Arizona Star

by Faith Baldwin

Baldwin, Faith

474 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Faith Baldwin attended private academies and finishing schools, and in 1914-16 she lived in Dresden, Germany. She married Hugh H. Cuthrell in 1920, and the next year she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill. Although she often claimed she did not care for authorship, her steady stream of books belies that claim; over the next 56 years she published more than 85 books, more than 60 of them novels with such titles as Those Difficult Years (1925), The Office Wife (1930), Babs and Mary Lou (1931), District Nurse (1932), Manhattan Nights (1937), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Her last completed novel, Adam's Eden, appeared in 1977.

Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.

Reviews

[Nick Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Breihan writes a very entertaining series for AV Club called "The Popcorn Champs" where he reviews and contextualizes the top grossing film from each year, beginning in 1960. Many of the earliest entries make perfect sense to me. Who wouldn't shell out good money to see what all the Taylor-Burton hoopla was about by sitting through the interminable "Cleopatra?" Who wouldn't flock to a theatre to watch "The Sound of Music?" Who wouldn't enjoy the creaky, sappy, soapy romance of "Love Story?" As the column inches closer to present day, though, I'm quite frankly at a loss to explain many of the featured films' appeal even if I understand (on an intellectual level) why those films were (and still are) so popular.
One of those films is "Star Wars." According to Breihan, the original 1977 film was stuffed full of references to past happenings within the cinematic "Star Wars" universe, that it created sequels, television series, animated spin-offs, novels, etc. Fans, apparently, spend years of their lives debating the minutiae of the films and speculating on where the story will go next based on clues contained in earlier episodes.
None of this interests me in the slightest. However, as a fan of soap opera, I do understand the appeal of a fictional world without end; a continuing story filled with dramatic potential. I just prefer a fictional world filled with romance, heartbreak and family conflict as opposed to violence, weirdo aliens and robots. Call me old fashioned.
In "Arizona Star," Faith Baldwin creates such a world. Set in a fictional Arizona city and the surrounding ranches and resorts, "Arizona Star" details the town's leading family as well as the ranch owners and resort employees and guests who enter their orbit. Told across 6 separate yet connected novella-length stories (with deliciously campy titles such as “Hostess To Heartache” & “Lady In Levis”); each chapter hints at the conflicts to arise in the next section or shares details regarding the characters we've come to know in the previous one. And, while the storylines and conflicts are, for the most part, resolved the novels ends as though the world these characters inhabit is still turning.
Set against a backdrop of mid-century, Southwestern kitsch, "Arizona Star" fired my imagination with its stories of romantic tribulations and familial conflict driven by an iron-willed matriarch. Descriptions of ranch houses, cowpoke Casanovas, frivolous matrons and fortune hunters stalking the featured resort and bawdy roadhouses add to the novel's appeal.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not realize when I started this book that it is actually six interconnecting stories, rather than a full-length novel. I'm generally not a fan of short stories (although some of these are probably long enough to be considered novellas), and this collection did not change my mind. The stories concern the powerful Grafin family in Arizona, and the same characters appear throughout. They were written in 1944-45, so it's an interesting picture of what Arizona was like back then, and Ms. Baldwin does an excellent job of bringing the beauty of the desert to life. She also weaves the ongoing war into the backdrop--and sometimes the foreground--of the stories. My biggest problems with the collection were that I thought there was rather too much exposition--often providing the history of the Grafin family--and I didn't find the stories to be terribly involving or even, at times, believable. The author admits in the Foreword that she doesn't know of any matriarch like Emily Grafin, and I have to agree. Emily Grafin did not strike me as a realistic portrayal, and since her machinations are at the center of most of the stories, I was not as intrigued by them as I might have been. In fact, my two favorites of the stories involved the Grafins only peripherally. I like Ms. Baldwin's writing style and have enjoyed another set of her stories Temporary Address: Reno, but this collection did not measure up.