BOOK REVIEW : Attempting to...

When we sit down with a collection of regional stories, we make the assumption that we are going to come away with a composite image of a specific geographic/cultural space that imprinted itself on the writers we are reading. That is the whole point of putting together a collection with a regional bias.

Unfortunately, neither “Great California Stories” nor “Los Angeles Stories” succeeds very well in offering definition to that immense hyper-reality that the 16th-Century Spanish writer Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo dubbed “California” (“on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Earthly Paradise”), or to its most intense area of congregation, the sprawling, polluted, overpopulated and under-watered dream dump later Spaniards called the “City of Angels.” Indeed, how could they?

A. Grove Day, editor of “Great California Stories,” tells us its contents have been selected “to convey the breadth and varieties of the state,” with particular attention to settings and to gathering a multiplicity of cultural perspectives. He’s bitten off a nearly impossible chew, because California is simply too broad and various to be captured by a handful of writers in a couple dozen works of fiction.

As anyone who lives on the coast knows, Humboldt, Trinity and Shasta counties to the north are geophysically on a different planet from Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties in the center; not to mention Kern, Los Angeles and Orange counties to the south. Coastal, Central Valley and Sierran communities are culturally and topographically about as similar as Kansas, Alabama and Vermont.

And we are talking here just about physical geography. The California of the mind, as Joan Didion once observed, “is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.” Try documenting that.

Pieces by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London and Idwal Jones give us a peek at life in the gold country during the latter half of the 19th Century. John Steinbeck, Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Janet Lewis impart something of the coastal range environment, mid-20th Century; Wallace Stegner and Danny Santiago take us into the Los Angeles barrios, circa 1956 and 1970, in the two most recent works in the collection.

Much of the work in “Great California Stories” is standard anthology fare (such as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”), and not all of it is indeed “great.” Bierce, London, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Edwin Corle do not hold up so well over time.

“Endlessly fascinating, glamorous and amazing, Los Angeles is revealed in all its glory in ‘Los Angeles Stories,’ ” says the dust jacket on this collection. Without debating its assumptions, one is compelled to observe that there are few “stories” (as in short stories) in this gathering; in fact, there is only F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Crazy Sunday.”

Everything else that resembles fiction is excerpted from novels as diverse in time and temperament as Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona” (1884), Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust” (1939) and Charles Bukowski’s “Hollywood” (1989).

The rest of the collection is taken from the memoirs of such folks as Oscar Zeta Acosta (the model for Hunter Thompson’s “Dr. Gonzo”), Henry Miller and Sarah Bixby Smith; from the Charles Brackett-Billy Wilder-D. M. Marshman Jr. screenplay for “Sunset Boulevard,” and from poetry collections by Sam Shepard and Tom Clark.

There also is a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by Raymond Chandler on “Writers in Hollywood” (by far the best piece in this anthology), and a selection from something described in the author’s credits as “a sort of book version” of the TV series “Dragnet” by Jack (Joe Friday) Webb.

The endless clippings and extractings are irritating but might be justified if they really served the principle of selection, to wit, the revelation of Los Angeles “in all its glory.” But they don’t.

Some reveal Hollywood in all of its . . . whatever (glory does not come to mind). But if the point is to offer a literary image of that incredibly polyglot city of varying lifestyles and economic levels, then “Los Angeles Stories” is singularly unsuccessful.

This is not entirely the fault of its editor. Los Angeles is not going to be captured in 153 pages. Even if the work of the writers chosen to define it were more fully represented, Los Angeles, like California, is very hard to find. In fact, it may not exist at all.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Subway Lives” by Jim Dwyer (Crown) .