SOURCE: Martelle, Scott. “The Good Earth.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (28 September 1997): 13.

In the following excerpt, Martelle evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Already Dead.

We are, often without our awareness, creatures of the land we inhabit, defined by the terrain on which we live. It helps congeal our sense of beauty, our sense of self. An Easterner, for example, moving to the sere valleys of Southern California, can't help but be taken aback by the dryness, the brownness, the grayness. He is oblivious to what Wallace Stegner used to describe as this subtle beauty that comes in shades other than green.

For a time, anyway. Then the land, much more than the culture, begins to transform the soul. Green slowly loses its sense of nurturing comfort and becomes a color that startles. Gray becomes a shade of expression, rather than a lack of definition. Brown is seen...