L.A. Lit (Does It Exist?)

Editor’s Note: Is there a Los Angeles literature? And, if so, what are the factors (sense of place, climate, speech, character) that define it? Or, to put it another way, we perhaps know what we mean when we speak of Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, but does the Los Angeles they so well described (and which is now so well established in the popular imagination), any longer exist? Or is there another Los Angeles that is emerging in the novels of the last years of this century? Or which have yet to be written?

We asked a number of writers to participate in a symposium to explore these questions. We also asked each of them to choose a handful of essential novels that anyone interested in Los Angeles ought to read. We hope their answers will encourage a conversation between writers and readers alike. We invite you to respond by sending your thoughts (no longer than 300 words) to us at the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.

D. J. WALDIE

The former literature of Los Angeles is nearly finished--the literature of Anglo unease with race and sunshine in our ruined utopia. The literature that runs from Nathanael West to Joan Didion is passing away. The literature to come isn’t here yet. When it is, it will finally be comfortable with the autumn heat and the pitiless light in a season of drought.

Its writers will be more familiar with the real streets of Tehran or the imaginary ones of Tenochtitlan than those of Greenwich Village. They will be disturbingly frank about the presence of God (or gods) in the suburbs. They won’t be Emersonian. Because many of them will have gone in a day--not in a lifetime--from birthplaces in villages and barrios to East L.A., Glendale or Long Beach, their writing will be crowded with ancestors whose grievances cannot be dismissed by our longing for perpetual adolescence.

Our literature won’t be like the South’s literature of remembered guilt or the East’s literature of transgression and assimilation or the West’s literature of isolation by Nature’s indifference. The best of the literature to come will be tragic.

The standard for the excellence of its stories won’t have been set in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop but by women talking at a hearth baking chipati and men whispering in Spanish before slipping between strands of barbed wire across any border south of here. It will be a literature that cures our willful amnesia about Los Angeles and restores Los Angeles as the northernmost capital of the tropics.

It will be a mongrel literature for a mixed people. It will not be written for the comfortable. It may even be redemptive.

L.A. readers and L.A. writers have a past to acquire before they can read or write the literature that is to come. They might begin with:

* “Southern California: An Island on the Land” by Carey McWilliams;

* “Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County” by Leonard and Dale Pitt;

* “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory” by Norman Klein;

* “The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California,” edited by James Paul Allen and Eugene Turner;

* “The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles” by William Fulton.

D.J. Waldie is the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” which received the California Book Award for nonfiction in 1997. He is a Lakewood city official.

GAVIN LAMBERT

In the beginning was L.A. noir. Raymond Chandler was the first writer, in his brilliant novella “Goldfish” (1936), then in “The Big Sleep” (1939), to perceive the city as a mainly immigrant accumulation of people and power (it still is), where wealth and crime were intimately connected (they still are), and a sense of lonely space and prehistory haunted the machinery of ambition and dreams (it still does).

Chandler’s fastidiously hardboiled style was a personal mix of Hemingway and Black Mask pulp magazine. In James Ellroy’s novels of late 1940s and ‘50s L.A., the tone is similar but grittier, the melodrama bloodier and less ironic, the sex often obsessively brutal, but L.A. hasn’t changed, only grown more so. And it’s still growing in Michael Nava’s “The Burning Plain.” Focused on West Hollywood, this is the kind of novel Chandler might have written if he’d been alive and gay in the 1990s.

Other genres: You’d never guess it from the movie of “Mildred Pierce,” but James M. Cain was the Emile Zola of 1940s Glendale. As in “Double Indemnity,” his characters live there in Spanish houses with department store furniture and a mortgage. Although crime-driven, Cain’s novels are basically emotional melodramas; and on the cooler side of the street, the L.A. novels of Bret Easton Ellis, like Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” (1970), are basically higher-income melodramas of manners. These days the traffic would never allow Didion’s anomic heroine to get away with her behavior on the freeway, but in “Less than Zero” (1985) and “The Informers” (1994), L.A. youth lives in a vividly recognizable world of car wrecks, drugs, rock clubs and unhappiness beneath a perfect tan. Ellis is a master of the wickedly sad, and in “Resentment: A Comedy” (1997), a melodrama of manners with a fictionalized background of the Menendez trial, Gary Indiana is a master of the corrosively funny.

Melodrama, Chandler once said, is “an exaggeration of the possible.” So is L.A., and these five novels progressively exaggerate its possibilities:

* “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler;

* “Mildred Pierce” by James M. Cain;

* “The Black Dahlia” by James Ellroy;

* “The Informers” by Bret Easton Ellis;

* “Resentment” by Gary Indiana.

Gavin Lambert is the author of “Nazimova: A Biography,” “Inside Daisy Clover” and “The Slide Area.”

RICHARD RAYNER

Fiction set in Los Angeles tends to observe the city from distorting, if stylistically enticing, perspectives: through the self-contained, and therefore self-limiting, binoculars of apocalypse, of personal breakdown, of Hollywood aspiration, of noir. L.A. has its very own house of fiction with rooms that seem oddly disconnected to one another. The virtues of its literature lie, like those of the place itself, not in unity but diversity. Thus the storm-lashed boulevards of Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” are several Warner Bros. galaxies away from the hidden squalor that Nathanael West dug up in “The Day of the Locust” (even though these two classics were published in the same year, 1939); and the deadpan neurosis of Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” is separated by far more than the width of the marital bed from the fevered corruption of her husband John Gregory Dunne’s “True Confessions.” Charles Bukowski co-exists, somewhat uneasily, with Bret Easton Ellis. Yet, in the midst of this variety, what no one has ever attempted is a flat-out fictional assault on the whole scale of the city’s social reality, and this seems odd, given L.A.’s riven class structure, its obsession with lists and loot, subjects that would lend themselves very well to a Balzac, Dickens or James, or indeed a Tom Wolfe. Perhaps the city’s fractured and constantly morphing identity resists such an approach; its discontinuous, sometimes shabby, and always temporary geographic selves have inspired exaggeration, satire, genre, rather than naturalism, a tendency that has been ever-heightened as our reality-exploding century draws to its close. Look at James Ellroy, or J.G. Ballard, who have added further layers upon L.A.’s mythology even as they have demonized it.

My can’t-live-withouts:

* “The Day of the Locust” by Nathanael West. This must surely be at the top, or near the top, of everybody’s list. West evokes a city both recklessly youthful and desperately old, where innocence never was, where fever seethes beneath the bright surface of the hard, flat light.

* “Farewell My Lovely” by Raymond Chandler. Less for its show-stopping similes--”It was a blonde, a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window”--than for its odd wide-eyed lyricism, for instance describing a dark night in the canyons--”A yellow window hung here and there by itself, like the last orange.” Maybe L.A. once was Eden. Chandler’s finest novel, and his own favorite.

* “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?” is a truer anthropological gaze at naked and gleefully unpleasant Hollywood ambition, and Daniel Fuchs’ seemingly forgotten “West of Sunset” offers a portrait of a movie legend far more convincing than Fitzgerald’s studio boss Monroe Stahr, but neither has the floating, effortless grace of this, the last unfinished waltz of the literary Adonis that L.A. marched to martyrdom.

* “A Single Man” by Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood’s dying hero looks out over Los Angeles like a sad prophet of doom, thinking: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.” Better yet, the author’s cool and unsparing sensibility has him do it, while his hero is taking a piss beside a manzanita bush. Not quite so easy to translate into erotic musical comedy as Isherwood’s famous Berlin stories; much better than Evelyn Waugh’s facile “The Loved One.”

* “The Family” by Ed Sanders. Sanders’ obsessive quest for meaning in the Manson murders is not quite a novel, although it reads like one. Between the encroaching desert and the laving ocean lies Los Angeles, and the possibilities of horror and madness beyond the imaginings of even the wildest Gothic.

Richard Rayner is the author of numerous books, including “Los Angeles Without a Map,” “The Blue Suit” and “The Murder Book.”

JOHN RECHY

Los Angeles literature has only one identifying factor, a powerful one, its subject, the city itself. Since the city is constantly being rebuilt like an epic movie set, its literature is always in a vibrant state of evolution.

Paradoxically, the unique aspects that define the city and influence its literature are those recurrently reduced to derisive cliches often masking envy, especially from the fascinated East Coast. Viewed without mired prejudice, the city’s extremities and contradictions attest to its grandeur. Profligate natural beauty encouraged by subtle seasons is juxtaposed with eclectic architecture; gorgeous flowers grow alongside the complex statuary of the freeways, all overseen by arrogant palm trees.

Narcissism is courted by extended summers and miles of beach that invite unapologetic exhibitionism, perfect bodies and exposed flesh extending throughout the city a radiant sensuality; even sad derelicts have tans, and those who languish along Technicolored Venice Beach look like extras waiting to “go on.” The city’s multiple personalities--distinctive “schizophrenia”--are kept on alert by an influx of new immigrants bringing old ways, new ways, opulent wealth, desperate poverty, new conflicts, old conflicts, knowledge, superstitions.

The city’s promiscuous spirituality reflects an urgency to live, to feel--immediately--and where better, therefore, to easily acknowledge death than on this last frontier of the country, the sun’s last stop, land’s end? The “rage to live” is intensified by intimations of doom as the city prepares for yet another excitedly predicted disaster--within the most benign climate in the country. Santa Anas, fires, earthquakes, floods, swarms of killer bees, sliding cliffs--no tiny disasters in the city of daily apocalypse; they’re grand, dramatic, melodramatic--and the city overcomes with intact glamour.

If Los Angeles literature exists, then those singular factors inspire art that is, finally, unpredictable--in turns, urgent and cool--like the city itself.

Five recommended novels:

* Inevitably, “The Day of the Locust” by Nathanael West;

* “Making History” by Carolyn See;

* “The Slide Area” by Gavin Lambert;

* “Under the Feet of Jesus” by Helena Maria Viramontes;

* “Less Than Zero” by Bret Easton Ellis.

John Rechy is the author of numerous books, including “City of Night” and, most recently, “The Coming of the Night.” He is the first novelist to receive the PEN / USA West Lifetime Achievement Award.

YXTA MAYA MURRAY

Los Angeles is as haunted as Flannery O’Connor’s South and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem. We have old, old ghosts here, as well as recent blood-guilts and burnings.

I don’t really recognize spare Joan Didion’s city or Raymond Chandler’s chiaroscuro town. Los Angeles is a place of ancient themes--you can imagine dark Cleopatra planning intrigues here, if not draped in silk and shouting orders from inside the glittering walls of the Getty, then at least flashing her violet eyes and purring promises to Richard Burton in front of movie cameras and an expensive director.

Los Angeles literature is Marilyn Monroe standing out on Cesar Chavez Avenue, all myth and melting pot and anachronism and racial contradiction. It’s Natalie Wood in brown face for “West Side Story”; it’s Margarita Carmen Cansino changing her name to Rita Hayworth and becoming a star.

But you have to watch that star-struck business too--that’s one of the literature-killing temptations of L.A. The best Los Angeles fiction isn’t the dead actress or the script-thin story of some Beverly Hills debauchery. Hollywood is important, but it’s just a marker, like Twain’s river or Melville’s sea storms.

For me, the city’s lit is this: A brown-skinned woman at a Wilshire bus stop, which has a poster of Garbo or Paltrow beaming behind thick, graffiti-scarred plastic. Perhaps around the corner we can see the charred remains of a torched convenience store, or a palm tall as a building, or the quick-shifting mass of a group of men fighting.

The woman takes out a cigarette and lights it and smokes for a while. Then she takes an unopened letter out of her purse and touches the red end of the cigarette to the paper. She holds it there until the letter catches fire.

A woman like that is my Los Angeles literature. She’s got that ageless anger, but she’s also created out of the city you see outside your window right now, with its heat, noise, dread and lunatic glamour.

As for a book list, I have four. They are:

* “Anywhere But Here” by Mona Simpson;

* “Chicana Falsa” by Michele Serros;

* “The Tattooed Soldier” by Hector Tobar;

* “All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren.

With respect to Warren, I know that “All the King’s Men” is not Los Angeles literature, but it has this enchanting description of my hometown, Long Beach:

“For having lain on the bed in Long Beach, California, and seen what I had seen, I rose, much refreshed, and headed back with the morning sun in my face. It threw in my direction the shadows of white or pink or baby-blue stucco bungalows (Spanish mission, Moorish, or American-cute in style), the shadows of filling stations resembling the gingerbread house or fairy tale or Anne Hathaway’s cottage or an Eskimo igloo, the shadows of palaces gleaming on hills among the arrogant traceries of eucalyptus, the shadows of leonine hunched mountains, the shadow of a boxcar forgotten on a lonely siding, and the shadow of a man walking toward me on a white road out of the distance which glittered like quartz. It threw the beautiful purple shadow of the whole world in my direction, as I headed back, but I kept right on going, at high speed, for if you’ve really been to Long Beach, California, and have had your dream on the hotel bed, then there is no reason why you should not return with a new confidence to wherever you came from, for now you know, and knowledge is power.”

Southern California has rarely been depicted as the center of a metaphysical universal dream--and rarely described in such beautiful terms. It’s not my Long Beach, but it’s some fantastic kind of place, and sometimes when I go back to visit my old high school stamping grounds, I spy around for a glimpse of Warren’s weird paradise.

Yxta Maya Murray is the author of “Locas” and the forthcoming novel, “What It Takes to Get to Vegas.”

NORMAN KLEIN

Los Angeles may well be the epic paradigm for cities in the next century; however, that should not be seen strictly as a compliment. Cities are being aggressively colonized by a globalized, tourist culture. L.A. appears to be the place of export, but in fact is as much its colony as the rest.

What novels might be useful introductions to this colonization? Dozens certainly, but I will begin with a standard list of seven--with advice on one way to read them: Nathanael West’s “Day of the Locust,” Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely” (or “The Long Goodbye”), Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays,” Chester Himes’ “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” Steve Erickson’s “Rubicon Beach,” John Fante’s “Ask the Dust,” Walter Mosley’s “Devil in a Blue Dress.” When you read, or reread these, consider one peculiarity that they all share: the fiction--locust people, gambling lords, the white culture across the bridge--stands in for the promotional hype that operates like a fleet of trucks here. Promotion (a kind of political fiction) obscures the humanity and pathos below, muddles the politics. Beneath the hype are layer upon layer of half-completed greedy mishmash, its social imaginaries--and the people it hides. In L.A., the imaginary is a business, like coffee plantations grinding the harvest, and shipping it out in tin cans.

Global hucksterism feels as close as a movie van next door. We see the alienation it brings in a very ordinary way, the loss of privacy, the camouflage, the business as usual. I suspect that this global economy will become a catalyst for yet another generation of fictional experiment in L.A.: vast shifts in digital literature, in hybrid forms of fiction / nonfiction most of all, new modes for stream of consciousness in literature. If response does not come from here, where else?

Norman Klein is the author of “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory.”

DAVID RIEFF

It seems unlikely that any single writer will ever again “speak for” Los Angeles in the way that, at least arguably, Chandler or Didion once did. That is partly, but only partly, because times have changed. It is undeniable that, at least in the arts, master narratives and master narrators are out of favor. But to blame political correctness and harp on the extent to which so many contemporary novels or collections of short stories read like barely disguised autobiographies, dramatized manifestos of ethnic pride, or self-help tracts explains rather less than conservative pundits rather touchingly imagine. The reality that no writer today can really aspire to exemplify his or her city, let alone his or her times, can be traced to far deeper transformations in American culture.

For even if one would never know it from reading most contemporary literary criticism, we continue, as we always have, to live in the shadow of some master narrative. Our contemporary American variant, nowhere more powerful than in Southern California, is called capitalism, and its cultural manifestations can be found in the on-line brokerages, investment chat rooms, and business television stations that compel so many viewers and Internet users.

Most writers know little about this world, and perhaps, although Balzac’s example would seem to suggest otherwise, the contemporary novel is the wrong form in which to try to encompass or examine it. What is certain is that, with the condition of modern life generally being one of fragmentation (Los Angeles is only an extreme version of this increasingly universal condition), the idea that a writer could reproduce not one but many worlds, and not the private and the familial but the public and the political (never mind the scientific; that’s probably a lost cause) all in one book is too much to expect.

Never mind political correctness. A shared sensibility is hard to maintain in the age of the Internet and two-and-a-half hour commutes. Under the circumstances, it is touching that the citizens of a place as vast and various as Los Angeles have as much in common as they do. But imagining one writer could speak for them now seems as out of reach as the America in which--or so we imagined--the norm was two races, two political parties, three television networks and one evil empire.

David Rieff is the author of several books, including “Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World.”

MIKE DAVIS

From the perspective of literary geography, Los Angeles has been a small, neglected province of Hollywood. In fiction, the “Industry” and its major subsidiary, the crimes of the rich and famous, have long overshadowed the city itself. Even on a clear day, the ordinary flatlands of Los Angeles life have been rarely seen from the top of Mount Mulholland. For all their macho boasting about “mean streets,” the legendary gumshoes of detective fiction, like most tourists, have preferred the lush landscapes of canyons and beaches.

Occasionally there have been eruptions in the plain that briefly illuminated the possibility of a different kind of L.A. fiction that didn’t need celebrity or celluloid as essential props. In his “Martian Chronicles,” Ray Bradbury offered a meditation on nostalgia and imagined pasts that subtly addressed the dislocated Midwestern soul of white Los Angeles in the 1950s. Chester Himes’ explosive 1945 debut, “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” prophetically exposed some of the darkest corners of race hysteria and police violence in the land of sunshine, while John Rechy’s equally brilliant “City of Night” turned L.A. noir inside out with its young hustlers’ participant-observation of downtown in its seediest prime. Indeed Himes and Rechy brought almost unbearable autobiographical intensity and street-level hipness into their writing: L.A. counterparts to Nelson Algren’s fierce stories from Chicago.

Rechy, of course, remains a robust, still subversive presence. As a pioneer of contemporary gay and Chicano fiction (if those boxes matter), he must relish the current rebellion in the backlands. Since the mid-1980s, a New Wave of female, black, Latino and Asian novelists have liberated L.A. writing from the stifling hegemony of the Westside, re-centering it in previously voiceless immigrant neighborhoods and blue-collar suburbs. In “The Gettin Place,” Riverside novelist Susan Straight digs where she stands to uncover an extraordinary black history in the Inland Empire. Likewise, the always astounding Octavia Butler weaves whole worlds (most recently, “The Parable of the Talents”) from her magic loom in Altadena. With uncompromising humanism--also echoed in recent novels by Hector Tobar, Cynthia Kodahata and T. Coraghessan Boyle--Straight and Butler attend to the courageous struggles reshaping Los Angeles.

Mike Davis is the author of “City of Quartz” and “Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.”

CAROLYN SEE

Sixty years ago, if you looked for Los Angeles literature (instead of Hollywood novels) you came up with Hans Otto Storm, and that was about it. Hollywood novels were--and still are, I suppose--a dime a dozen, generally the products of homesick Eastern writers who were lured out to Hollywood, furiously disappointed, and who then issued standard jeremiads about the bogusness of this place: Flowers here had no scent, and fruit no taste. There were no seasons. “Love” meant nothing, and you couldn’t even smell the bland Pacific.

They couldn’t see what was here--a vast, tactile, easy, ferocious, comfortable splash and sprawl, a context so infinitely elastic that anyone, literally, was capable of becoming anything. Southern California--Los Angeles--has always had in reality what the rest of America only parroted as rhetoric. This really is a relatively classless society, a place where we can become what we want to be. The question, though, then becomes: What do we want? And what do we want to be?

To my mind, Los Angeles literature plays out as a series of extravagant and often sinister fairy tales: We ask for what we want, and we get it. But what if we’ve asked for something stupid or venal or low? Sammy, in Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?” wants power and all the sex he can imagine. He forgets to wish for love, of course, and ends up rich and hated by his wife. Gavin Lambert’s Daisy Clover--what a wonderful meditation on the creative process “Inside Daisy Clover” is--follows her genius as a great popular singer, but realizes early on that she’s never going to find “love,” or happiness either. You can get what you want out here, but if you only ask for fur coats and eternal youth, you’re going to be sorry. Our newer novels--which address Los Angeles as a multicultural multi-ethnic behemoth--echo these questions and address issues that have been here all along. For my part in this symposium, I’m going to take the position that everything old is new again.

The contrast here in L.A. between harsh, hot desert and fragile, transcendent dreams can blow the mind sometimes. My favorite Los Angeles novel of all time is “Dirty Eddie” by Ludwig Bemelmanns--a masterpiece, but in 1947 people couldn’t see it; “Dirty Eddie” was way over their heads. It’s a story about making a movie that stars a pig, except the pig keeps changing sizes because they shoot the film out of sequence. It’s about how you can’t get a script read unless you hold a gun to the potential reader’s head. But it’s really about how Los Angeles and Hollywood, this whole, intricate, dream network, offers new lives--not just the possibility, but new lives--to anyone who comes here and has the courage to ask, to wish: the war widow, the European emigre, the alienated writers. What you wish for, you can get. The place will accommodate you.

What if this really were an Earthly Paradise and we were in it? John Espey’s “The Anniversaries” looks at old Pasadena from the 1880s to the 1940s, when the city was still fresh beyond comprehension, beautiful beyond words. But what’s the good of Paradise if you can’t see it? Espey creates a visiting English war bride who marries into this fortunate elite, suffers culture shock, but--unlike those early, disgruntled Eastern screenwriters--has the wit to keep her eyes open and love what she perceives. What if a Rose Parade was absolutely just as real as a corpse?

Or, what if Los Angeles is gaudy Hell? Out here crime stretches to meet our foulest, creepiest fantasies. John Gregory Dunne’s “True Confessions” pairs the fabled murder of the Black Dahlia with shenanigans in the Los Angeles diocese of the Roman Catholic church. It’s gory and hilarious and a classic. James Ellroy takes the same historical unidentified female body so heartlessly hacked in half and, in his “The Black Dahlia,” puts that poor girl, with all her forlorn hopes and California dreams, through every possible identity from slut to saint. I don’t mean to be contentious, but I’m not sure another place in America could yield up stories so rich in dark fantasies. Other places are too real, too set in their ways.

Los Angeles is flirtatious. Half the time its scenery is only movie sets, its spoken language the vernacular of semi-literate dreamers. The city winks and blinks at the rest of this respectable nation: Come on over and party! We can have a good time, honey! This brazen shamelessness can provoke a certain disdain, and there are those who suggest that the whole metaphysic and mystique of L.A. is a sham and a con. But let me extend that theory of elasticity and accommodation just one step further. If you believe it’s a sham and a con, of course that’s what you’ll get.

My favorite five Los Angeles novels are:

* “True Confessions” by John Gregory Dunne. Sin is sweet, and Dunne understands that too.

* “Inside Daisy Clover” by Gavin Lambert. In soft, Isherwood-ian prose, Lambert gives us a little girl in a trailer in Venice who has one golden gift, her own voice.

* “Dirty Eddie” by Ludwig Bemelmanns. A gorgeous novel about love, a pig, and the movie business.

* “The Anniversaries” by John Espey. Taking the position that Los Angeles County is America in microcosm, the author uses a Jamesian style to conjure up the lost but easy elegance of old Pasadena and its happy rich.

* “Golden Days” by Carolyn See. What if there was a nuclear war, but the people in L.A. weren’t interested? What if there were a “race of hard mystic crazies who . . . lived through the destroying light, and on, into Light Ages”?

Carolyn See is the author of several books, including “Golden Days” and, most recently, “The Handyman.”

SUSAN STRAIGHT

Growing up in Riverside, an hour east of Los Angeles but somehow a universe away, I read every L.A. novel I could find at the library, fascinated with the way the bougainvillea and heat and stucco buildings and canyons were characters along with the actual people in the stories. We had all these things out here, too, but they seemed different near our citrus groves, dairy farms and rural roads. I sensed menace and striving and shiny glamour in the L.A. crime novels I read, and I thought it was funny that Riverside was mentioned as a dumping place for bodies, a hide-out from the police, or a place everyone passed on the way to Palm Springs.

Reading Joan Didion’s essays transformed me. She wrote about my inland area in a detached, cool way, allowing me to imagine I was from far away; from Los Angeles. In “The White Album,” she described the Santa Ana winds raking our irrigated desert flatlands, the stone curbs around the lemon groves and the people living in trailers and barren neighborhoods. Years later, I found out my aunt had lived across the street from one of Didion’s subjects, the woman who murdered her husband, setting his Volkswagen on fire and pushing it into a lemon grove.

Reading her descriptions of the wind, I realized that the wind, the smog, the color of the sky, the vivid blooms and schemes were all essentials of our literature. But many of the famous L.A. novels weren’t populated by the kind of people I knew from my trips to the city. People like my husband’s relatives in Crenshaw, Inglewood and Carson, or my great-aunt who lived in Echo Park and worked at Parker Center. They had all come from somewhere else--Oklahoma or Mississippi or Colorado.

When I read Walter Mosley’s “Devil in a Blue Dress,” I recognized almost everyone. The black characters had settled in L.A. after leaving Texas and Louisiana; they clashed with rich and poor white characters who had been in the city long enough to think of it as their own. In “Understand This” by Jervey Tervalon, the next generation, the descendants, fight with drugs and with each other in the changed streets of South-Central. And in last year’s novel by Hector Tobar, “The Tattooed Soldier,” a Guatemalan man who has fled to the MacArthur Park area sees among the thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central America the soldier who killed his family. During the 1992 riots, the men confront each other amid the crowded tenements and street vendors and storefronts in the Los Angeles of now.

Moving east, one of my favorite novels is “Famous All Over Town” by Danny Santiago, a comic book narrated by a teenager from a vanished part of East Los Angeles, where the S & P Railroad tracks erased wooden porches and Mexican American neighborhoods. And even farther east, stretching the boundaries of that ever-expanding web of freeway and tract that defines greater Los Angeles, “Pomona Queen” by Kem Nunn, takes us to the citrus groves and abandoned downtowns and native citizens of the edge. To me, L.A. literature is all about the moving edges and the wind.

My other favorite L.A. novels are Michael Connelly’s “The Black Echo,” Carolyn See’s “Making History” and Judith Freeman’s “The Chinchilla Farm.”

Susan Straight is the author of “Aquaboogie: A Novel,” “Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights,” “The Gettin Place” and “I’ve Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out all the Pots.”

AIMEE BENDER

The same thing I hate about L.A. is also what I am starting to love and appreciate: It’s a swollen overblown mass of city. A place like San Francisco, a city I love without question, is nonetheless containable. If some god figure wanted to give a city to another god as a gift, they could box up San Francisco with wrapping and ribbons, and it would be the hit gift at the god party. But Los Angeles, behemoth that it is, cannot fit in any box; it always, always spills out, and resists its own stereotypes. Every container it’s put inside doesn’t quite work. Who even knows where it ends and begins? This, ultimately, is one of the things that makes it an exciting and dynamic city, and this is why I resist the idea of an L.A. literature.

What’s likely to be a dominant factor in Los Angeles literature of the next century is that there is no necessarily dominant factor. The pie graph of L.A. keeps switching proportions on me.

If I had to choose five novels--of course there are “Play It As It Lays” and “Day of the Locust,” but also, why not some books that are new and so specific they can’t possibly take on the whole city, but just illuminate beautifully one aspect, like “Holy Land” by D.J. Waldie, a memoir of the growth of suburbia, or Rachel Resnick’s new novel “Go West Young F*cked-up Chick,” a young woman’s experience trying to find roots in an unrooted city, or Francesca Lia Block’s young adult series, “Weetzie Bat,” which has L.A. as a mecca of illusions inside of which are real, pained, joyful people.

My hope is that everyone’s set of five books will be different. What better way to do this city justice?

Aimee Bender is the author of “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.”

CLANCY SIGAL

“Movies are the literature of this generation,” trumpeted director Norman Jewison on getting a recent “achievement” Academy Award.

Chilling idea, this. That movies--an industrial product hammered out on a crowded assembly line--can do what novels and short stories do, only better. It’s tempting to think so. After all, there is something so . . . so irresponsible about the writing and reading of, say, fiction.

When I write screenplays, I am obliged to a studio, producer, director, actors, accountants, lawyers, my family, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. When I fall away from my 12-step anti-poverty avoidance program, and sneakily embark on my darkest perversion, sloping off to a private corner to knock off a piece of fiction with (almost) no thought of a movie sale, I am guilty of wanting to satisfy nobody but myself. And, if I’m lucky, satisfying one other reader, perhaps--to paraphrase John Updike--a zit-stained 16-year old in an Omaha suburb who randomly checks me out of his local library. Writer-to-reader is a fiercely private, conversational, indulgent connection, uninfluenced by a cinema audience’s buzz, still less by weekend grosses.

Yet, to be fair, the instant emotional power of a really good movie--or a lousy one that kicks you in the gut--is a challenge to any writer of fiction. At first glance, it would be hard for a novelist to equal the wry poignance of Bill Condon’s “Gods and Monsters” (itself based on a novel) or for that matter “Titanic,” a photographed Judith Krantz novel (and all the better for it). The trick is to do what movies cannot do.

For example, no Los Angeles movie, not even the best--”Sunset Boulevard,” “Double Indemnity,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “Chinatown”--can excite a reader’s inquisitive heart in quite the devastatingly personal way of, say, Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely,” John Fante’s lyrical novels, the icy dread of Didion’s “Play It As It Lays,” Walter Mosley’s L.A.-meditations disguised as detective fiction, or the books of Carolyn See and Susan Straight. And, despite the occasional presence of movie-makers like Charles Burnett, Gregory Nava and Wayne Wang, the film industry’s traditional racial exclusiveness means that the commercial screen largely refuses to deal with, or even denies implicitly, L.A.’s most powerful reality, the mix rising to dominance of Latinos and African and Asian Americans.

It seems almost foolish to claim that one author’s cry (or laugh) from the heart can be heard amidst the blasting, searing images of FX Dolby. Hooray for Hollywood . . . but also for the fools of fiction who keep our culture alive.

Clancy Sigal, a screenwriter, is the author of four novels, including “Going Away” and “The Secret Defector.”

BERNARD COOPER

The literature of Los Angeles is broad and horizontal. Viewed from a certain height--a telescope at the Griffith Park Observatory, say--its typography seems to consist of words laid out in even rows. Things are far more chaotic down in the basin, however, where anything can happen. On Page 28, a man taps his kid and says, “See that strip mall? Used to be a coffee shop where I ate as a boy. Place was famous for its fruit plate.” The kid rolls her eyes, thinking Dad’s sappy, but she’s an adult by Page 164, and she notices that the above-mentioned strip mall, once the site of her favorite video store, is now the most popular place in town for a drive-through colonic.

Despite the inevitability of change, certain aspects of Los Angeles literature will always remain stubbornly Los Angel-ish, such as the chapter headings you see whizzing past the windshield at regular intervals, or the dedication page, which may include the names of personal trainers, cosmetologists or cult leaders. No matter its degree of invention or intellectual rigor, some snobs still believe that Los Angeles literature contains no table of contents, and if this is true, it is due to a failure on the part of the editor, the printer, the binder, the bookseller or the reader, but can by no means be blamed on the poor writer, a native Angeleno who no doubt spent his or her formative years caught in traffic jams, custody battles and unrelenting sunlight. Like the literature of any city, the literature of Los Angeles is short-lived and immortal. It is able to sing with its tongue in cheek. It can read aloud while it drinks a glass of water. It includes:

* “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” by D.J. Waldie;

* “Garden Of Exile,” poems by Aleida Rodriguez;

* “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonders” by Lawrence Weschler;

* “Artemis In Echo Park,” poems by Eloise Klein Healy;

* “Half a Life” by Jill Ciment;

* “Exterior Decoration: Hollywood’s Inside Out Houses” by John Chase.

Bernard Cooper is the author, most recently, of “Truth Serum.” He is the recipient of a 1999 Guggenheim fellowship. “Guess Again,” a collection of his short stories, is forthcoming from Simon and Schuster.

MICHAEL TOLKIN

Why not just surrender to the movies the notion of a Los Angeles literature and be done with the question? Or put the answer this way: To the degree that Los Angeles has an identifiable literature, that literature is second rate. Or I’ll put it this way: I don’t spend any time reading anything specifically identified as the writing of Los Angeles, although when I travel and find a shelf of local authors, say, in Miami or South Carolina, I ask someone in a bookstore for a recommendation. You could speak of themes, but the themes of Los Angeles, as codified by the writers here, and of this I’m no less guilty than anyone, are rather meagre; Hollywood and disaster (inflated implications of weather and earthquakes) and the frustration of failure, the category that contains Fante and Bukowski.

My five Los Angeles books are:

* “If He Hollers Let Him Go” by Chester Himes. Here’s the first sentence, and if you don’t like it, nothing can help you: “I dreamed a fellow asked me if I wanted a dog and I said yeah, I’d like to have a dog and he went off and came back with a little black dog with stiff black gold-tipped hair and sad eyes that looked something like a wire-haired terrier.”

* “Ask the Dust.” John Fante is an ugly writer, but if this city was actually literate, and if the L.A. Unified School District taught the poor real novels, Fante would be the patron saint of an L.A. writing school that created the world’s true literature of poverty, and from this, the messianic age.

* “City of Night” by John Rechy. The science fiction cliche of parallel universes is the essence of this city, which is the theme of the book. Pornography is sometimes simple journalism.

* “Hope of Heaven” by John O’Hara. An Easterner’s laconic Hollywood story in which Los Angeles is treated as an ordinary place.

* “Among The Dead” by Michael Tolkin. I want to sell my books and you should read them. I got tagged as a screenwriter who was hustling his treatments in book form, as though a Booker Prize winner who sells his lit-ruh-chah to Hollywood is pure, and for that, I refused to sell my second book to the movies, but you can still find it. If I don’t say it, you’ll never hear of it. Save something for books only.

Michael Tolkin is the author of “The Player” and “Among the Dead.” He wrote the screenplays for “The Player” and “The Rapture.”

MICHAEL SILVERBLATT

Say I receive a box in the mail and in it find the Los Angeles novel of all Los Angeles novels. What would it contain? It should contain the bathroom in the elementary school that is kept locked because of the drug problems, with the result that children urinate in the halls. A teacher told me about this bathroom and any Los Angeles novel would be incomplete without it because it tells more about the terrible future of children in this city than any other thing.

But maybe we read to escape. So it should contain the variously polluted and beautiful ocean. I went swimming in it once and someone from a health department came up to me and requested that I call his office and respond to a questionnaire about germs and symptoms that might have followed my immersion.

And one day we noticed that an old man who lived in our apartment building had disappeared. This was in Santa Monica. When the building manager jimmied open the lock, the apartment was empty. The floor was covered with mashed up cupcakes and pastries. Apparently the old man had set the cakes in a parade formation, and then walked among them. We had to call the bug men. Weeks later, billboards featuring giant dead roaches filled the city, an advertisement for an extermination product. Should this be in the ultimate Los Angeles novel?

No, these three episodes would not be in the ultimate Los Angeles novel. They would maybe be in my Los Angeles novel, if I wrote one, because I tend toward depression and sadness and I tend to isolate the frightening elements of any landscape.

That is to say that these episodes are part of my inner world. The writer’s job is the construction of the inner world, and every inner world is different. There are no correct prescriptions of what an inner world should contain. I know people with joyous and exotic inner worlds.

Whatever the inner world contains, it must be conveyed in writing of an individual stamp. The language should not have been seen before. When Raymond Chandler says something like “it was as obvious as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake,” he is not describing Los Angeles or describing anything really. He is inventing a language. By now, this kind of tough-guy surrealism has become so common in writing about Los Angeles that I do not think we would notice a writer using it--except maybe to say that the writing is derivative. It has become devalued, common.

I probably could not use my episodes in a Los Angeles novel. This kind of low-grade despair was invented in the novels of Nathanael West. Let’s say that I live in a derivative inner world--that my inner world has been invented by other, greater writers. This is why I am not a novelist.

So, let us say, it is not Los Angeles itself that furnishes the future of Los Angeles writing. The future of Los Angeles writing is in the language that is used to form and make unforgettable the evidence of a so far uncreated inner world.

I am not a writer, but I am a reader, and I am a reader in public. My radio show, “Bookworm,” is my act of public reading. So, I would like to provide some clues. The following are books that have given me some clues about this strange place where I live. Note that these books are not about Los Angeles, but they help me think about Los Angeles. First, Walter Benjamin’s essay “Paris: The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” because it helps to define what a city is, what characterizes a particular city, and how that characterization becomes synonymous with a city’s art and history.

Second, George Bataille’s “Story of the Eye,” because I think that the invention of a new Los Angeles in prose requires a new series of sexual assertions. Bataille’s abstract, exhausted eroticism should launch anyone in a ferocious new direction.

Third, the great city novels of the past, particularly James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Andrei Bely’s “Saint Petersburg.” These books are among the great celebrations of cities in literature. The creation of inner worlds in bold and confusing and beautiful languages and styles. These novels are monuments of what we thought cities were, and what we thought novels could be, in a great period of our literary culture.

Four, read the great Africans Amos Tutuola, Bessie Head and Nuraddin Farrah for language so fresh and original you can feel the world being reborn.

Five, look at some of our Los Angeles writers: in particular Dennis Cooper, Jim Krusoe, Mitch Sisskind, Mona Simpson, Amy Gerstler, Benjamin Weissman. These are hardly the only choices. I mention them because I grew up during their literary development, and they help shape my inner world.

Michael Silverblatt is the producer and host of “Bookworm,” a literary interview program airing weekly on KCRW-FM (89.9) and syndicated nationally.

MICHELLE HUNEVEN

I am most aware that there is a literature of Los Angeles when I’m doing a lot of driving. More and more, the areas I pass through evoke images and scenes not from my own personal memory, but from pages I’ve read.

The grassy vacant lots where the homeless camp overlook downtown freeways now belong to Hector Tobar’s “The Tattooed Soldier,” as does MacArthur Park and its nearby commercial corridors.

Echo Park is Yxta Maya Murray turf in “Locas,” her vivid first novel about two girl gang members. And I’ve never passed the Echo Park Lake or Aimee Semple McPherson’s temple without thinking of the closing chapters of Judith Freeman’s numinous “The Chinchilla Farm.”

Griffith Park and most of Los Feliz are the bailiwick of Bernard Cooper. Driving to the observatory, I recall neither trips there with my family nor those with my fourth grade class, but the wild ride to the top undertaken by neighbor kids late in Cooper’s only novel, “A Year of Rhymes.”

The eastern outskirts--the Santa Anita racetrack, the flood control systems, the orange and lemon groves and the very sprawl of Los Angeles--have been appropriated by Sam Shepard in “Motel Chronicles” and “Cruising Paradise.” My own childhood memories of rambling through storm drains and orange groves have been partly eclipsed by his tales of unsupervised boys riding bikes in the aqueduct or driving “the immaculate aisles of lemon trees and oranges” in a chopped and channeled Merc “with a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle cruising through Paradise.”

Michelle Huneven is the author of “Round Rock.”

PAULA WOODS

When I think of the tapestry of Los Angeles literature, I see two distinct, albeit interrelated, threads: moral decay prettified by sunshine and palm trees, and the forces of nature playing sinister games with human lives, both strands tied together by imagery of rotting interiors behind glorious facades. Los Angeles literature nevertheless falls into the overtly crime-driven and other literary (although perhaps no less villainous) variety.

For me, the most captivating Los Angeles literature is crime-driven. From Raymond Chandler’s oil-rich morally bankrupt Sternwood family in “The Big Sleep” through race relations as depicted in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, Los Angeles crime literature has risen above the oxymoronic jokes and flourished as skilled writers unravel our culture’s predilections and prejudices, all in the guise of discovering “who done it.”

That said, I have also been drawn to writers who weave other kinds of spells whether the nihilistic nightmare of Hollywood (Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” through John Ridley’s “Love Is a Racket”) or the dogged hopefulness of the inner-city denizens of Jervey Tervalon’s “Understand This.” They, too, contribute important pieces to a literature that seeks to re-imagine a city and region initially articulated by East Coast and English immigrants like Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh.

Currently, I find most intriguing those novels that give voice and shape to the newer immigrants--those “others” who represent the majority of Angelenos, if not now, then in the very near future. On my “must read” list are Yxta Maya Murray’s first novel “Locas,” rich with the cadences and often harsh realities of some Mexican American lives. Gina B. Nahai’s “Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith” is another recent novel that magically illuminates the lives and histories of a group of Iranian Jews in their homeland and Los Angeles. And on the crime side, when I’m not writing, I try to make time to read different voices, principal among them Michael Nava’s excellent series featuring gay attorney Henry Rios, “The Burning Plain,” my most recent find.

But sometimes old friends are best. Tom Nolan’s superb biography of Ross Macdonald has stimulated me to revisit his seminal Lew Archer novels, starting with “The Moving Target,” the first in the series. Rereading Macdonald, a student of both Coleridge and Chandler, reminds me that crime fiction can and should be as richly written yet relevant in its perspective on society and what ails it as any novel I am likely to encounter.

Paula Woods is the author of “Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Novel” and “Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century.”

CAROL MUSKE-DUKES

The most important recent “novel” written about Los Angeles is a book-length poem called “Four Good Things” by James McMichael, the most astonishing meditation on real estate ever written. It seems to be about L.A.--but L.A. (or Pasadena), while appearing to be the subject, is in fact one set of connections that grows out of the narrator’s consciousness as he demonstrates that “everything showed you how it went together.” What is American--ingenuity and constant sense of loss--lies at the heart of a poem that gives careful clue-like consideration to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Aerojet International, the California Institute of Technology, street grids, the construction of a Craftsman house, a mother’s slow death from cancer and the Industrial Revolution. “Four Good Things” provides the most oddly precise, enlightened history of the forces that shaped Southern California--and the forces that shaped a poet’s consciousness--of any book in memory.

It is this kind of book--unorthodox in its imaginings, poetic but not in conventional ways “set” in Southern California but carefully defining a universe in the shape of a particular life--that interests me. I am not so taken with the romances of Southern California, of which we have many, and which all seem to me to buy into a kind of Southern California “culture,” extravagant yet empty, alternative yet finally unsurprisingly mainstream and predictable. These are investments in a myth that I find mildly tedious. I’m not much taken with hyped-up ideas of L.A. “innovation” (as if any writer who set pen to paper, or fingers to keys, wasn’t by definition innovative) or, on the other hand, post-Chandler, post-Didion, post-West tributes--all expected to fulfill some preestablished thinking about our town. West was a genius, haunted by a prophetic now obvious vision of Hollywood. Chandler was absolutely romantic about L.A., Marlowe was a kind of noir saint. What Didion accomplished in her journalism and fiction was tough-minded revelation that also reads like romance. They did it, it’s been done. To attempt to “rewrite” these revelations seems to me a kind of finger exercise for piano--the student plays Mozart but does not become him. These voices are provocative, ultimately, not because they speak of Los Angeles, but because their voices comprised a style that supersedes subject matter. The “cinematic” novel (which takes in almost every piece of fiction written now) makes this same point. The imagination, its landscape and voice, is portable.

When I wrote a novel set in L.A., I naively clung to the notion that in my book, Hollywood would be transformed by science (much the way the actress Heddy Lamar turned out to be a scientist-inventor who developed a code-jamming device that she sold to Sylvania during World War II) and would be no longer recognizable as a repository for cliches about personal narrative. That is to say, narratives that reinscribe what we hold to be “self-evident” about Los Angeles: that this is a city of dreams; angels (recast as busybodies); cars; incredible Pacific Rim opportunity for its diverse citizenry; hopeless exploitation, pollution, violence; exploding robots and studio heads; the walking dead or the brain dead (as typified by celebrity bios, celebrity memoirs, et cetera); beach culture and/or surfing; self-realization; Apocalypse, Disaster Obsession; High Concept, Bad Concept. Naturally, I failed to evade these pre-made narratives. How can I say this? Writing about L.A. makes a writer feel like a principal in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” We have been written, we have been understood, there are pods everywhere. But then I think of “Four Good Things.”

There is also “Golden Land,” Faulkner’s devastating short story portrait of L.A. during his boozy tenure here, and Jill Ciment’s “Half a Life” and “The Law of Falling Bodies.” There is John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” and everything John Fante wrote. Also, the works of Kenneth Rexroth, Robinson Jeffers, Ann Stanford. Today there’s Bernard Cooper, T.C. Boyle, Jervey Tervalon, Michelle Latiolais. Finally, there’s Cesar Vallejo’s “Poemas Humanas,” which reads like a letter to L.A., postmarked Nowhere.

Carol Muske-Dukes is a poet, author of six books of poems and two novels, including “Saving St. Germ,” set in L.A.

GARY INDIANA

We know there is a Los Angeles literature because we know exactly when a book set in Los Angeles gets it all wrong. Yet many who’ve gotten it right in various crucial respects didn’t need to be native Angelenos: Aldous Huxley nailed the confluence of weird religion, apocalypse-love and class warfare in “Ape and Essence”; Evelyn Waugh got the expat screenwriter syndrome and the surreal L.A. culture of the mortuary down in “The Loved One,” and of course Raymond Chandler, a British gentleman alcoholic, defined the city’s signature sensation of being in the middle of everything glittering and sinister and smack in the middle of nothing at the same time, most hauntingly in “The Long Goodbye.”

There is the expat novel and the native novel, the Hollywood novel and the Los Angeles novel, and several other binaries we could use as subcategories, but a sense of place is critical, ditto the weather, and most important the fact that the single thing that connects us as a community is the shared knowledge that a Magnitude 8 could strike before you finish reading this sentence. Mudslides and wildfires should also make an appearance. Speech, the argot of the moment (my current favorite, the movie “Go”: “Don’t get 818 on me”), yes, accents, not so much: Okie, Spanish and California bland are about all we have. Character? Absolutely: Maria Wyeth cracking a hard-boiled egg on the steering wheel while she negotiates a triple-lane change in Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays,” Daisy Clover in the recording studio in Gavin Lambert’s “Inside Daisy Clover,” Griffin Mill in a karaoke bar with the screenwriter he’s about to murder in Michael Tolkin’s “The Player.”

Like all places where human contradictions collide without elaborate insulation--Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Berlin--Los Angeles is best concealed and revealed by the farrago of fantasies about it that the outside world entertains, the L.A. it gets from literature. We should bless those writers who have made the only deeply interesting city in America a place where the meek and the easily collapsible fear to tread--a place where the American deal is not so ameliorated by supposed good intentions, fake morals and “humanness,” even as it manufactures these paradigms like stale prescription drugs for the rest of the universe. Five books that jump to mind as essential are: Chester Himes’ “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust,” John Rechy’s “City of Night,” Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” and Tolkin’s “The Player.” Oh, and James M. Cain’s “Mildred Pierce.” These books have enchanted this city, by which I mean they have given its peculiar horrors and its quotidian features the stature of dreams you would want to have in order to be interestingly complicated and better than technically alive. They are perfect, complete, the way Faulkner’s “Light in August” is perfect: The world is unimaginable without them.

Gary Indiana is the author of several books, including “Three-Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story” and “Resentment: A Comedy.”

KATE BRAVERMAN

Los Angeles writing is about protagonists who are beyond naked, it’s about the end of the trail. It’s what happens after Donner Pass. You have no family, no traditions, no talismans, no one waiting back home, back anywhere is just an abstraction, and you’ve already eaten your friends. You’re a criminal. The landscape makes you, induces you to break the rules, to inhabit a realm of the impossible. No Hawthorne dark forest for you, girl. It is always a blazing white. You don’t need a jacket. You don’t plan ahead. Why should you? You are barefoot, suck oranges from trees tasting of stucco and malathion (mal-a-thigh-on). You’re a mutation. Your mouth tells you this. You dare to say anything. They think you are raving. You are actually understated. Your writing is more personal, flagrantly confessional. You write with bone fragments from your own startled anatomy. In your ears, the Santa Anas howl, the IV drip of the ocean, the caress of eucalyptus, the rustle of bamboo, not a curtain but a claw.

The prototypical L.A. characters are utterly alone. They’re not cynical about their pasts. Cynicism would imply a human dimension, and their journey to this last outpost on the tenuous edge of the Pacific has stripped them of that conceit. All acts are rudimentary and address only survival. In Los Angeles, it is always the first generation. You are always hungry. Color has seared your eyes wide open--the magenta bougainvillea, sunset in a smear-like Mercurochrome (mick-cure-a-chrome), the blues of Santa Monica Bay, translucent like the skin of bruised infants. There are no words for this. Or what it cost to get here, to stay here. You couldn’t write home if you wanted to. You have no home, no language. Maybe you could communicate by choreographing pieces of cloth, waving them like lost women at sea, expecting nothing, just the gesture and then a slow drowning.

L.A. writing is John Rechy, alone in a world of anonymous alleys smelling of desert and hallucination. It’s Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” which is rumored to have been written in Los Angeles. And the Robert Stone of “Dog Soldiers,” where under the brittle brilliance is a savage substance your vocabulary will never define.

Kate Braverman is the author of “Lithium for Medea,” “Palm Latitudes” and “Small Craft Warnings.”

SARA DAVIDSON

There is no book, no literature, that portrays the Los Angeles I grew up in during the ‘50s or the Los Angeles in which I’ve lived and raised a family in the last two decades. In the ‘50s, the spirit of youth was best expressed by the sunny harmonies of the Beach Boys, for our life truly revolved around the beach. Every weekend we’d make our way by bus or lengthy car ride (there was no 10 Freeway yet) to Santa Monica, where the Gentile kids encamped on a beach called “Sorrento” and the Jews on another called “State.” The hot drive-in was Delores’; the hot place for spring break was Palm Springs; and the wildest activity we engaged in was cruising Hollywood Boulevard in convertibles.

That Los Angeles no longer exists for any age group. The beach is polluted; there are no more drive-ins and no more sleepy endless summer days. Instead, we have a workaholic city, a Balkanized terrain in which disparate cultures clash and co-exist. No writer that I’m aware of captures the span of it--high to low. There are Hollywood novels, though some of the most trenchant books about Hollywood are nonfiction: John Gregory Dunne’s “Monster” and David Freeman’s “A Hollywood Education.” There are novels that carve out a slice: the Latino experience, the Japanese American, the Chinese American and the underworld of wasted wealthy teens. But who has written a book that encompasses, for example: blacks in South-Central, the Salvadoren~os in Huntington Park, the Iranians in Beverly Hills, the police in Simi Valley, and the deal artists in Hollywood? Who’s written about the city where more than half the population speaks Spanish?

We’re still waiting for someone to do for Los Angeles what Tom Wolfe did for Atlanta and New York: to attempt to capture the whole teeming, contrasting, dissonant and expanding mass, to make us sense the aggregate and show us how the parts connect and bind.

Sara Davidson is the author of “Loose Change” and “Cowboy: A Love Story.”

WANDA COLEMAN

The problem with identifying Los Angeles is that its identity is in a constant state of flux, transition, transmission. It has no single identity because the city has no plaza / heart / soul / center. Defining Los Angeles is like trying to define an earthquake. How you feel about it depends on where you’re standing at the time. It’s impossible to be fair to the readers by having people name only five books. It would be easier to name five books for every part of town. And since I regard ALL of L.A. as my turf--ALL OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA--and since I was born and raised here--I opt to choose more than just the politically correct portion of Watts and South-Central which are usually doled out to me because I’m black. In the last 30 years, enough writers have matured in L.A. to write the entire city--if they had the support that publishers, reviewers and critics generate. But they didn’t and don’t. AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, THE L.A. OF THE LAST 30 YEARS HASN’T BEEN WRITTEN, AND ONLY EXISTS IN LITERATURE IN SNATCHES. My list could RUN 10 pages deep, and I have no choice but to toot my own horn because absolutely nobody has written with significant merit about the South-Central L.A. I grew up in and spent most of my adult life in except me, but I’ll limit my choices thusly:

Fiction:

* “City Terrace Field Manual” by Sesshu Foster;

* “Straight Out of Compton” by Richardo Cortex Cruz;

* “All the Assholes in the World and Mine” by Charles Bukowski;

* “Ask the Dust” by John Fante;

* “A War of Eyes & Other Stories” by Wanda Coleman.

Poetry:

* “Poetry Loves Poetry,” edited by Bill Mohr;

* “Bachy,” the magazine edited by Bill Harris, then Leland Hickman, all back issues--some still available from Beyond Baroque Bookstore. No one’s bothered to archive them;

* “English as a Second Language,” an LP produced by Harvey Kubernik;

* “African Sleeping Sickness” by Wanda Coleman;

* “South by No North” by Charles Bukowski.

Writers To Watch:

Henry Morro, Shelly Berger, Jenoyne Adams, Ellen Maybe, Russell C. Leong.

Wanda Coleman is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “Bathwater Wine.”

HECTOR TOBAR

I got a pamphlet in the mail the other day from our local literary headquarters, PEN Center USA West, an invitation that, in its own way, neatly summarized the conundrum facing us purveyors of Los Angeles literature. In order to help rescue us from the poverty that is the plight of nearly everyone here who calls himself a novelist, PEN had scheduled a pair of workshops that promised to solve two impenetrable