A Storybook Beginning

Devyn Defoe photographed at Beers Books in May (Portrait by Max Whittaker)

The brighter the light, the blacker the shadow, psychologist Carl Jung posited. Sacramento novelist Devyn Defoe is a very bright, shiny new literary light on the brink of a promising career, so it makes sense that for her first novel, Burnside, she would choose to plumb the dark heart of the city that produced boarding-house murderess Dorothea Puente and the Golden State Killer—filtered through a magical realist lens and reflected in a fun-house mirror—in dense, ornate prose so old-fashioned it feels fresh.

As a teenager, Defoe, now 34, grew up hearing her father regale the family dinner table in the Poverty Ridge neighborhood with tales of serial killers. “It was the psychic environment when I was a kid,” she says. “My parents are both judges. My dad was really interested in violent crime, and before she was a judge, my mom was a U.S. attorney focused on child exploitation crimes.”

Set in a lightly fictionalized version of the River City, Burnside—published on Aug. 4 by Astra House and distributed by Penguin Random House—opens with the eponymous homeless man accidentally injuring a girl in a cafe then disappearing, after which residents begin to blame the apocryphal figure for all manner of ills. “Seething glee” is how Defoe describes the mood buzzing through the local coffeehouse culture during a summer of wildfire smoke, colonies of feral children, and deaths that could be murders, suicides or fentanyl overdoses. The coffee shops, avatars of Chocolate Fish and Temple, are called simply “the fish shop” and “the religion shop” (little inside jokes only Sacramentans will truly appreciate). Most of the characters in Burnside  don’t have real names either. Instead, the narrator calls them by their archetypes: the actor, the DJ, the cinephile. The narrator’s roommate September (the recipient of the injury) is named for the month she represents in a pinup calendar for the “breastaurant” where she waitresses while wearing a microscopic cowgirl costume.

Courtesy of Devyn Defoe and Astra House

The unnamed narrator—a college student who works at an antiquarian bookshop and drinks at “the barbershop bar” next door to the Warehouse Artist Lofts on R Street (a nod to the erstwhile Bottle & Barlow)—is stylishly disaffected à la Greta Gerwig’s heroine in Lady Bird, a character Defoe vibed with intensely. Defoe and her mom even used to tour open houses the way the titular character and her mother did in the movie. “Such a random, very Sacramento thing to do!” Defoe says with a smile. “And like her, I couldn’t wait to leave Sacramento. But I’m glad I’m back,” she adds, about returning home in 2018 after grad school. Her book’s protagonist, however, is still in the thick of youthful angst. Resting on the campus lawn while waiting for a class to begin, she narrates, “I lay down and threw an arm over my eyes, watching the darkness crowd and mutate and fall in favor of a vicious red, a wall of silent and shifting blood. What was the point of closing your eyes if it didn’t stop the constant seeing?”

Defoe herself is a part-time bookseller, at downtown’s Beers Books, but unlike the narrator—who can barely stand, let alone study—she has the academic bona fides to pursue a career in the literary limelight: a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from U.C. Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia. In 2018, she landed a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, one of the most prestigious plums in all of literary academia, offered to just 10 writers a year with an alumni list that includes greats such as Raymond Carver (briefly a Sacramentan himself), Ken Kesey, Alice Hoffman and Larry McMurtry. One of her short stories was included in the anthology Best American Experimental Writing 2020. Getting an agent, she says, took some time, but once the manuscript was sent out to prospective publishers, a book deal quickly followed.

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When Burnside  first came across her desk at the Manhattan-based imprint Astra House, Defoe’s editor Maya Raiford Cohen felt the tingle of discovery. “You get sucked up into the New York literary scene, and things start to feel sort of iterative at times,” she says. “You meet a lot of writers here. So it was such a surprise to encounter this clearly generational talent who was living in Sacramento and had written this really singular book about the strange corners of that town.” The literary world agrees, and the accolades have begun piling up. Among those offering early praise, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist Chang-Rae Lee—who was one of Defoe’s Stanford professors—wrote in his book blurb that “Burnside  is the coolest weird fever dream you’ll ever have while awake,” and declared that the novel “may well prove a signature chronicle of our American end times.” And in July, Publishers Weekly  named Defoe one of its Writers to Watch, while Poets & Writers  ranked Burnside  as one of the five best debuts of the summer in a feature that included an interview with Defoe by National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley. The New York publishing world’s limelight may beckon, but Defoe isn’t heeding that siren’s call—she’s staying put in her hometown.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” French novelist Gustave Flaubert advised, and Defoe has absorbed that wisdom. During her Stanford fellowship, Defoe chose to live at home with her parents and commute to Palo Alto for weekly workshops, a financial decision that fortuitously triggered an urge to write about Sacramento. In 2021, she started working as a bookseller at Beers Books and has no plans to leave. “It really does take a degree of audacity,” Defoe says, referring to the determination to carve out a life as a working artist in today’s economy. “Sometimes people will ask if I’d consider moving to New York, but my main goal is to keep the stability and balance that I have currently.” The key to that is a job she loves—working as part of a team of like-minded colleagues at Beers Books, buying and selling used volumes. It may not be the most lucrative career, but as a side benefit, she has discovered many now-favorite authors in the books coming across the counter, like

American modernist writer Henry Miller and Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek. “Devyn has a shrewd but very empathetic mind, and she has a lot of integrity,” says friend and former Beers co-worker Audrey Merriman.

After Stanford, her parents, although supportive of her art, urged her to cultivate a “real career” as a day job. Defoe knew herself better. “I can’t work a full-time job and be a writer,” she says. “I’m sure some people do, but I just don’t have the energy for that.” So Defoe works three days a week at the bookstore, where the staff of writers, painters and musicians functions as a de facto artists’ colony. “It was clear early on that I could do this and sustain a creative practice,” Defoe says. The other four days are spent writing in the light-filled Poverty Ridge apartment she shares with her boyfriend, two blocks from where she grew up. Flaubert would approve.

Defoe is sticking close to her intellectual roots too. In her promising debut effort, she shows glimmers of a young Joan Didion and William T. Vollmann, two Sacramento literary luminaries who, incredibly, both received National Book Awards on the same night in 2005.

“Sacramento authors rule at National Book Awards,” read a San Francisco Chronicle  article about Joan Didion and William T. Vollmann winning the nonfiction and fiction categories, respectively, in 2005. (Photo by Henny Ray Abrams/AP Images)

“My own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour,” wrote Joan Didion (who coincidentally lived in Poverty Ridge as well) of Sacramento in her 1968 collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The native daughter was bemoaning the fading of a boom era that started with the Gold Rush, which eventually gave way to the suburbanization of Sacramento, a process that Didon felt had left the city deracinated from its proud history. Defoe read this as a high school student at Natomas Charter School and says, “It was the first time I heard anyone put into words exactly how I feel about Sacramento—its weird stuck-in-time quality.”

Defoe and Vollmann connected serendipitously—he’s a regular at Scorpio Coffee, where her boyfriend works—and the two have become friendly, meeting up to talk trade. There may even be a joint book reading in their future. “He is my hero,” she says simply of Vollmann. “No one else writes like that anymore. With his long sentences, his perspective can be so malleable. He can zoom in and zoom out, and make the craziest, most accurate connections between things.”

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Her novel, replete with its own long, lush sentences, chronicles a modern-day Sacramento summer any reader here will recognize, with its extreme heat and the smell of seasonal wildfire smoke hanging in the air. After September is harmed by Burnside, the incident comes to symbolize all that’s broken about this moment in time, including the growing homeless crisis and political divide. And when the body of one of the narrator’s acquaintances washes up on the banks of the American River, was it suicide? An overdose? Or was it murder? This last question echoes the question informing David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Like Lynch, Defoe is more interested in atmosphere than answers. As the summer unfolds, the young characters bounce between bars, coffee shops and college campuses, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—everything from an unwanted tongue kiss at a party to a home invasion robbery—in a tense spiral that feels Summer of Sam  dangerous.

For all the tension and gravitas, though, Burnside  is also one of the funniest literary novels I’ve read since Martin Amis’ 1984 novel Money, a savage—and side-splitting—satire of the Decade of Decadence’s excessive consumerism. Like Amis, Defoe has managed to nail our contemporary era from inside it—a neat trick to pull off without the luxury of hindsight. In one of the novel’s brilliant set pieces, the narrator escorts an injured college friend—a character referred to as “the psychic” who is (hilariously) a student of “veterinary astrology”—to the emergency room, where a random man she encounters in the waiting room tells her a chapter-long, acidly funny story about his wife’s wine-mom yoga vacation that had me barking with laughter. But the humor is a setup, as she pulls the rug out from under our mirth, veering into tragedy. (I won’t spoil it, but this is where the Golden State Killer makes an appearance.) In Defoe’s Sacramento Noir, even the sunniest, funniest days end in darkness.

As Defoe begins work on her next novel, which will also be set in Sacramento, Didion is the angel sitting on her right shoulder, Vollmann is the angel sitting on her left. The former is admired for a piercing exactitude, while the latter is known for a sprawling genius. By harvesting the finer nature of both, Defoe will be able to turn the Vollmann-esque firehose on blast for early drafts, then let Didion guide her through revisions, ironing knife-like creased edges into the billowing volubility of the prose. Following in the footsteps of these giants, Defoe is poised to be a generational literary artist who at once captures and captivates the beating heart of Sacramento, both past and present.