The Last City Room

The turbulent politics of the 1960s hasten the demise of an old-fashioned San Francisco newspaper in this entertaining but hollow fiction debut from Los Angeles Times columnist Al Martinez (Dancing Under the Moon; City of Angles). Twenty-four-year-old Vietnam veteran William Colfax leaves a smalltown paper to join the staff of the San Francisco Herald just as the Herald begins its precipitous decline, ravaged by the clash between radical community leaders and the paper's reactionary publisher, Jeremy Lincoln Stafford III. His first night on the job, Colfax covers a bombing at the Federal Building. He goes on to make his reputation by following the career of Vito Minelli, a charismatic campus radical who masterminded the crime, finally winning a Pulitzer for his coverage of Berkeley activism. While Stafford attempts to recruit Colfax as a lieutenant in his personal crusade against moral decay, Minelli casts the stodgy Herald as a fascistic foil to aggrandize his own revolutionary rantings. Stafford only fuels the fire with the bombastic editorials he runs on the front page. Soon Colfax's colleagues begin to fall victim to the paper's dwindling circulation, as Colfax finds himself caught in the middle, groping for some balance of personal loyalty, integrity and professionalism. Martinez paints all of this with a broad brush, fashioning a lively melodrama. But the novel is peopled more with types than characters. If Colfax fails to take on much depth, despite rote recollections of a failed romance and his dysfunctional relationship with his father, the others remain mere cartoons. Nor is the well-worn '60s milieu seen from a fresh perspective in this largely forgettable drama of remembrance, likely to be of most interest to West Coast readers and journalism junkies. (Nov.)