INNERMOST L.A.

What writer, work, character or scene best conveys the essence of L.A.?

Some local authors compare notes:

John Rechy, “The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez”: The ending scene in Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust,” when a grand movie premiere gives way to a violent riot, characterizes Los Angeles as I see it: a glamorous city of daily apocalypse.

Carol Muske-Dukes, “Saving St. Germ”: Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and its lines, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert,” always flash into my mind when I hear Industry talk. I can see Los Angeles returned to desert and just a few Producer Executive buildings (maybe those Disney characters over in Burbank) standing in the sand.

David Freeman, “A Hollywood Education”: It’s always Chandler. The L.A. he created might not have been a real place, but it is the basis of what the world uses to represent us. The four novels seem to deliver new information each time.

Bebe Moore Campbell, “Brothers and Sisters”: Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins represents the striving black who migrated from the South and tried to make it in Los Angeles even though most avenues of advancement were closed to him.

Carla Tomaso, “The House of Real Love and Matricide”: Most of Octavia Butler’s novel, “Parable of the Sower,” is set in the Los Angeles of 2025. The scenes of walled communities, fire storms and deserted highways are terrifying and prescient warnings.

Bernard Cooper, “A Year of Rhymes”: In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion describes her visit to the Ralph’s market on the corner of Sunset and Fuller. It is a hot summer afternoon and she wears a bikini, which, she insists, is not an unusual costume at this particular Ralph’ s. Still, she begins to feel a pang of self-consciousness in the Mexican deli section. Imagine the gaunt, bikini-clad author wheeling her cart and warily squeezing the avocados.

Russell Leong, “The Country of Dreams and Dust”: “America Is in the Heart,” by Carlos Bulosan, has many chapters set in pool halls, dance halls, hotels and streets of downtown Los Angeles in the 1930s and ‘40s. The protagonist, an itinerant Filipino farm w orker and labor organizer, finds a new life through his reading at the L.A. public library.

Michael Tolkin, “Among the Dead”: The best scenes in Southern California writing describe the parallel worlds that don’ t touch each other--Charles Bukowski’s bars and John Rechy’s Griffith Park. But no one has written prose to equal Laurel and Hardy’s “The Music Box,” where the boys try to push a piano up a flight of steps in Silver Lake. The futility of it all is the best statement anyone has made about this place.