Putting California into words

California -- and particularly Los Angeles -- may defy comprehension, but they cannot escape explanation.

Things being what they are, most of the latter is what professional explainers technically refer to as blather. To anyone forced to sit through it -- and who among us has not? -- it is hard not to wish for what might be described as a Thomas Guide of the Mind, a reliable road map to where we’ve been, who we are and where we might be going.

Inconveniently, no such volume exists. But a too-little-appreciated renaissance in the publishing of new and classic California histories as well as a series of first-rate new literary anthologies suddenly make it possible to assemble a fairly compact shelf of books through which diligent readers might discover their own explanations of this perplexing place.

History is the place to start, and the jumping-off point has to be “California: A Study of American Character,” which philosopher and historian Josiah Royce published in 1886. His willingness to ponder the ills and ambiguities, as well as the achievements, attendant on conquest and settlement was the beginning of a modern understanding not only of California, but also of the West. It is a book now available in several handsome volumes and collections.

(Besides, who would not want to spend time with a philosopher who once said: “My idea of heaven would be to know the complete meaning of anything I was doing at a particular moment.”)

Because the everyday experience of nature remains central to the California experience, at least one of John Muir’s books ought to come next. Everyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of the environmental movement’s founding father has his own favorite, but for this purpose either “The Mountains of California” (1894) or “A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf” (1916) would be a pretty good choice.

Here -- just because it’s California -- a place ought to be made for a work of thinly fictionalized history, Frank Norris’ 1901 novel, “The Octopus,” an epic account of the struggle between the railroads and Central Valley wheat farmers. Norris’ book is important not only for its own sake, but also because it so strongly supports the argument he made in his posthumously published “The Responsibility of the Novelist.” Its contention that socially conscious American fiction should involve naturalistic writing based on firsthand experience subsequently exerted a powerful influence on such writers as Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck.

Next to Norris on this imaginary shelf should come “Fool’s Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader,” recently published by California Legacy, a joint project of the University of Santa Clara and Berkeley-based Heyday Books. McWilliams -- lawyer, journalist and radical -- was 20th century California’s indispensable social conscience. This volume brings together well-chosen excerpts from his classic works, “Factories in the Field,” “North From Mexico,” “Southern California: An Island on the Land” and “California: The Great Exception.”

Kevin Starr’s magisterial synoptic history of California -- the seventh volume of which is forthcoming this year -- gets the next slot. No one has marshaled so many facts so gracefully in the service of the state’s cultural history.

Given his panoramic scope, Starr’s treatment of many topics is necessarily glancing. Thus, the series’ greatest pleasures are to be found on those pages where his personal enthusiasm eddies into deeper pools of reflection and exposition. For example, readers who may be participating in one of the ongoing sponsored readings of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” would profit from consulting Starr’s account of its composition in his fourth volume, “Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California.” It is a fascinating exploration of how Steinbeck’s close ties with the Hollywood film community influenced the novel’s character.

Finally, to finish up the Los Angeles end of this section, one might turn to Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz” and David Rieff’s “Los Angeles: Capitol of The Third World.” (For the record, both books have about as many detractors as admirers, and this writer is one of the voices frequently quoted in the latter volume.)

Now things get a little more interesting. Suddenly, we are so awash in intelligently chosen literary anthologies that it is possible to get a comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary California writing in less than a half-dozen volumes. Every anthology is an invitation and a provocation, and a good one should evoke at least as many controversies as it does compliments. That’s part of the genre’s pleasure.

Begin with the first volume of “The Literature of California: Native American Beginnings to 1945,” published a little more than a year ago by the University of California Press. This is a judiciously -- and often surprisingly -- chosen collection. The astonishingly rich array of Native American and 18th and 19th century writing will repay the reader many times over.

The obvious companion choice is the recently published “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” edited by David L. Ulin for the authoritative Library of America. Although this is bound to be the most controversial of the literary volumes on this imaginary shelf, it is nonetheless the best collection of its kind yet assembled.

Next should come a pair of unexpected anthologies published in the past few months: “Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature From California” is a stunningly rich 548-page collection edited by printer and publisher Rick Heide for the California Legacy series. Here is a real education for those who have lazily consigned Latino letters to the propaganda section of the identity politics movement.

Arranged thematically into sections such as “Arriving,” “Pop Culture” “Working” and “Violence,” the authors chosen range from Nobel laureate Octavio Paz to contemporary L.A. novelist Yxta Maya Murray and from the historical meditations of turn-of-the-century geneticist and bohemian Jaime de Angulo to 24-year-old Indio-born poet John Olivares Espinoza, whose “Aching Knees in Palm Springs” is a heartbreaking account of working with his landscape gardener father.

Taken together, these selections make a convincing case for Latino writing not as a parallel but as an integral part of California letters.

So, too, does “The Dirt Is Red Here: Art and Poetry From Native California,” recently published by Heyday and selected by Margaret Dubin, longtime editor of News From Native California, the quarterly magazine of the state’s Indian communities.

Technically sophisticated and often movingly executed, many of the poems in this volume will make a claim not only on readers, but also on the compilers of more general surveys of California literature.

And speaking of that, all our Thomas Brothers of the Mind needs to reach provisional completion -- and what in this state is not provisional? -- is Dana Gioia’s forthcoming anthology of California poets.