Reviewed by Nancy Spiller
The Current Fantasy
by Charlie Haas
Beck & Branch
Oct 2024, 368 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8988550549
In lieu of an epigraph, Charlie Haas kicks off The Current Fantasy, his novel about a German group seeking a Southern California utopia at the turn of the 20th Century, with a photograph of a long-haired, bearded man, shirtless in the desert, a guitar in his lap, sitting in front of a primitive shack. Dated 1917, Palm Desert, California, the man could as easily be a back-to-lander hippie circa 1967. The photo is of a member of the German counter culture movement known as naturmenschen and is just one of the pictures inspiring this fascinating and heartfelt historical novel.
In The Current Fantasy, a group of German intellectuals find their way to San Bernardino County in the teens of the last century, fleeing modern civilization and an oncoming war, to found a commune they will call Sunland. There they will only use money if they can’t avoid it, go without electricity and live as clothing-optional vegetarians who indulge in “a great deal of sexual activity.” They are, they say, for “everything equitable,” which they prove by bringing an African-American family into the fold. Soon after, the group’s classical musicians begin playing the blues. America has its way of changing even German intellectuals.
Meticulously researched, The Current Fantasy brings to life a cultured people who sought a simpler life than the chaos modern Europe at the 20th Century’s turn could provide. Our Germans have arrived in Southern California when “an entire Old World still needs overthrowing and an entirely new one needs constructing…” San Bernardino County held the promise of affordable land, a mild climate in which to grow food, and pre-industrial living could be had. The Current Fantasy focuses on a family–Anna and her husband Gerhard, son Benji–a bright boy who doesn’t want to leave Germany, and his sister Lilli, also bright, but much more willing to give herself to the New World’s promise, if not the ideals of the naturmenschen.
I felt for the characters as they leave their homeland, make the long and arduous journey by boat to New York, and find themselves facing the raw possibilities of the new lives they’d only previously imagined in California. Once here, the dream only takes partial shape before reality and human nature interfere. Not only do the forces outside their group threaten their existence, but the inevitable tensions within do as well.
That Haas is a successful screenwriter (Gremlins 2), comes through in the novel’s vivid and cinematic details. Every step of the way you participate in the sights, sounds, smells and real challenges of building a commune. At one desperate point, Benji bicycles from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, a remarkably believable trip. Also believable is the inevitability of free love and nudity bringing the locals’ disapproval, along with the prejudice and suspicions of their being German.
This is Haas’ second novel, his first was The Enthusiast, a brilliant and funny take on the media scene at the turn of the 21st Century, with a freelancer burning himself out as he works his way through a universe of niche magazines.
In The Current Fantasy, Haas gives readers a tightly woven fabric thick with details, ideas, characters and a tremendous understanding of humanity. Where this New World is headed might best be summed up in a lesson Lilli shares when she makes it to the movies. Charlie Chaplin is a great success, she observes, wanting the same for poor people as the folks of Sunland, but he knows “People don’t want to be taught a lesson with songs about slavery. If you say what you mean with seltzer, they put your picture in Photoplay.” The Sunland folks’ tragedy is in attempting the seltzer free road less traveled.
Even at that, the Sunlanders’ ideals seem more realistic and possible than the Germans who immigrated to a tiny uninhabited island in Patagonia in the early 1930s, another true story that has inspired a new movie, Eden, and a sensational documentary, The Galapagos Affair.
I found the book particularly moving when the Sunlanders must experience the heartache of leaving a beloved place. It’s something many in this disaster prone era of climate change are either familiar with or may someday be. The story ends in 1934 with the Great Depression, bread lines in Southern California and people disappearing off the streets back in Germany.
This tender, fascinating, well told tale is a worthy addition to California’s creation story.
About the reviewer: Nancy Spiller is a writer, artist and educator living the coastal life north of Los Angeles after losing her home on its’ wild western edge to the Palisades Fire of January 2025. She is the author of: Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother’s Recipe Box. and Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes) and teaches creative writing for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. More can be found at http://nancyspiller.org.