The setting for these tales falls on the main character and travels between Santa Monica and Boston Massachusetts. The realism of life choices reigns supreme throughout, and more importantly the idea of once you make a choice and follow through, you can never get back to where you started. This is a key to the stories, and the key to taking the book outside of the pages and into the real world. The HiStory of Santa Monica places us in another’s shoes, something not easily done, and we are given the chance to live with the characters for a short while.
Throughout HiStory of Santa Monica, we are taken into the depths of the human spirit. We are given reasons to the strange behavior of our neighbor, and the post traumatic stress syndrome of living on the fly. Everyone who has every graced the planet knows this feeling, the emptiness and the hope of insuring a few extra years after the dust settles. We see this from one character:
I’d read newspaper articles one time about major league baseball players in the old days. They used to buy hardware stores-back home- just in case their careers didn’t work out. It was an insurance policy of sorts, in that time following the Great Depression…They were grounded and fearful of God’s wrath; the idea of going to the big league was nice, but having a hardware store back home, well that was security.
HiStory of Santa Monica dives into the issues found in our society, from the lonely rich kid to the broken down dreamers, to the redeemed woman to the thirty year old finally growing up. These stories offer an insight to the human perspective so easily felt but often frustratingly kept silent. Atwood lets us know that we can’t just give up and move home, even if home has followed us from the cold east coast to the often colder Santa Monica shores.
Zach Fishel is an Associate Editor with Girls With Insurance. He also is a graduate student at Mississippi State where he is studying Literature and Creative Writing. He believes that the Beat Generation will return, and has had work appear in numerous publications including fourpaperletters and Mad Swirl.
