The Sellout by Paul Beatty

An urban farmer comes up with a plan to help his people

Bonbon, homeschooled by his black studies professor father, the last (or only) farmer in Dickens, a blighted neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, finds himself in a funk after his dad is shot during a routine traffic stop and bleeds to death on the street. Reluctant slave owner of the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, and spurned lover of MTA bus driver intellectual Marpessa Dawson, Bonbon decides that the way to put Dickens back on the map and inspire its underachieving black and Mexican populace is to resegregate. Strangely enough, his plan begins to work, but not before outraging the country. The book opens and closes with Bonbon at the Supreme Court, defending his case.

This book rubs the reader’s face in outrageous racial stereotypes (as well as perhaps some subtle ones – significant chunks of the book are in fairly hilarious Latin). The meager oft mislaid plot is secondary to the poetic riffing on what it means to be black, to be an Angeleno, to be the child of a nutty professor trying to forcibly mold a child free of internalized white judgments. And also what it means to be a black man in a racist society. Or an amazing farmer who makes friends all over town by growing the sweetest oranges and the most kaleidoscopic weed.

The cadences are amazing – this book must have taken forever to write. The elaborately crazy sentences force the reader to slow down, to linger, to take pleasure. For the most part the imagery is beautiful, despite Bonbon’s journey always bumping him against unpleasant racist realities.  I loved the scene where Marpessa takes her newly resegregated city bus and drives it up Pacific Coast Highway onto the beach so that Bonbon and Hominy and the night shift at Jack-in-the-Box can go skinny dipping. This truly is a book about Los Angeles – how its beauty is a secret pleasure enjoyed by its laid back inhabitants. There’s freeway rides in here and surfing and the beans at Tito’s Tacos.

If you laugh at the outlandish stereotyping, are you racist? Maybe there’s a scene in the book that addresses that – maybe the answer is yes. Also, I wasn’t sure about the title – who’s selling out? Bonbon is nicknamed The Sellout by Foy Chesire, his father’s wealthy nemesis, who rewrites classic books for African Americans, such as Measured Expectations. But isn’t Foy is the real sellout?

This would make a great movie with some great scenes of LA but that would never happen.

Lightning Field by Dana Spiotta

Three women navigate LA

Mina, apparently the only woman who walks in Los Angeles, has an unfilled marriage and somehow, considering how passive she is, manages to pick up two lovers, who also leave her unfulfilled. She is employed by Lorena, her schizophrenic brother’s ex-lover. Lorena is a lifestyle consultant who establishes decadent theme restaurants, where, for example, waitresses are assigned the floor based on their astrological chart. Finally, there is downmarket fearful mom Lisa, who cleans Lorena’s house. These three characters drift through an LA where people straightfacedly espouse the trendiest of ideas, and film industry hangers on try to repeat the successes of famous artists of the past.

The prose style is a little hard to follow – there’s a lot of characters in a fairly short book. I kept getting the women mixed up (Maybe I was supposed to?) Many of the same themes here are also in Spiotta's Stone Arabia: the terror of child murders, the aimlessness of LA, the mental illness, the close yet painfully unbridgeable proximity to fame. Those themes, however, have far more emotional resonance and, in fact, beauty, in Stone Arabia. Lightning Field feels slighter, like thin gruel. This wasn’t quite realism yet never quite launched into surrealism. It’s like a satire of LA. The book also reminded me of Less Than Zero, though the attitude here was more whimsical, not so deadly serious.

The Five Acts of Diego Leon by Alex Espinoza

A Mexican boy comes to Hollywood to become a movie star

Diego Leon, an orphaned half Indian boy, is sent away to his rich grandparents’ house during the time of the Mexican Revolution.  After being groomed to take over his patrician grandfather’s legal business and becoming engaged to a devout young heiress, Diego chucks this preordained life away and leaves for Hollywood to pursue his love of acting.  Once in Hollywood, he is looked down upon because he is Mexican.  Diego sweeps floors, then get a few roles as an extra, then meets a handsome producer.  Suddenly he starts getting bigger parts.  The producer grows tired of him, but eventually Diego, in his final film, perhaps learns to act at last.

The structure is simple – five big chunks. Diego the mestizo living in the Indian village, Diego the young bourgeois living in the city, Diego the immigrant sweeping the floor of a LA café, Diego the struggling actor, and Diego the quasi movie star. The opening part of the novel, set in the Indian village, was truly compelling, and I was gripped wondering what would happen to the boy.  However, after that, the plotting is pretty much nonexistent, the scenes lined up like train cars one after the other, rather than having the events in one scene trigger the next.  The dialogue is expository.  The main problem is that Diego Leon is a robot being pushed along the path of his life.  Is he gay or straight – that seems to be a conflict every so often he encounterse.  He doesn’t seem to consistently feel any lust (either for bodies or for achievements) and I’m not so sure that conforms to real life.  Also, his prime motivation is to be a famous actor, but again, I’m not sure why.

The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr

A man ponders his wasted life

Jun Nakayama, a Japanese actor who possessed a smoldering eroticism on the silent film screens of the past, is invited to audition for a movie. But much has happened in the forty years since his last role, including the wartime interment of the Japanese and the mysterious brutal murder of a popular director. The highlights of Jun’s elderly life are his mountain hikes and studious avoidance of regret. As Jun considers whether to take the part, he revisits the long ago incident which caused him to quit acting. As part of the process of remembering, he meets with his former colleagues, the silent film stars of the past.

Now I’ve had two books in a row with people driving around a specific landscape interviewing people who were witnesses to a traumatic event. Nominally, Jun is trying to find out the chances that his “secret” will leak; the reader is trying to find out what this secret is. The reader is also trying to find out why Jun quit not only his career, but quit on life. That question is never fully answered. Was it racism? Was it sexual fear? Is he afraid of his own emotions? The problem for me was that I didn’t care what happened to Jun – his voice is so restrained and passionless I find it hard to buy that he was a successful actor. And the violent murder at the core of the novel lacks emotional resonance or motivation.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

A hardboiled private detective is disgusted by the depraved activities of the rich

Philip Marlowe takes pity on Terry Lennox, a drunk needing a ride home. Knowing he should walk away, he doesn’t, and provides assistance a few months later when Lennox is on the lam for the murder of his cheating wife. Once Lennox “commits suicide” in Mexico, Marlowe is warned off the case by representatives of powerful Angelenos, but will not comply. Later, he is hired by a beautiful woman to be the caretaker of her alcoholic author husband. Both husband and wife have a connection to the murdered woman. More characters meet a violent end with Marlowe just happening to be in the vicinity. There’s also a twist at the conclusion.

There’s something of a classical structure to this tale, as Marlowe minds his own business, yet still is visited three times by people warning him off the case. He doesn’t listen, but makes his own way. Marlowe is a truth teller, a misanthrope, outraged at society’s injustices. He’s also practically a socialist. Some pages in this novel are devoted to police brutality and how the police and the district attorney are in the pockets of the rich who run the town.

There’s a hallucinogenic quality to some of the scenes, with surreal dialogue, an example being the crazy drinking of the vodka gimlets with Mrs. Loring. Marlowe describes himself as “The pearl onion on the banana split.” This book gets a lot of energy from observing the human comedy, such as the dopey Ronald Reaganesque sheriff. Sexism and racism are flamboyantly present. This book felt qualitatively more literary than The Big Sleep – guess Chandler was hitting his groove, although the end was confusing, silly and not at all plausible. But isn’t that the point?

Off Course by Michelle Huneven

A promising young woman gets distracted by her affair with an older married man

In the early eighties, Cressida Hartley retreats to her parents’ Sierra A-frame to finish her dissertation, though it's not very long before the isolated charming but hickish town starts to suck her in. She has a quick affair with life-loving bar owner, Jakey, but is taken aback when he turns out to be promiscuous. Later she meets the quiet hyper-masculine carpenter Quinn Morrow, at first becoming his walking companion, then the recipient of his gifts of house made bacon. Next there is a kiss and after that there is a full blown affair that shakes his marriage to the core, scandalizing the town. Quinn and Cressida keep trying to break up, but Quinn bounces between his much loved loyal wife and much loved exciting mistress. Only Cressida, not Quinn, feels the extreme disapproval from the other townsfolk. Instead of hightailing it out of the mountains and salvaging her professorial career, she moons around the redwoods as a waitress, wasting years of her life. It’s clear by the end of the book, while Cressida is nominally happy, she has never recovered from the drama of loving Quinn.

Like Huneven’s earlier novel Blame, the themes of time and what is the meaning of life slowly sneak up on you. I kept thinking, well, the activities of these people are interesting but the stakes are low, than I realized, no, the stakes are actually quite high. Cressida is wasting her life. Slow and steadily in a series of tiny decisions but the consequences are huge.

Huneven is really talented at world creation.  She brings to life this mountain town with its social hierarchies, quaint entertainments (singing and dancing but also adultery and alcoholism). The lives of the town people are correspondingly stunted, though they all seem very comfortable in their beautiful bubble.  The mountain people despise LA, of course. Their parties are hilarious, as is the depiction of Cressida’s eccentric family. Although after a while the people in the town started to run together – Dee Dee, Donna – were they the same lady? Candy?

The twist ending is very believable, just because it happens all the time.

Middle Men by Jim Gavin

What makes a man a man

I enjoyed this book of full bodied generous stories about SoCal men with a liking for Del Taco and predilection for bad choices. Many of these stories I had already read in the little magazines, and unfortunately, for a few, the second reading was a bit duller than the first. But for the remainder I had a deepening appreciation. Los Angeles is the setting for most of them, the freeways and the palm trees and the loquacious dreamers. The standard plot is a dopey LA mick (frankly I didn’t even know that those existed) confronting the world’s cruelties and idiocies. At a certain point the man/boy has to decide if he wants to and if he is capable of growing up. Finally, the stories are funny.

I didn’t really like Elephant Doors – news flash – big Hollywood producer is a douche bag. I liked Bermuda about a good hearted kid who follows an older slightly crazy woman to Bermuda. The vivid settings and the dialogue were wonderful and in the middle the story took off in a completely different direction. I preferred the stories that had more of a plot to them rather than heavily evocative descriptions of meatheads. I also liked Bewildered Decisions in the Time of Mercantile Terror about a crazy guy in Berkeley leaning on his very sane cousin. The final “story” is a two part novella about a father son pair of plumbing salesmen, the father very good at his trade and the son not good at all.  Each grieves in his own way for the dead wife and mother. It’s about people scrimping and saving for the American dream. Will they even recognize it once they have it?

Loving Hands At Home by Diane Johnson

Being the perfect wife is stressful.

Karen Fry is a young wife and mother in Brentwood during the 1960’s. But it is clear, especially to herself, that Karen falls woefully short of the high homemaking standards expected by her Latter Day Saints in-laws. Partly to get away from their opprobrium, she takes her two small children on afternoon trips around LA, applying for wacky jobs, such as receptionist in a cat hotel and fortune teller on Santa Monica Pier. Little by little, however, she learns her conventional in-laws, especially the wives, have some strong internal pressures needing release. Also, she and her brother-in-law begin a strange affair.

Reading this makes me very glad I wasn’t a wife in the 60s. It doesn’t sound like that great a time for women. Or at least for women’s self expression. I wanted to read an early Diane Johnson novel, mostly for historical reasons, but then after I had finished the first chapter I thought, Another wonderful Diane Johnson book. The scenes are “zany," satirical and full of high energy.  Also, there is a classic Johnson BIG scene at the end which ends up with Karen and the kids moving to live in a mail truck at the beach. The final image is that of an “extraordinary, inspired sand castle” she and the children have built.

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Teen depravity in LA

Clay, an 18 year old on his Christmas break from a New England college, revisits his Beverly Hills haunts with his high school friends, witnessing excessive materiality and blatant soullessness. This was a close cousin, an echo even, of Play It As It Lays, both in lyrical prose style, and shell shocked attitude, but the stakes in this particular story were minuscule. In Play It As It Lays, Maria is dealing with a mentally ill child, a botched abortion and truly evil people. Eighteen year old Clay is dealing with too many toys and the sentimental memory of Granma’s cancer. Scenes grew boring, ripe for parody. The little jerks his friends are ridiculous, though I kept reading, compelled because this was the rare novel, debut novel especially, that got better as it went on. Clay’s adventures around West LA built to a climax. A climax of horror, really. However, ultimately the stakes may have been too low. The writing is assured and clever, but I had trouble telling all the characters (the little brats especially) apart.  I will read more of Ellis, however.

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

A drunk bucks the system for as long as he can stand

This book was hilarious. Henry Chinaski is a heroic parasite, a real man who won't take any bullshit and lives life the way he wants. Chinaski’s ethics are entirely self serving but honest and the book is a giant fuck you to middle class values, as well as to the entire capitalist system. On the other hand, a steady paycheck comes in handy, especially because Chinaski likes drinking so much.  Therefore he takes the postal service test, and is not at all surprised when he is the one of one hundred who survives the difficult address memorization portion. Chinaski gets the steady paycheck, but the tougher challenge is submitting to the massive soul crushing bureaucracy.  The rebel manages to outfox them for several years before finally surrendering. Was this is the first literary example of “going postal”?  

Our hero Chinaski rejects every value that made America great and has zero intention of bettering himself. What he does when he’s not sorting mail is to drink to a stupor and gamble on horseraces. There are two moments of tenderness in the entire (short) novel; the first when he attends the deathbed and funeral of a former lover who dies of alcoholism, and the other when he gaze on his very unlikely daughter.  But there's something admirable in his uncompromising path, however degrading it is.

Like other LA novels, torrential downpours play a part, as delivering rain in the mail is a lot harder than in the sunshine. The book is also a romance to getting drunk – although how much of a derelict can one be while holding a civil service job?  Eventually, his misbehaviors and disrespectful attitude catches up with him and he is hounded into quitting. In order to write a novel. But is Post Office even a novel? After only a little research it sounds like it was practically a memoir.

Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena Maria Viramontes

Four teenage girls come of age in 1960’s East LA.

I like reading about teenage girls, the 1960’s and LA, so for the most part, I was absorbed by this strange incantatory book. The novel tells the stories of four strong young women: Turtle, the tall girl disguised as a boy, disgusted by her femininity; Ana, the protector of a schizophrenic brother; Ermila the orphan tempted by lust; and Tranquilina, the holy girl who helps her family feed the homeless. Sadness permeates the pages. I hesitate to call this a novel, as a novel implies a journey between point A and point B, and these girls never really meet, except for a page or two at the end. Rather, the structure here is Point A, Point A, Point A... About a fifth of the way through, I thought, when is all this stuff coming together? About halfway through, I realized, it’s not. The narrative sequence was tragic slice of life after tragic slice of life, and the “chapters” don’t even function as short stories. It would have been better if the characters had a problem to solve apart from Fate crushing their hopes. But still I cared about these girls and kept reading.

I would also describe this book as a lyrical history of East LA, and I was consistently entertained by the descriptive though somewhat “writerly” writing. There’s a hallucinatory feel to the endeavor – like what is the Quarantine Authority, these police-like figures keeping the inhabitants trapped in East LA – did that actually happen? Were the police controlling for the spread of rabies – so why then when Ermila gets bitten by a dog, is she so matter of fact about it? Was the reader supposed to be concerned about her? The ending is frankly incoherent and lacks the emotional resonance it was probably supposed to carry.

If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes

In WWII Los Angeles, a black man is driven to the brink of madness by racism

This was a spare powerful book. In vivid economical scenes, with no wasted dialogue, Himes paints a picture of working class LA, a book in which the headlong plot supports a social commentary. The entire story takes place over a few days. The angry narrator, Bob Jones, is a black welder in a booming shipyard, where poor Southern whites compete for jobs with poor Southern blacks. Bob, who is always at pains to let people know he’s from Ohio, not the ignorant South, lives each day in a constant state of rage because of the contempt and insults he must swallow if he wants to earn a living. Bob has been promoted to crew chief of an all black crew. When Madge, a racist southern woman, calls him a nigger, he calls her a cracker bitch and gets demoted.  Rounding off his day, the Southern white men beat him for insulting a white woman. The rest of the story is Bob struggling with his desire for murderous revenge (which he knows full well will mean his own extinction), as well as his sexual curiosity about Madge. (He’s right in thinking she’s a little sexually curious about him too.) Meanwhile, Bob (who is not the monogamous type) has a light skinned girlfriend, Alice, from one of the top black families in LA. She urges him to go to law school, to accept the reality of their subordinate situation and have patience that it will eventually improve. But Bob is unable to emotionally accept a second class status, needs his revenge, and therefore the plot comes to an unsurprising head. The ending, where Bob is saved by an implausible twist, felt opportune.

The book asks other questions: Should you fight and go down in flames still retaining your pride or do you submit to injustice and live?  Alice counsels that they will only be happy if they live their lives privately – quietly accept their inferior status in public, but save their real feelings, their real fulfillment, for private. Bob seems to agree with her, but then provocation after provocation cause him to lash out. The most powerful scene in the book was the scene where he humiliates Alice by taking her to the Biltmore only to find out, as Alice knows full well and he suspects, that the Biltmore doesn't want colored patrons.  She prefers to ignore her second class status and he won’t let her.

The narrator is so angry (at whites and at women) that it’s amazing that the book is filled with insights, about men and women, about anger, about sex, and about the different levels of Los Angeles society. Despite his intellectual knowledge, Bob still walks right into the traps laid for him.  At the end of the book, things feel truly hopeless.

Lithium for Medea by Kate Braverman

An anxious young woman makes the decision to tear herself from LA

Rose, the emotionally neglected child of a monstrous egomaniacal mother, and an older hardboiled gambler, is a true child of LA. Rejecting her mother’s materialistic lifestyle, she flees to Berkeley where she enters into a marriage to a perpetual graduate student/mentally ill Trekkie. Rose gets divorced and returns to LA, only to fall into a relationship with the monstrous egomanic Jason, who needs her dependent on him, and dependent upon his injections of cocaine. This novel is the story of her breaking free from the entanglements of family, love and the city.

This truly is an LA novel, (maybe West LA novel).  The most distinctive thing about Lithium for Medea was the absolutely beautiful prose. The sentences were simple and lyrical, with highly evocative descriptions of plants and flowers. Reading this was like opening up chest after chest filled with pearls. When I was done, I kept searching the book at random to read paragraphs, and without exception, they were all astonishing.  The limpid prose, however, illuminates a sordid (even petty) story.

The unsympathetic nature of virtually every single character, including Rose, could be a problem. If this were a movie script, the producer would say, Couldn’t you give her a puppy? (Give her a pet? No, think not).  Plot points are studded through the marvelous descriptions: Dad gets cancer, letters arrive from a half mad cousin, Rose starts to gather her self respect vis à vis Jason. I kept thinking, who has that little self esteem to stay with such a colossal jerk? The stakes, however, are ultimately low. Rose must save herself, but I couldn’t fully go on the emotional journey with Rose.

The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez by John Rechy

Amalia Gomez walks around Hollywood anticipating and dreading a miracle.

This deceptively simple novel is a character study, and unlike Madame Bovary or Mildred Pierce, this particular character study is not fused to a conventional plot. (Amalia’s story, however, might be fused to a theme – a pointedly political one). Amalia Gomez, the smart but uneducated Mexican-American daughter of El Paso, proud US Citizen, mother of three deeply unhappy children, supports her family with a variety of low end jobs and liaisons with different men. Her life, from the beginning, has been tough. An abusive father, abusive husbands, crappy jobs, society looking down on her because of her brown skin. The people who pass her in the street don’t really “see” her. Amalia endures because of her toughness, her vitality, and her faith/superstition. She never questions her painful life. The “plot” is Amalia spending a day in Hollywood, from East to West, a sealed letter in her purse she dreads to open. In scene after scene, we experience Amalia’s daily life, her interactions with her man, her children, and her coworkers at the garment factory. In between the day’s events, Amalia has almost uniformly unhappy memories of her past.

Amalia herself does not make dumb decisions.   Rather she is a victim of the culture – the profound passivity required by women which has caused her not to question the unrelenting pain she has experienced and expects. Her gritty life is contrasted with the silly glittering stories of the telenovelas and Amalia’s emotional devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The writing is vivid and alive. I really felt inside Amalia’s head. This is a portrait of a person and a time. I laughed with delight at the end – all that walking took her to the Beverly Center, and a finale right out of a telenovela.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

One too many tragedies sends a woman over the edge

Maria (Mar-eye-ah) Wyeth, a 31 year old failing actress living in Beverly Hills, starts behaving in self destructive ways. The institutionalization of her young daughter has contributed directly to her divorce from Carter, a hot movie director. However, it is Hollywood, so the strange behavior doesn’t raise that many alarms. As the novel goes on, one horrible thing after another happens to Maria. Overwhelmed, she lets it happen without direct protest.

The writing is tremendous, crazy and hilarious, all about the telling detail, compulsively readable, so that the reader completely buys being in Maria’s crazy head, although the reader is also expected to pay attention enough to figure out what exactly is going on with the plot. The dialogue as characterization is wonderful. Didion keeps it mysterious, at first. The organizing principle is gambling. “I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last.” A classically optimistic American (Californian?) position. But lately that philosophy hasn't been working too well for Maria. She copes by stumbling through Hollywood like a zombie.

The story is familiar, perhaps even hackneyed. A beautiful girl from a rural Eden gets transported to Hollywood. She has a fairytale marriage, a beautiful blonde baby, a nascent career as a movie star – then, everything falls apart. Her daughter has a severe mental illness, which puts Maria in agony. Her primary motive in the book is to help her child but her child is beyond help, so Maria numbs her feelings.

Carelessly, also numbly, she gets pregnant. Her ex-husband arranges the illegal abortion. Huge chunks of this novel concern the abortion and Maria’s subsequent horror of bloody fetal parts clogging the drains. She’s so traumatized she can’t react. At night, she tries to comfort herself with peaceful images of her and her daughter and her lover at the beach eating mussels. During daytime, she realizes it’s a fantasy.

I’m not sure that this novel is a fully realized realistic portrait of society. The husband is a two timing villain. And the female friends are monsters.  Near the end, the plot gets to be like the perils of Pauline. I was like come on, she's getting raped too? I could feel sympathy for Carter’s exasperation.

She never tries to make sense of what’s happening to her. But she never gives up either.

Ask the Dust by John Fante

Portrait of the artist as a young dago

It was fortuitous I ended up reading this book right after the actual Portrait of The Artist.  Both books concern the same subject, the devout Mama’s boy who intends to be a genius. Except one book is a masterpiece with insights pertaining to all humanity and the other is an exhilarating yet dated snapshot of LA in the Thirties. Cartoony but in a good way.

Ask the Dust is about Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer from Colorado (i.e., a hick), who’s published one story, The Little Dog Laughed.  He has come to LA to make his fortune and spends most of his time daydreaming about that fortune, handing out unwanted copies of The Little Dog Laughed and eating cheap oranges. He goes to a bar for a cup of bad coffee and falls in the love with the waitress Camilla Lopez. They have a weird relationship – he is terribly mean to her and she is terribly mean to him. But apparently they have initiated a grand love affair. Meanwhile there is an earthquake in Long Beach.

The novel is unmistakably funny with visual and dialogue gags. Arturo Bandini is an egomaniac, and the other characters, such as the hilarious landlady, are seen in telling bursts, but they lack dimension, they have no roots extending into Bandini’s soul. We see the start of the Left Coast, peopled by eccentrics who moved here from calmer burgs. Fante's downtown LA is filled with fruits and nuts.  

I was under the misapprehension that nobody had casual sex before 1964 but this book and Mildred Pierce have shown me otherwise. Although Arturo Bandini, unlike Stephen Dedulus, seems to suffer from a detumescing case of Catholic guilt.

Also, what kind of marijuana does Camilla smoke? It sends her to the mental hospital and is depicted by Arturo as if she is shooting meth. I also liked the somewhat hopeless ending.

Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

The rise and fall (and rise again?) of an American woman

I thought this would be light popular reading, musty perhaps, but instead I was impressed by this character study.  The book is also a glimpse into a particular culture (Los Angeles) at a particular time (the Depression). Mildred Pierce, abandoned by her kindly ineffectual husband, desperately needs money in order to keep a roof over the heads of her children. She swallows her pride and becomes a waitress, then uses her pie making skills, supplemented by her shapely legs, gradually to reinvent herself as a wealthy woman. Her unreasonable devotion to her dreadful "artistic" daughter, Veda, however, ultimately causes her world to collapse.

I didn't love the book, however. It had a coldness for me, as I kept anticipating the anvil floating above Mildred's head.  Mildred needs money though Mildred has a weakness for handsome weakish men.  You root for Mildred Pierce because she's a go getter, she won't be beaten down. That part was typically American, and in some ways, since Mildred Pierce is unmoored, unchurched, typically Los Angeles. She gets her kids' names from a psychic.

The book is a study not only of just one woman, but of productive friendships between women and hierarchal enmity between women. Women bail Mildred Pierce out and she helps them in return, provides the best outlet for their talents. I'm not sure if the mother/daughter plot fit in that well with the pulling herself up by the bootstraps plot.  I didn't quite buy Mildred's behavior on behalf of Veda. Unless Veda is the idealized version of Mildred, the weapon she sends into high society to have her revenge.

The plotting was wonderful, unforced, except at the end when the soap opera like plot twists hurt my neck and harmed the story.  Until that point the novel was a naturalistic character study with planted interjections of shocking nudity and casual sex (and I was in fact shocked at how quickly Mildred falls into bed with men). At the end, however, the believability of Veda's operatic success become suspect.

Is Mildred Pierce a monster? Not at all. She strikes me as an efficient manager. She does what she has to do. Unlike Madame Bovary, she cannot rely on men for money, as the upper class men she sleeps with (Bert her husband and Monty her lover) are completely useless (financially, that is) after the Depression wiped away their wealth. So instead of taking rat poison after her world collapses, Mildred just "gets stinko" and lights the oven for more pie baking. Again, typically American.

The most spectacular scene in the book is the New Year's Eve party in the colossal downpour. Only a woman would do that, right, not be deterred by washed out roads to attend a party. An extremely vivid and well written scene.

There's also some humorous parts for someone reading the book in 2012. Mildred is always dashing between Pasadena and Newport Beach-- nowadays that would be about three hours each way.

 

 

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

What is honor?  

I had no idea this book was so good.   I thought it would be stupid.  The first chapter was amazing, establishing the impressive Sternwood mansion, the suffocating hothouse preserving the decrepit old man, the two corrupt girls. The hero, Philip Marlowe, educated private detective, is hired by General Sternwood, the dying oil magnate, to discover who's been blackmailing him on account of his two beautiful wayward daughters. Carmen, the younger, clearly has a screw loose, and Vivian, the older smarter one, seems to be hiding something. Numerous shootings and car chases follow.  Nearly every woman he encounters has a soft spot for tall dark Marlowe.

Chandler's strength is description, and it was entertaining reading about LA and Hollywood in the 1940's. Rialto is farmland here, orange groves, not acres of housing like it is now. The writing is deadpan and funny and even though the dialogue is sometimes hampered by obsolete slang it moves the story along and is witty. The book is a very easy read.

Philip Marlowe is still a little shocked at how fallen the world is. What are principles? Some low down people seem to have them, and some high class people definitely don't. The family story provides the motivations here. The Sternwoods are trying to protect each other and Marlowe is trying to protect the Sternwoods. To a degree.

Certain elements haven't stood the test of time. The porn library on Hollywood Boulevard is funny now - the criminalization of stuff available immediately on the Internet. Also, a key part of the plot reminded me of The Sound and The Fury, in that the premise rests on a nutty concept of female sexuality. About a third of the way through, the story degenerates into a welter of dames shooting guns and having fits, and the novel stopped making narrative sense. Also, I am stumped by Marlowe falling in love with Mona Mars who he has apparently known for two minutes.

But I will definitely read more Chandler.

 

The Necessary Hunger by Nina Revoyr

A high school basketball player suffers from unrequited love

This novel was strangely compelling, even though it was "about" schoolgirl basketball and I don't have that much of an interest in schoolgirl basketball. But the book didn't concern games and practices and sneakers, not really.  It was about a girl in love with another girl, and how the girl cannot bring herself to say so. The love story pulled me along, the way that Nancy is trapped, has no power over her love. In addition, the novel offers a glimpse into another world, a world not usually seen in literary novels-- African American 1980's LA, a background of endless freeways, carjacking and Laker championships.

Nancy Takahiro, 17 year old basketball phenom from Inglewood, is in love with Raina, the 17 year old star guard from a rival high school. It so happens (and this is handled believably), that Nancy's dad and Raina's mom are in love and move into together. The girls become housemates. Nothing much happens in the novel after that. Nancy pines, they drink a lot of beer, their respective teams win until they meet in the championship where Raina pulls a Isaiah Thomas bonehead style pass. Racial tensions, homosexual tensions, are in the background of this novel, not the foreground. These kids really don't know they're poor.

The novel is about 25% baggier than it needs to be.  We may need to know all the players on Nancy's team, but do we really need to know all the players on Raina's team?  At the end it bogged down, the emotions unsupported, but Nancy with her blind strivings, her passion for Raina, keeps the reader interested. Raina, however, is essentially unknowable. I guess that's what makes her the love object.

 

 

 

 

How To Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak

A lonely immigrant to LA tries to find out what's inside a private Russian nightclub

So called Anya, Polish born, but brought to this country as a child, comes to LA, and is fascinated by the garish Twin Palms nightclub next door to her run down West Hollywood apartment. She is determined to see inside, and, with a blunt direct seduction, chooses club goer Lev, a middle aged Russian wise guy, as her "boyfriend." Lev is all too happy to use Anya for sex but not much else. When Lev puts her in her place, she turns to a drastic solution.

There were echoes here of Burning, Diane Johnson's novel of LA eccentrics who continue in their sun baked eccentricity even as their mansions go up in smoke. I think in both novels there is an underlying editorial approval, Sodom and Gomorrah style, that LA going up in smoke is a fine conclusion. Waclawiak has an appealing deadpan prose style that works well as Anya encounters the Russians next door; Lev's wife and her nasty friends; Mary, the eccentric Bingo lady, (who in her life has experienced true love).  The characters are vivid and lively.

Anya's motivations confused me a little, however. Why does she want to get into the Twin Palms? It seemed very tacky. Why does she pursue Lev? He really seems tacky - though manly and animalistic. I didn't understand the fascination. I assume it was a sort of deranged lust, but then again Anya finds all human excretions disgusting and parts of the book are nauseating. In a literary way, of course.

I sense the real emotional story lies with Anya's Polish mother left behind in Texas and their strained phone conversations. The real immigrant's story of leaving family and culture behind. And also Anya's relationship with Mary, the chippy bingo lady and the tale of her lost love. The conflagration at the end felt a little tacked on.