Season of the Witch

If this book had been well-executed, it would have made it into my essential San Francisco experience for visitors. "Oh, you have to go to the Academy of Sciences," I'd say, "and we'll eat at Cliff House, and check out the views from Twin Peaks and the GGNR, and you should totally read this book before you get here..." I'd give it as a holiday gift to people on the fence about visiting.

But Clio, the muse of history, bestowed the gift of this work onto David Talbot, whose prayers to her sisters Calliope (epic poetry), Euterpe (lyric poetry), Erato (love poetry), and especially Thalia (comedy) apparently went entirely unanswered. The result is an utter slog, 480 pages that I, who have in the past successfully completed [b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446876799s/6759.jpg|3271542] and [b:The Baroque Cycle Collection|22535547|The Baroque Cycle Collection|Neal Stephenson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407110757s/22535547.jpg|50643684] with nothing more than my keen intellect and grit, gave up on. Did you find that last sentence to be a needless insertion of my viewpoint? If so, you're going to want to skip the author's note at the beginning of this book.

The first third of the book, "Enchantment", is all right. Oddly enough, it evokes Northern California in the 1860's as it describes it in the 1960's: there are flakes, grains, and even occasional nuggets of gold, which a dedicated prospector can certainly find in the mud. But it's still unevenly written and even more unevenly edited, with perfunctory paint-by-numbers descriptions of people who will exist in the narrative for a page or two, reappear for a paragraph twenty pages later, and then vanish into the ether. A competent editor would have hired a co-author, tightened this up, and released it as a standalone work that would be delightful.

The second third of the book is where Talbot jumps emphatically over the shark. It's where I gave up. I made it through his incoherent chapter on Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the SLA, where he mentions a safehouse "in the funky, lefty Bernal Heights neighborhood". And then I read the chapter on the Zebra Killings, where one of its perpetrators "began prowling the streets of the Excelsior, a drab neighborhood of stucco bungalows and lowered expectations."

I made it one paragraph into a chapter called "The Empress of Chinatown", where he begins to discuss the prominent politicians of the 90's whom his father's money and his status as co-founder of the never-profitable dotcom enterprise Salon allowed him to brush elbows with, before I threw in the towel. I was still mad about those crime chapters. True crime is a remarkable genre, and descriptions of these wild happenings could have been very good.

But it wasn't just the failure in execution. It was the subtle things, like those neighborhood asides. That's how I figured it was time to give up. You see, Bernal Heights and the Excelsior are right next to each other. The difference between the "funky" one and the "drab" one? Guess which one David Talbot lives in...