[In the following review, Prescott finds The Western Coast stylistically interesting but its plot and purpose unclear.]

Other fiction writers will appreciate the formidable technical hurdles that Paula Fox set for herself in this, her third and most ambitious novel [The Western Coast]. There is almost no plot, for one thing, no story line strong enough to sustain suspense or even to indicate an inexorable direction; the novel instead consists of a series of events, some quite dramatic, which involve a large but continually changing group of characters. For another, the story so scrupulously re-creates a particular place in a particular time, and kinds of people who have often been written about badly before, that the novel serves as a kind of social history, convincing us that this is the way it must have been. Most difficult of all: the heroine is an entirely neutral person, a blank upon which others leave their prints, and in this way we come to know them, but not her. This is a useful device, but I am not sure there is any way it can be brought off entirely successfully.

"Don't you know anything?" people ask Annie Gianfala. "I need to be taken in hand," Annie admits. The time, as the book starts, is 1939 and Annie is "not quite 18," living on her own because her father has taken a woman to New Mexico. Annie attracts drunks, homosexuals, misfits, drifters, crazy people; the affinity between the maimed and the innocent is now firmly entrenched in American letters, and Annie, who is quite bright, is aware that she encourages in others expectations that she cannot fulfill. Annie fends the others off until Walter Vogel, a Communist, unemployed actor and sometime sailor, tells Annie he doesn't like virgins. Annie thinks Walter holds the world's secrets, he can take her in hand, and so, with another boy, she makes the necessary adjustment.

Alone, hungry, purposeless, Annie settles into a dreary room and a drearier job somewhere between Hollywood and Los Angeles. She falls in with jobless film writers, apologists for Stalinism, a kindly homosexual. "Like beads from a broken string," she thinks, "rolling senselessly all over Southern California." She becomes married, abused, promiscuous, divorced, deathly ill, bored by the Communist claptrap people tell her to read. In time, she will simply throw it over, grow up a little as she cares for a dying relative, and then set out for Europe, realizing "how often she'd known people she really hadn't liked, had spent hours and days and months with them."

Most of them, indeed, are not likable—particularly the Communists. Paula Fox is very good at showing their insufferable rigidity, their boring diatribes, their internecine nit-picking, even the way they look: "In his gray little face the tiny jawbone flexed with purpose and self-love, the delicate nose pointed at heaven." Miss Fox is an excellent satirist and a superb observer who can, in a paragraph or a page, bring a character or an incident vividly alive. Here, however, because she is determined to get so much into her book, there is a side effect: after their brief parts are played, the characters are thrust aside so that others may take their place. Even toward the end of her book, with Annie for no clear reason about to go to Europe, Miss Fox brings on new people, which leads me to think there may be more novels about Annie (who is just her author's age) to come.

If so, perhaps Annie will become less of a catalyst for others and more clearly herself, whatever that self will be. One of the characters here, thinking about Annie, felt that "she was, in an essential way, without self" and he was "faintly repelled" by her. So are we.