West of the Sun

By LANCE MORROW

CALIFORNIA by LELAND FREDERICK COOLEY 607 pages. Avon. $1.95.

AMERICANS AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM by KEVIN STARR 494 pages. Oxford. $12.50.

Social essayists have a habit of calling California "the cutting edge of the future"-a cautionary model of what the U.S. might become if and when it finally degenerates into a transcontinental landscape of neon, plastic, and religious eccentricity. Californians tend to look back the other way, over their shoulders, with a snobbery of heritage worthy of Cavalier Virginia or Puritan New England. To be able to connect with grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had a place in the state's earlier development gives a select few of them some sort of hedge against the banality of tract house and freeway.

Novelist Leland Frederick Cooley works the genealogical lode like a Forty-Niner. In a preface to his 607-page paperback epic, Cooley speaks pointedly of his Mexican great-grandmother and his Mexican-Welsh grandmother. Then he attempts a vast, three-generation dynastic "saga" of the Lewis family. It starts with a Yankee ancestor's jumping ship at Monterey to start a dynasty in the 1830s and ends in the 1960s with the business-and land-rich heirs grimacing over the pot parties of their young and wondering what catastrophes Cesar Chavez and his troublemakers are going to visit on the California dream.

Cooley's narrative wanders between epic trash and a dogged replica of history. He plies the big-state genre, hoping his readers will be thinking of, say, Hawaii or Giant. They probably won't. Cooley's stagehands bang history back and forth: "Santa Ana is a fool. No man of reason can talk to him." Canned narrative alternates with archaic sex scenes:

"Now in this strange bed this voracious man-hungry woman had twice drained him with her insatiable demands."

Cooley's book is an Avon paperback original, which started this fall with a first printing of 500,000, and is into a second printing now. The customers would get much more absorbing reading about California if they bought Kevin Starr's book instead. It is better history, for one thing -a long historical essay reflecting on the meaning of the California experience. The Burr senior tutor at Harvard's Eliot House, Starr writes an occasionally musty prose that smells of the stacks. Still, he draws upon a wealth of material, and his research is lively. The best and worst of America wound up in California -drifters, merchants, philosophers and killers. As a kind of cultural terminal, with a nature that is both paradisal and preternaturally nasty, the state became a complicated, slightly fantastic projection of America itself.

Sierra Gothic. The mountaineer-geologist Clarence King found in the Sierras elaborate analogies to the Gothic -an organic interchange between nature and art. On the other hand, a group of Americans spent five days in 1853 cutting down a 3,000-year-old sequoia, 302 ft. high and 96 ft. in circumference. They polished the stump into a dance floor and hollowed out the fallen trunk to make a bowling alley. The sacred and profane commingled, usually at the expense of the sacred.

Starr's book is rich with the biographies of Californians and their fates.

One chapter is devoted to the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, a Californian who believed that the state's very provinciality might be its salvation. Starr describes Jack London's last California years, which dissolved in a sad and grandiose alcoholic dream. The 19th century San Francisco bohemians are presented too, along with missionaries, businessmen, Stanford Alumnus Her bert Hoover and Botanist Luther Burbank. Starr recounts as well the state's brawling racism, which sometimes brings to mind D.H. Lawrence's formula: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, Stoic and a killer."

Starr's California history ends in 1915. Cooley, on the other hand, collars the reader right on the cutting edge of the present: he begins his book with the latest member of the Lewis dynasty by marriage, Rancher Howdy Goodwin, sharing a platform with Ronald Reagan. Howdy is thinking of running for Governor himself.

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