Di as a child developed her shimmering photorealistic style, and where the Harlan clan pursued property development when art didn’t quite pan out or turned into hackery. “Maybe art didn’t put anything into order,” Di thinks, rightly, at one point. “Maybe it reflected back the chaos, the ambiguity, the vertigo of living.”

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To that point, Castleberry has pursued the tricky task of creating an orderly novel whose theme is chaos. There are places where he’s not quite up to the task, where the various lines that stretch through and across the family trees can feel like tripwires for the reader. A mother’s disappearance comes into the narrative, then fades; a money-grubbing son arrives, then steps off the stage. Castleberry means to frame Klaus as hard-hearted to the point of cruelty. One woman in his life, a prized silent actress, is driven to kill herself by jumping off the Hollywood sign — a tragedy that, in addition to being a bit on the nose, is softened by more compelling narratives about Klaus’ late-career revival via “Brackett,” his selling out a writer during the Red Scare, and genius granddaughter. Castleberry can make you wonder which reprobate to care about most, which sin causes the most harm.

Brian Castleberry’s “The Californians” is an ambitious novel about the ugliness that often ensues when art and commerce collide.

(HarperCollins)

But the flaws in “The Californians” reflect ambition and overexertion, not slackness. Castleberry strives to realistically capture the way money shores up or permeates all sorts of creative endeavors: Hollywood, TV, fine art and more. The realism is bolstered by interstitial chapters featuring news stories, blog posts, term papers and other ephemera that address the characters’ lives, while also suggesting that the official story these pieces help create always gets things somewhat wrong. He makes you desperately wish you could see the fourth season of “Brackett,” where the lead goes dark and rogue in a way that anticipates “The Sopranos” by decades.

“In America, art is always paid for by somebody and griped about by somebody else,” Klaus opines late in the novel to Di. “Occasionally something breaks through, people see it, people like it, their lives are changed by an infinitesimal degree. … If you’re really lucky you can make a living looking at all this and making some sense of it and communicating it to others.” In the context of the story, he’s inspiring a young Di to pursue a painting career. But in the world of the novel, Castleberry is trying to honor art-making — including novel-writing — to a world that wants to reduce it to matters of profit and loss. Art often is just a business, but a dangerous one: Changing people by an infinitesimal degree, Castleberry knows, has a way of thoroughly warping and wrecking human lives.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”