September Book Club - Mecca

Thanks to Diana McDonough for both hosting and leading the meeting this month. Seven of us discussed Susan Straight’s latest book Mecca, published in 2022, about various friends and families living and working (legally or otherwise) in contemporary Southern California, around San Bernadino and east of it into the desert. 

Straight depicts the area’s canyons, rocks, floods, and fires vividly.  Most of us found her characters - white, black, Mexican, Native - compelling as they endured regular threats and insults from racism, ICE, even the weather.  However, we thought that the large number of characters made the novel difficult to follow.  It was hard to find any overarching plot line or narrative arc.    Some of us found that when we gave up trying to connect all the characters and just treated each chapter as its own short story, it was more satisfying and enjoyable. 

We liked the solidarity between the characters, the theme of family support whether biological or not, the characters’ resilience in the face of fear and danger, the emotional intensity of many scenes, and the interest in language expressed by many characters.  We agreed that the author’s efforts to make connections between the characters was a forced fit and that the book lacked a coherent narrative.  The characters were beautifully drawn but, at bottom, we didn’t know what the book was about.  The ending of the novel, where we hoped all would be made clear, left much unresolved just like the book as a whole.