Moonwalk

Whether they mean to be or not, novels set in Los Angeles are expected to be about Los Angeles: to pass judgment on the city’s peculiarities, render the lay of the land, even to confirm its existence for skeptical outsiders who tend to view L.A. as a desert mirage. Its symbiosis with Hollywood gives L.A. a chimerical quality, as if it had been invented by screenwriters. The real city has always gotten tangled in literary hyperbole. At one extreme, it’s a mecca of adult infantilism and scary kitsch (Aldous Huxley’s “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One,” Alison Lurie’s “The Nowhere City”). At another, even more popular extreme, it’s a cesspit of hideous secrets, corruption behind the sunshine, the evil birthplace of noir; from James M. Cain to James Ellroy, the nightside of L.A. fiction conjures a prehistoric, toxic vortex with its epicenter somewhere around Melrose Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard.

The Manhattanization of L.A. during the 1980s (described in Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz”), the influx of “architects, designers, artists and culture theorists” into a matrix of amply capitalized cultural institutions, the evolution of L.A. into a Pacific Rim banking and investment center, as well as the 1992 riots have given the city-slash-county a slightly different, more complex character than the noir / kitsch, L.A. / Hollywood duality of the past. L.A.’s multiethnic expansion has also altered the scene. The underlying horror of it all is still there, but many of its ancient shadows have bleached out in the gray ‘90s.

The Los Angeles of several current novels isn’t exactly the poised-for-apocalypse Los Angeles of Nathanael West or Joan Didion, though the authors often sound nostalgic for the classic wasteland of earlier literature. Richard Rayner’s “Murder Book” is about a good homicide detective who decides to do something bad in order to look after his crippled ex-wife and their 10-year-old daughter. Billy McGrath is half American, half English, “just like Raymond Chandler.” As any other L.A. noir hero, McGrath travels up and down the socioeconomic landscape while unraveling a complicated crime. Though he takes a bribe and sets up a guilty person for a crime that that person didn’t commit, McGrath’s essential decency eventually forces him to do the right thing.

Rayner spends far less time on the physical landscape than earlier L.A. crime writers, filling in neighborhoods with a telegraphic sentence or two as if their evocative qualities had already been used up by other prose. Near the end, however, he places several chapters in some underused quadrants of East Los Angeles and San Pedro to remarkable effect, much as last year’s film “City of Industry” exploited some of L.A. County’s least photographed incorporated zones.

If Ellroy’s work is neo-noir, “Murder Book” must be neo-neo-noir, a mannerist thriller that shrinks back from Ellroy’s extremes while shaking free of the period-piece mode of both Ellroy and Walter Mosley. Rayner’s book has a ‘90s kind of bleakness. His protagonist has seen too much corruption and unfairness. His decisions betray a suicidal recklessness that makes his ultimate survival look altogether too lucky. A multiracial cast of characters adds a welcome up-to-date feeling; one thread of the plot, a movie star who gets away with murder theme, folds in the favor of post-O.J. justice.

At the same time, this book often exhibits the schematic complexity of something written to be turned into a movie; the reader spends more time casting it than believing it. Novels can go much further than movies into the depths of human depravity, but this camera-ready book never does.

Craig Nova’s “The Universal Donor” shares “Murder Book’s” over-constructed, underimagined quality, though quite a bit more of it sticks in the mind after it is put down. Set mainly in a Los Angeles hospital, this novel features enough clinical pathology to make readers squirm. Virginia Lee, a woman who extracts venom for a living, is bitten by a rare snake; taking two vials of antitoxin from the lab, she sets off in her car for the hospital where her lover, Dr. Terry McKechnie, works in the emergency room. Virginia has settled for a loveless marriage with Terry’s med school friend Rick, a dermatologist. Her trek to Terry’s ER dumps her life into his hands and heats their private drama to a boil. The snakebite brings complications. Virginia is allergic to horses and the antitoxin is distilled from horse urine. Terry has a rare antigen or something that makes him a universal blood donor, but Virginia has an even rarer blood type that’s incompatible with Terry’s. As Terry struggles to maintain Virginia’s vital signs, both Flash Back to various turning points in their lives.

The story of why Virginia married Rick instead of Terry is not especially memorable. Rick, Terry and Virginia are not characters one cares much about. Their triangulation doesn’t have the rotten smell of lived experience. Somewhere around mid-story this book becomes interesting, even compelling, when Nova introduces a shadowy character, identified only as Number Two in a police lineup, who may have stolen Terry’s car and used it to abduct and rape a woman. Terry first encounters the man in the hospital cafeteria, late at night, and because there’s something devilishly knowing about this menacing figure, Terry helps him elude the police. After the guy disappears, Terry learns that Number Two has the same rare blood type as Virginia; he then has to find him and persuade him to donate blood. This is not an easy matter because the man is a criminal psychopath.

The scenes between Terry and Number Two, and another in which Terry drives a heart attack victim through the city on the night of the ’92 riots, cut deep into the shadow-land murk associated with the best noir: Dostoevskyan and pulpish at the same time, they recall such gems as Diane Johnson’s “The Shadow Knows” (which, though set in Sacramento, could as easily have taken place in one of of those UCLA housing clusters off Sawtelle Boulevard).

It’s a pity that Nova doesn’t run to the end of the night with his manifest talent for terror, opting instead for a tidy middle-class morality tale. “The Universal Donor” does accomplish something that may have become possible only in the ‘90s, though: it’s a Los Angeles novel in which the characters have no connection to Hollywood or the entertainment business yet still have lives.

“Stars Screaming” by John Kaye is sloppily generous compared with “Murder Book” and “The Universal Donor”: Here, at least, one feels that the story wasn’t laid out on a graph or on file cards with plot points clearly marked. Kaye’s narrative, centered on the life of screenwriter Ray Burke, encompasses both the movie business and the fringe life around it. Flashing back and forth from the ‘40s and ‘50s to an ostensible present in the late ‘60s, Kaye tracks several gorgeously well-rendered characters--an ancient pedophile producer, a pair of gay autograph hounds, a female drifter named Bonnie Simpson, Burke’s mentally disintegrating wife--across several decades, revealing via elliptical structure how their paths have crossed at numerous junctions, whether they realized it or not.

Kaye describes the city in richly evocative detail (the Gower Gulch ban and hotels in both their glory days and their decline, the breakfast fare at Tiny Naylor’s in 1969, long-gone landmarks whose names still resonate), suffusing it with real feeling. Burke and the people who pass through his life are entirely credible; their struggles leave scars and they finish up unpredictably: dead, happy, haunted or, simply, drastically changed. Their mixed fates are neither overdetermined nor unaffected by the quickened sense of possibility in a town where mortals frequently, sometimes arbitrarily, mutate into stars. Coincidence, chance and geography added to quirky individual choices create this book’s events, giving its world a strangely satisfying completeness.

“Stars Screaming” is full of passing time’s aching weight, and although it depicts all manner of cruelty, from the casually inflicted wounds of a failing marriage right up to child molestation and murder, Kaye handles this potent material without brutalizing the reader. In fact, what Kaye conveys supremely well is the paradoxical sense of comfort one gets from listening at 3 a.m. to desperate voices on radio call-in shows. His Los Angeles is replete with awful happenings, but it’s also beguiling--a magic space where human dreams have the chance to incarnate (though usually to fail) and where the available spectrum of disappointment is unusually generous.

Sandra Tsing Loh’s “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now” feels like the most genuinely contemporary of these four books, a kind of slapstick product of post-riots, multicultural Los Angeles in which the present already feels like the past because one has to live in the future to keep up. It opens a little before the riots, when Bronwyn Peters, a feminist academic getting by on grants, and her husband, Paul, a struggling screenwriter, are living in Tujunga far from the center of excitement with Paul’s unwelcome brother Jonathan as their permanent house guest. Bronwyn and Paul would like to schmooze in the fast lane, get in somewhere on the ground floor, make it big; they’re both a bit too naive for their own late-blooming ambitions, and when Paul’s parents hand over their life savings (hardly a fortune) to spur them forward after Paul lands a job writing infomercials, it’s hastily invested in a new car and a downtown condo.

“If You Lived Here” depicts with horrific accuracy the yearning for money and nice things and a real life, and how blinding that yearning can be when it encounters the slightest chance of being satisfied. No sooner do Bronwyn and Paul start to feel real in their glitzy high rise than it’s all taken away: Paul gets fired, the car falls apart and the riots erase the value of their condo. Surrounded by slick, confident people who win every hand they’re dealt, Bronwyn and Paul can’t understand why they, uniquely, are doomed to a destiny in lower case; in the end, neither can we. It’s just the way things are in the big city. “If You Lived Here” is a deceptively droll portrait of Los Angeles as a giant mousetrap, baited with all the ridiculous junk that money can buy.

In all four of these novels, the protagonists wrestle with the city’s complexities and contradictions, and in each case they lose everything they ever wanted. The Los Angeles of legend scarcely exists in “Murder Book” except as an overworked memory; “The Universal Donor” renders the city as a black hole with freeways running through it. The alluring side of the place turns up in “Stars Screaming,” but as a 30-year-old flashback. Loh’s book concludes with the (perhaps unintentionally) horrific reaffirmation of Bronwyn and Paul’s befuddled marriage: resigned to the fact that Los Angeles has crushed them, they settle for the menu of dull habits and dim epiphanies they’ve worked out together. This may reflect the reality of contemporary Los Angeles better than any of us would care to admit, for that would mean L.A. has become a place like most big cities in America, cold and unlivable as the moon.