L.A. and Other Fictions : Post-Riot, Mid-Recession and Pre-Apocalypse, Novelists Are Finally Closing the Gap Between This Town's Illusion and Reality. And The News Is Not <i> All</i> Bad.

By NINA J. EASTON

Sept. 5, 1993 12 AM PT

Nina J. Easton is the magazine's staff writer. Her last article was "Shinto Meets Chanel," about the crown prince and princess of Japan

WE BEGIN WITH THE PALMS, TOWering imperiously over Beverly Drive, lazily looping MacArthur Park, silently swaying to the beat of Pasadena’s Rose Parade as frigid Easterners look on enviously.

We begin with the palms because they so often do, the storytellers who bottle the essence of Southern California, spraying its seductive mist on the rest of the world.

Like its chaotic citizenry, most of Southern California’s palms are recent transplants, squatters on the natural flora. They give no food or shade, they just punctuate the skyline. Yet fiction has transformed them into the symbol of this urban desert--of its promise for escape, for new beginnings, for winter sunshine and acquired beauty and easy wealth. In L.A. literature, the palms were once as crisp and alluring as a David Hockney painting. Palm trees and pools. Sex and glamour and a dash of mystery. A Hollywood set, to be sure, but one that felt authentic because the palm trees in the backdrop were real.

Somehow, it seemed fitting that in the lootings and fires that crushed this city’s already waning confidence, palm trees were torched. When the smoke finally cleared, a local official reported that most of the damaged palms would survive. “You can burn almost the whole tree and it still grows back,” he said in a metaphor of hope for the entire city.

After the self-deluding highs of the ‘80s, hope has run short. The best fiction writers, with their innate ability to pierce through the clutter of everyday life, have been capturing that anguished pessimism in story, often flashing warning signs well before the recession and last year’s uprisings. And, like their predecessors, these chroniclers of contemporary life in Southern California often begin with the palms.

But in the latest round of L.A. fiction, the trees have lost their sheen; they are dirty, ragged, tired. “For more than a century, they have pushed themselves up into the sun and in the end, frail and deformed, utterly debased, found nothing,” Kate Braverman writes in “Palm Latitudes.” Braverman’s Latina heroine finds cynical comfort in the destruction left by the Santa Ana winds, “the stillness in the mornings . . . after the winds have ripped the palms, made confetti of the pale listless fronds, dragged their anemic sun-drained fronds to the ground. Then the city has been purified. The calligraphy is obvious. . . . God is saying the party is over.”

In this year’s “Chimney Rock,” Charlie Smith’s Los Angeles reeks of decay. So do the trees. “The palm trees and the eucalyptus trees and the paloverde bushes beside the little Mexican urban rancheros were dusty, and the pale linen and chrome buildings were dusty. . . . The trees lining the street, the junipers and the jacarandas, were eaten along the bottoms, the crowns of the date palms picketing the median looked exhausted above their shabby gray skirts. The green world is dying everywhere, but out here in the desert, death has its own quality.”

Yet the green world is not entirely dead. Patios are still fragrant with the scent of orange blossoms by day and jasmine by night. The same ocean breeze takes the edge off the sun and sends musty spices blowing in off the canyons. But the talk has turned sour, not just over smog and traffic and overcrowding. Now it’s carjackings and shootings and fortunes lost in real estate. It is real, and it is not. It doesn’t matter. What matters in this image-crazed land is what we choose to see when we look in the mirror, and right now that mirror is cracked.

WE BEGIN WITH THE PALMS, AND THEN WE MOVE ON. TO DISCOVER WHAT the writers of the golden land’s mythology are saying about its present and future, this story surveys five years of literature based in L.A., broadly defined here as Southern California. The focus is on fiction with a distinctly regional flavor, stories that would lose their identity if set against any other backdrop.

One purpose of this exercise may be to heed the warnings of these visionaries--about the drift, the detachment from community, the chaos so often simmering underneath the surface lives we live. At the same time, though, it is fair to question whether any body of work has successfully captured what “Among the Dead” author Michael Tolkin calls the “mundane truths” of Southern California life, the everyday pains and stories hidden beneath the dramas that sell.

Consumed with the melodrama and amorality of Hollywood (as many writers since Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald have been) or with the underbelly of crime (a tradition upheld by Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy wannabes) or with the ferocity of the land’s elements (Joan Didion’s Santa Ana winds bore the seeds of insanity), L.A. literature has been largely bereft of less mythical tales. It’s almost as if the dark family secrets that inspired Southern writers don’t exist here, as if the Northeastern suburban angst that captured John Updike’s imagi nation turned trivial once it was transported to Southern California’s sun-drenched cul-de-sacs.

Southern California is a population that speaks more than 80 languages. It’s a place where writer Russell Leong can realistically transform a tract house off the Garden Grove Freeway into a Buddhist temple, a haven for his Vietnamese character, a man of water “born in the Delta plains between the Red and Black Rivers” but transported to this desert of “jerry-built towns of plastic pipe and drywall.” To author John Rechy, it’s a place where a vision from God appearing over the Hollywood sign can be just as real, just as comforting to Amalia Gomez--who survives in a world of empty pockets, gang violence and revolving-door husbands--as the bougainvilleas in front of her stucco bungalow. Rechy’s novel “The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez” and Leong’s short story “Geography One” represent the diversity of stories that ring true in 1990s L.A.

But most of the Southern California fiction that New York publishers choose to buy and promote most heavily is written by and about Anglos, the richer the better. Some local black writers, such as Walter Mosley, author of popular detective novels set in 1950s Watts, have managed to capture the attention of publishers. Still, with the “black story” typecast in Southern or New York accents, L.A.’s African-American writers stand a better chance of getting a Hollywood agent than a literary agent. To most American readers, L.A. is Hollywood or Beverly Hills (usually the brand found in Jackie Collins or Pat Booth novels), less often the Latino worlds of Echo Park or Boyle Heights and rarer still the middle-class suburbs of Fullerton or Torrance or Northridge.

Raymond Chandler’s L.A. was an intriguing and sometimes literate city. That image was long ago replaced by the L.A. that is rich and vain, where wealthy men and women patched together with collagen and sleeked by liposuction go apoplectic over flabby triceps. To outsiders, it is still the city where the “reading span is sorely stretched by the instructions on microwave popcorn,” a description used by Richard Powers in his 1993 novel “Operation Wandering Soul.” It’s a city where people find intellectual fulfillment on “Entertainment Tonight” and spiritual fulfillment in the fast lane. To insiders, it’s a bit more complicated. Or maybe we’re just defensive.

Southern California has never enjoyed a particularly warm spot in literary hearts--not because of its troubles, but because of its brilliant blue lure. To L.A.’s harshest critics, the Queen of Angels was the relentless tease, the slightly slutty and always untrustworthy nymph who conned even the most serious-minded into casting aside good judgment and fleeing to the Pacific. How many writers who came here from east of the Mississippi hated themselves for lusting after life in the palms?

The city remains haunted by the image of the tipped continent, with all the loose nuts landing here. If California’s immigrants weren’t crazy before they got here, they were driven mad by the heat or the winds or the blondes. According to New Yorker Nathanael West, L.A. consisted of people who had “slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. . . . Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?”

Once there, West wrote in his classic “The Day of the Locust,” California’s transplants discovered that the sunshine wasn’t enough. “Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment.” With a steady newspaper and movie diet of murder, sex crimes and explosions, “nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.”

West’s book captured the city as an “idiot Eden,” writes another Easterner, “Outerbridge Reach” author Robert Stone, “a dream of paradise that either turns its inmates into cartoon characters or profoundly disappoints them. Disappointed, they become frighteningly embittered, betrayed, enraged, violent.”

That, of course, makes Angelenos bristle. In her introduction to the 1991 collection “Los Angeles Stories,” Eve Babitz recalls lying in her hammock in the relentless sunshine, a 17-year-old in a leopard-skin bathing suit, reading “The Day of the Locust.” “I knew just by reading this guy, Nathanael West, that he was probably one of those icky East Coast guys with glasses who got mad because when he came to L.A. all those starlets preferred producers or cowboys to him.” Outsiders like West, writes Babitz, “took one look at L.A. and decided that the city was a metaphor for apocalyptic chaos. People who had really been in apocalyptic chaos took one look at L.A. and decided that they wanted to go on a picnic.”

Apocalyptic chaos or not, Southern Californians are not in much of a picnicking mood these days. “All cities are tense,” writes A. E. Maxwell in the new mystery “Murder Hurts,” “but Los Angeles is like an E-string that’s been overtuned to play an extra octave. The result isn’t music. It’s a shrill, penetrating, head-banging, nerve-shattering, mind-bending cacophony; a dull high-speed blade sawing hard steel, a drive-by shooter ripping through a 30-round magazine on full automatic. . . . The melting pot will have to bubble for a long time to amalgamate this polyglot sprawl. Blood is too thick, anger too real, and violence too handy.”

Fictional L.A. has always presented a heightened reality--a distorting mirror of prettier, grittier, richer, poorer images. Today’s stories, though, are more real, and more mythical and frightening at the same time, because the characters so rarely have an anchor to cling to. The Southern Californians in these stories are even more adrift in the 1990s than Joan Didion’s Maria Wyeth (“Play It as It Lays”) was in the 1960s. No one is rooted here; home is somewhere else, even if it was three generations ago. We’re from Tulsa or Guadalajara or Saigon. Our families are broken, nonexistent or at best improvised. Our deepest secret is our loneliness. Like the young waitress fresh from New York in Erika Taylor’s “The Sun Maiden,” we might count the local bank teller as our closest friend--until she disappears into the demands of her own life. Or we might look for slim emotional solace in 12-step programs or Stairmasters or the neighborhood gang.

We may not all be of Hollywood, but, most fiction writers would argue, we take our cues from its rootless culture. “The biggest collection of strangers in the world,” is how Len Deighton describes L.A. in “Violent Ward.” “People from every part of the globe with nothing in common but a belief that making money in the sunshine was no more strenuous than making it in the rain and snow.”

CHARLIE SMITH’S SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IS A PLACE WHERE THE NEEDLE on the collective moral compass spins as wildly as the hands of a clock caught in a time machine. He sets “Chimney Rock,” his tale of amorality, in Hollywood: An actor’s wife blithely sleeps with her father-in-law; an evil producer-father plots against his own son; a beautiful but listless mother-actress finds comfort in the arms of her child’s best friend, a 13-year-old girl. It is the lunatic world of the rich and famous, with bigger-than-life characters. But Smith transforms it into a warning for the broader community. Drift, he tells the Latino driver whose family was burned alive by gangsters, drift, because when chaos erupts--and it will--there’s no percentage in leaving your own soul exposed.

You don’t have to go through an earthquake to realize that the steadiness, the dependability of the Earth, is just an illusion. Out here they can tell you about it at the 7-Eleven. Watch out, they say, as the goof at the end of the counter pulls a gun from his jeans and demands all the money--watch out, everything’s going haywire. . . .Better, I thought, to slip aside, to drift. Better to idle along, touching lightly. Don’t get too attached. Don’t let on you’re really here. If you have to, pretend you’re blind, pretend your legs don’t work, go mute . . . .When the evil crashes through into your living room, cry out, Hallelujah, Satan, I was yours all along.

By the time the 1992 uprisings intrude on Smith’s characters, their own moral chaos is so turbulent that the rioters become nothing more than a camouflage for greater crimes being committed closer to home. Treating the riots, or any sort of random urban violence, as mere background noise for more searing troubles of the individual soul is a common theme in the latest L.A. fiction.

In Cynthia Kadohata’s futuristic “In the Heart of the Valley of Love,” set in 2052, there’s a riot daily in one city or another. Forever disenfranchised from an indifferent power structure, “the rioters had long ago stopped rioting for change. Now they rioted for destruction.” Random violence is pervasive: In Los Angeles alone there are more than 100 road shootings a year; kids carry guns or Mace everywhere they go. Friends and family disappear, dead from mysterious cancers or ushered off into the night by a brutal and arbitrary police force. Kadohata’s America is in the Dark Century--”Mad Max” meets “1984.” But in L.A., the listlessness, the disconnectedness, the piercing loneliness of her characters are especially palpable as they search for someone, anyone, to turn to.

Now and then, I could look at an ordinary chair or tree and feel confused, and then later I could see five ambulances in a row speeding down Western Avenue and this made perfect sense. Certainly it was not out of the ordinary. I was always asking people things like, “What would you do if I suddenly disappeared?” or “What would you do if I started screaming at the top of my lungs? Would that surprise you?” And I guess what I was really asking was, “Is the world as wiggly for you as it is for me?”

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WAS NEVER A safe and comforting place in literature. It is, after all, home to earthquakes and droughts, brush fires and killer winds, the desert’s threats to reclaim the land. It was also home to Charles Manson and the Hillside Strangler. The threat of natural violence remains; Southern Californians blithely go about daily life in the shadow of the Big One. But the human violence has escalated, violence that can be as random as a gang shooting at the neighborhood mall or as intimate as privileged youths killing their millionaire parents in the family living room. In this environment, it should come as no surprise that “transgressive literature”--which pushes the boundaries of sexual norms and sexual violence--is now fashionable among young L.A. writers.

Guns are ubiquitous in L.A. literature, and these days no one’s blaming the Santa Anas. Now writers can, and do, connect the surging violence to the emptiness of our lives. In John Shirley’s short story “Jody and Annie on TV,” Jody is the Charlie Starkweather of the San Fernando Valley, with a twist. After the mass murderer Starkweather and his girlfriend went on a Midwestern killing spree in the 1950s, legend has it that he explained to the judge, “Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” In contrast, Jody might respond, L.A.-style, that he was feeling, well, detached.

Convinced that there’s nothing in between being Bon Jovi and being dead, Jody the rock musician is depressed and jobless. His mother had wasted away Jody’s teen years in self-involvement--Lifespring, est, Amway, anything that said “I’m not responsible for other people.” The surge of power Jody feels when he causes an accident on the Ventura Freeway is so intoxicating that he drafts his girlfriend for more fun. Next it’s throwing a wrench through a car window, killing the driver. But the real laughs begin when they pull out guns. Annie shoots a young Latino man at a schoolyard, but it doesn’t make the news. Bummer. So, later, she empties her barrel at a couple of jock college students in front of a Carl’s Jr., spraying the windows of the restaurant to make sure the shooting gets on TV. Their killing spree makes the 5 o’clock news, CNN, and “NBC Nightly News.” Cool.

When the shooting is over, the police surround Jody and Annie’s apartment. Jody can’t help but grin when he sees the news crews arrive. Suddenly, Annie disappears into the next room and returns with a TV set.

“Hey,” she says, her eyes really bright and beautiful. “Guess what.” She has the little TV by the handle; it ‘ s plugged in on the extension cord. In the next room, someone is breaking through the front door.

“I give up,” he says, eyes tearing. “What?”

She sits the TV on the counter for him to see. “We’re on TV. Right now. We’re on TV. . . .”

IT’S INCREASINGLY COMMON FOR FICtion and nonfiction writers alike in the 1990s to take one look at L.A.--with its widening gap between rich and poor, its growing immigrant population and its pockets of desperate poverty and lawlessness--and declare it a Third World capital. Kadohata’s futuristic L.A. includes a rapidly shrinking “richtown,” barricaded from the violence and poverty of everyone else. Her imaginary city is an extension of the world that present-day fiction portrays, with well-off whites zipping past isolated ghettos of blacks and browns, reminded of the poverty below only when graffiti taggers scar the off-ramps--or when the city blows up. One end of the spectrum is the Los Angeles that nobody wants to see; at the other is the Los Angeles that considers civil disobedience against the status quo a capital crime if it slows down traffic. In Carolyn See’s 1991 “Making History,” it takes a double-dose of personal tragedy to force an affluent Pacific Palisades deal-maker--a “master of the universe” L.A.-style--to wake up to the world.

It’s no surprise to these writers, then, that the city exploded in flames last year, all the slights by fearful cashiers and indifferent teachers and racist cops fusing together in one gigantic time bomb. In “Operation Wandering Soul,” Richard Powers writes:

Outside the hospital window, even in the failing light, every listening child can see it is still East Angel City, a neighborhood a year or two away from setting itself on fire, exploding again under the pressure of daily unanswered need, routinely violated due process, random strip and seizure.

Abandoned children are ubiquitous in world myth, from the deformed child set adrift by Japan’s founding gods to the Italian twins raised by wolves. So Powers could have set his poetic tale of lost children anywhere. Instead, inspired by his brother’s experience as a trauma surgery resident in L.A.’s inner city, Powers reveals the egregious sins the City of Angels has committed against her own offspring.

Los Angeles--or Angel City, as Powers cynically calls it--is a place where a young Vietnamese girl, with her three-ring binders and book covers and barrettes and jumpers, learns to sleep through the sirens and midnight bludgeonings outside her room. It’s where a seventh-grader, acting as a living tote bag, is rushed to emergency when the drug dealer’s balloon inside him breaks; where dozens of school children are killed or wounded in some crazy man’s spray of playground bullets. It’s where too many infants’ hearts pump furiously against the forces of crack and HIV.

The bunker in this war zone is the pediatrics ward of an urban hospital, a sterile haven for abandoned children. Powers calls the children who turn up in his hospital “conscripts of a collapsing infrastructure, their gear of choice: Kalashnikov, AK-47, Uzi, even M16.” Like Charlie Smith, Powers warns against emotional attachment. Watching the blood flow from that many children can drive even the most single-minded doctor mad.

No one in L.A. wanted to see all this coming--or wants to see it now, many of these authors suggest. If apocalyptic chaos comes, Powers says, it will be the “perfect end of a world that has achieved the ultimate aim of being both great tasting and less filling.”

Carol Muske Dukes, a USC teacher and author of this year’s “Saving St. Germ,” has her own theory about the L.A. psyche, woven from the musings of her central character, a brilliant chemist who finds herself and her daughter jarringly out of sync with the rhythms of “normal” life. The starting point of this view is an early Stephen Hawking theory--since rejected--that after the Big Bang, certain high-density regions stop expanding and collapse to form galaxies, stars and the Earth. In that case, Hawking theorized, people might remember events in the future and not in the past.

I can’t think of a better scientific analogy for my town--a town that remembers the future, but not the past. L.A.’s psychological arrow of time, with all those past lives and New Age channelers and conveniently amnesiac agents skewered on the shaft, is shooting forward into the past, into a perfection of forgetfulness, effect preceding cause. Isn’t that relaxing when you think about it? Causeless effect: no history, no accountability--but backwards order. Results before action. Answers then questions. No self to speak of, but nostalgia for the future. Pure desert under policed water, reconstructive surgery, MTV, freeway exit signs that you forget as you exit the entryway.

The only problem with that theory is that most people here do remember: They remember the promise they were chasing when they came to L.A. They remember the hope they held like a good-luck charm when they crossed the border from the south or the east or the west. If they were born here, they might recount the dreams of their parents or their grandparents or their great-grandparents.

Now, of course, much of that promise has died--for the unemployed aerospace engineer in Canoga Park who came here for a good salary and plenty of sunshine, for the housekeeper in Boyle Heights who traded in Latin American civil war for the bruising violence on her new streets, for the Southern migrant in South-Central who fled one isolated ghetto only to raise his children in another. Maybe most of those dreams were unrealistic--though they continue to lure millions from around the world. If, in the eyes of refugees, America is Disneyland, then Southern California is Fantasyland. Even the name of its anchor city can’t live up to its soaring promise: Nuestra Senora, Reina de Los Angeles. Our Lady, Queen of the Angels.

The lost promise of California has been a theme of literature for decades. West’s original title for “The Day of the Locust” was “The Cheated.” That theme continues today, but it has moved outside the wealthy enclaves of Hollywood and Beverly Hills to the east and the south and the north. Kem Nunn captures it poignantly in “Pomona Queen,” the story of Earl Dean, whose great-grandfather came to the rich valley surrounding Pomona, lured not by the pretense of the palms but by the tangible riches of the orange groves. Earl Dean’s paltry inheritence is one acre, which he clings to stubbornly, hoping someday to recapture his ancestor’s dream. Instead, Dean finds himself fighting for his life one night as he lands in the fringes of the cracked civilization that Pomona has become--”a place rife with ghosts, canceled promises, missed opportunies.”

The mall was to be the last best hope. . . . Within six months, however, the weeds had already begun to sprout among the shrubbery. The hidden speakers had begun to pump their Muzak for the benefit of a dwindling number of shoppers. The first graffiti had begun to appear on the storefronts. . . . And that had pretty much been it for the town. One more broken promise. One more plan gone sour. The land would only stand so many.

AS THIS BEARISH TOUR OF contemporary L.A. fiction concludes, two personal stories come to mind. For years after I left my Southern Califoria home, I’d hear my father’s chipper voice whenever he got on the phone to report the local gossip and friendly weather: “Another miserable day in paradise!” He retired two years ago, fleeing north, to Ventura County, and I realize now that it’s been a long time since I’ve heard him--or anyone else, for that matter --refer to Southern California as a paradise. L.A.’s current mayor got plenty of political mileage out of the city’s hemorrhage of longtime residents by describing the waiting lists for outward-bound moving vans.

In my second story, I am on assignment in Miami, an ethnic polyglot of urban ills not unlike L.A. At an inner-city drug clinic, one of the counselors to whom I am introduced jokingly yells to his colleagues, “Hey, she’s from L.A! Quick! Duck! She must have an Uzi on her!” It’s a measure of how far L.A.’s national image has fallen, since this drug clinic stands just blocks from where a German tourist was mugged and murdered in front of her young children.

And that, more than anything, is the crux of L.A.’s problem in literature: The tug of war between image and reality. L.A. was never a paradise. It was never a land of boundless opportunity. It was never some carefree melting pot. For that matter, it was never the mysterious and ominous place that Easterners weaned on Chandler half expected when they arrived here, almost peering around stucco bungalows in search of dead bodies. Those reflections in the mirror were perpetuated by ourselves as much as by the movies, TV shows and best-selling paperbacks that paired glamour with deceit.

Plenty of writers avoided buying into the fantasy of the golden land. But they basked in the contrast between image and reality. The fantasy was too tempting to ignore, so they set their stories against the backdrop of the California dream, the lure of the palm. And, inevitably, the dream was a lie. When their characters fell, they fell hard and fast.

With its troubles, L.A.’s image is being remolded into something more in tune with reality: It is an insane amalgamation of disparate peoples who stay safely inside the confines of their own cultural harbor, a version of the American myth of the melting pot gone haywire. It is a city on the forefront of urban ills that are creeping into the rest of America. It is also a place where daily life hums quietly on, sometimes in quiet desperation, sometimes in strikingly strong communities carved out of the concrete sprawl.

With the downscaling of L.A.’s image, will more writers set aside their high expectations and dig for drama beneath the dream? This survey of fiction suggests that some of them are already doing just that. Many writers are beginning to see Los Angeles as a gigantic “lost and found”: Their characters are lost when they arrive, even more lost after living here. But ultimately they find something that had been missing in their lives.

In Marti Leimbach’s “Sun Dial Street,” a young man who follows his family west is eventually pulled into their chaotic, dangerous lives. But he emerges with renewed ties to his sister and mother and even finds love here. In Susan Straight’s “Aquaboogie,” black characters in the depressed town of Rio Seco grapple with poverty, drug addiction and death, but they also discover the resilience of family and community. In “Pomona Queen,” Kem Nunn’s character Earl Dean, a bundle of canceled dreams, glimpses a way out of his overwhelming loneliness after reaching into a hellish abyss.

This new generation of authors displays a more complex view of Southern California. Francesca Lia Block is one author who managed to find something to love about L.A. by scaling back her expectations from the outset. Her message goes out in a series of novellas to the hip-adolescent set. Her 1989 “Weetzie Bat,” with its bizarrely named characters and families seemingly manufactured from the neighborhood’s flotsam and jetsam, is Block’s punk ode to L.A. The main character, Weetzie Bat, was already warned about the place by her father, who despised it and fled back to New York: “I hate the palm trees. They look like stupid birds. Everyone lies around in the sun like dead fishes,” he wrote to his sister. But Weetzie could never leave L.A., despite an open invitation to join her dad. She just couldn’t bring herself to leave “where it was hot and cool, glam and slam, rich and trashy, devils and angels, Los Angeles.” She had hated high school because her friends didn’t get it: They didn’t get L.A.:

They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their backyard at Graumann’s, that you could buy . . . the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers. There was no one who cared.

L.A., Chapter and Verse

There are hundreds of books about this city; these are just a brief sampling of recent works that hold up a literary mirror to L.A.’s present and future.

Alex Abella, “The Killing of the Saints”

Isabel Allende, “The Infinite Plan”

Eve Babitz, “Black Swans”

James Robert Baker, “Tim and Pete”

Francesca Lia Block, “Weetzie Bat”

Kate Braverman, “Palm Latitudes” & “Wonders of the West”

Michelle T. Clinton, “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” from ZYZZYVA literary journal

Wanda Coleman, “A War of Eyes and Other Stories”

Michael Crichton, “Rising Sun”

Len Deighton, “Violent Ward”

Michael Drinkard, “Disobedience”

Carol Muske Dukes, “Saving St. Germ”