Like so many young writers before him, Slater Brown arrives in San Francisco looking for the story that will inspire him to greatness. He's dazzled by the sun glinting off the Bay, by the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate and by the special light that arrives at twilight only in San Francisco. He roams around filling notebook after notebook until he runs out of money.
Desperate to get his work published, Slater conjures up a journalism resumé that gets him hired at a struggling newspaper called the Morning Trumpet. When the editors read his first story, a run-on tome about the magical beauty of San Francisco, he's laughed out of the newsroom.
Soon afterward, having discovered a one-of-a-kind news-gathering tool, Slater returns in triumph to the Morning Trumpet. Slater's kind landlady gave him a box of hand-me-downs that included an old transistor radio. Riding across the city with the radio wedged between his head and the bus window, he hears voices, entire conversations. He realizes that he can eavesdrop on secrets being whispered at City Hall, in hotel rooms and from inside of downtown board rooms.
As Slater's star rises, he becomes the nemesis of the mayor and he falls in love. In the whimsy that defines this story, he becomes the center of a storm – literally. His beloved, Callio, is a master chess player who catches the attention of both the mayor and the most famous man in America, an inventor named Milo Magnet.
Milo makes the connection between the multilayered logic of chess and the weather-making computer program he's working on. In his quest to squash Slater Brown, the mayor becomes the unwitting catalyst to what Milo unleashes after a widely promoted chess match in the City Hall rotunda.
Rodes Fishburne makes this crazy plot work. His charming descriptions of San Francisco define him as someone under its spell and his homage to a young man falling in love is priceless.
When first enthralled by Callio, "Slater did what young men have done for thousands of years – he imagined her life and her world, and then he went another well-worn step, and imagined himself in it."
But Fishburne's debut novel is a lesson on spoiling what he gets so right about San Francisco. [Full disclosure: I am as much in love with this city now as I was when I first moved here forty years ago and I know every corner of it.]
While he nails details like this, "Past the surfers at Fort Point, past the clam diggers at Baker Beach, the Mile Rock foghorn sounded off like a belligerent, exuberant opera star" – he blows it a few pages later, referring to the Conservatory of Flowers as being "in the middle of the city." (The Conservatory of Flowers is in Golden Gate Park on the west side of the city).
Later, with Slater on the edge of Golden Gate Park, he has him searching streetcorners on the other side of the city but states that his fascination with all the sights and sounds of the city "he never got more than six blocks away from the park."
In a scene from the latter part of the novel, Slater rushes down Broadway to get a look at a fire in Japantown. You can't see Japantown from Broadway -- either from Broadway that runs through North Beach or from Broadway in Pacific Heights.
It's tempting to salute his reference to Lotta's Fountain which is so iconic to early San Francisco history. Commissioned in 1875, it represented hope in the aftermath of the 1906 quake and still stands as a symbol of the city's celebrated survival instincts.
Describing its location as Market and 3rd Street though doesn't cut it. Market is a very wide street running diagonally down the spine of the city. It's so defining that the names of the streets change when they cross it. Lotta Fountain is on Kearney Street at Market. 3rd is way on the other side of Market Street. (Maybe it's just me who knows this stuff.)
And why, Mr. Fishburne, did you name your fictional San Francisco radio station WGGB. GGB, OK, obvious reference to the Golden Gate Bridge, but no radio station west of the Mississippi is allowed to use 'W' for its first call letter. They all start with 'K' per FCC policy.
The wonderful thing about reading novels set in San Francisco is the opportunity to savor the authors description of enchanting views and our city's unique variety of neighborhoods. The downside is that when a writer gets it wrong – or gets some of it wrong – all we can see is the fly in the ointment.
Oddly, Rodes Fishburne lives in San Francisco and belongs to a SF writing group called the Grotto.
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