Wrecked it Ralph Inzunza

Former city councilman Ralph Inzunza's debut novel, The Camp, a semi-autobiographical account of his 21-month stretch in a federal prison camp for his efforts as a city councilor to change the law so patrons could touch dancers at strip clubs in San Diego, has not exactly caught fire among local readers, if public library records are any indication.

So far, almost five months since the San Diego Public Library acquired 11 copies of Inzunza's opus on October 10, the book has been borrowed a total of 20 times, according to a February 28 record the library provided. In Chula Vista, where Inzunza settled after being released in April 2013, the public library did not own a copy.

And thus the tribulations of the new novelist, a job where few can make a decent living. But, as Inzunza told Chula Vista’s Star News, “I think my name is being repaired through my literature.”

Inzunza, in his fictional prisoner persona as Eddie Angulo, sidesteps the question of why he ended up in camp fed in the first place. He writes that he was accused of a thought crime, “thinking about” voting against a landfill in his district “in exchange for campaign donations” from a housing developer. He says the big boys and girls downtown were out to get him for so openly challenging them.

By contrast, prosecutors put it this way in the indictment in 2003: "It was...part of the scheme that defendants...would seek and accept money...and would agree to be corruptly influenced in the performance of their official duties, to advance the repeal of the no-touch provision."

(One indicted councilman, Charles Lewis, died and the other, Michael Zucchet, won his appeal. Michael Gallardi, the owner of the Cheetahs strip club and generous supporter of the councilmen, ended up in prison. Inzunza, the only city official to join him, fought his conviction for nine years.)

Anyway, as one of the 20 borrowers of the book from the city library, your scribe reports being annoyed by this minimization when Angulo could have bared all. The semi-autobiographical nature allows for such filtering. “I'll let you, the reader, decipher on what really took place behind the fence,” Inzunza writes in an author's note. One might ask why, when you don't have to.

One example of a bothersome thing: the author refers to haute cuisine chef Julia Child as “Julia Childs,” a proper name error. Another is his all-too-often failure to make a fresh paragraph when two people are talking, as in this dialogue as he arrives at the prison gate: “May I help you?” asks the guard. “Yes, sir, I'm here to self-surrender.”

Reviewers on Amazon see things differently. Eleven of the 12 of them had nice things to say, but even the “most positive” reviewer wrote, “What I still wonder is how much of Mr. Inzunza's own story is actually true.”

At the other end of the range, another reviewer opines, “Most of us who hail from the same barrio area as the author would not characterize the author as an activist, victim, innocent, community advocate, etc — but rather as a self-serving, petty politician who rightfully got caught with his hand in the public cookie-jar (yet again). The lack of honesty, culpability, or remorse shown in this book are consistent with the author's lifetime modus operandi. Maybe an interesting read, but almost pure invented fiction.”

Meanwhile, Inzunza's nearly two years of mingling with non-violent drug offenders serving Draconian time showed him how mandatory sentencing is “absolutely nuts.”