Tales of the city

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I’m not sure what FourStory really is — a website dedicated (in its own words) to “fact-based housing advocacy with a human perspective” or an online magazine. The site, which went live Sunday, features a manifesto and a few loose personal pieces about the vagaries of city living, but the real draw is the first installment of “The Underbelly,” a new serialized crime novella by Gary Phillips, author of the Ivan Monk mysteries (among other books) and a longtime activist in L.A.

“The Underbelly” is not political fiction per se — except in the sense that all of Phillips’ work is political, deeply rooted in his own sense of community — but it does encompass both downtown development and grass-roots advocacy, all filtered through the story of a Skid Row murder that reverberates in unexpected ways.

It’s not clear how often new installments will appear, but it’s worth checking out because Phillips is a true Los Angeles original, a local, born and raised, with a nuanced sense of the layers of the city, of how it works at the level of its neighborhoods. (Full disclosure: He has written, on occasion, for The Times and Book Review.)

His writing also offers a compelling example of the way fiction can touch on larger concerns. I don’t know what this means in terms of “gentrification, tenants’ rights and smart growth,” as FourStory frames it, but if “The Underbelly” has anything to tell us, it’s that Los Angeles remains a character in its own ongoing drama, a city (to borrow a phrase from Raymond Chandler) “no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”

David L. Ulin