Book Festival Reveals a Diverse L.A.

The literary persona of Los Angeles was once viewed through the hard-boiled prism of Raymond Chandler’s urban knight, Philip Marlowe, or against the soul-sucking Southern California landscape of Joan Didion.

On Sunday, participants at the Festival of Books spoke of its literary reinterpretation by a new generation of writers and poets whose themes reach deep into Latin America, across the Pacific Rim or into the heart of a rediscovered United States.

More than 100,000 people came to hear authors read their fiction or discuss their craft during the two-day event at UCLA, which many described as the most diverse public gathering of a city that sometimes seems divided by its many communities.

“You get everybody under the sun here,” said Edward James Olmos, as he signed copies of “Americanos,” a book on Latino life for which he wrote the preface. “This is probably the best way to bring people together.”

If there is an enduring soul to Southern California literature, it is a restless one, shaped by new waves of dreamers and desperate sojourners; from the star-struck loners of Nathanael West to the kind of maverick upstarts who would quickly be shown the door at the far more durable institutions of Boston and New York.

But today, those who land in Los Angeles are more likely to cross the U.S.-Mexico border than the Great Divide. Many of the new stories discussed at the festival seemed to gravitate closer to the populist urban maelstrom of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” than the lethally vacuous Hollywood of Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.”

Even the classic noir mystery genre has been reinvented by writers such as best-selling author Walter Mosley, who immortalized the self-styled black investigator Easy Rawlins in his novel “Devil in a Blue Dress.” Mosley, who unveiled some of his new fiction at a heavily attended panel Sunday, set that novel in the 1940s belle epoque of black Los Angeles, an era when jazz floated out of clubs on Central Avenue and jobs in munitions factories provided a measure of prosperity for a wave of black Americans from the South--among them members of his own family.

“I wanted to tell a story that hadn’t been told,” Mosley said in an interview at the book festival, which is sponsored by The Times. “It’s a whole period that’s not talked about, not related to. It was harder then to be black. There was no upward mobility, until recently.”

One of the elements altering literature, Mosley said, is the hunger for a broader range of American experiences from the reading public--a shift he applauds.

“In America, black history is American history,” Mosley told his audience. “We’re looking at our fellow Americans.”

Authors on the “Border Culture” panel tilted the standard East-West geography of literary Los Angeles southward, drawing the city into a region that comprises Mexico, Central America and points beyond.

In his novel “The Tattooed Soldier,” border panelist Hector Tobar, a Times reporter, tells the story of a homeless immigrant ravaged by the memory of a terrible massacre he survived in Guatemala. In Los Angeles, he stumbles across a soldier involved in the massacre, and their death ballet begins anew.

Festival participant Yxta Maya Murray, author of “Locas,” suggested that Hollywood--like Mark Twain’s Mississippi or Herman Melville’s churning sea--will always be an inevitable Los Angeles literary marker. Panelists at “Fiction at Hollywood’s Fringe,” in between jabs at the industry, seemed to agree.

Lindsay Maracotta, author of the Lucy Freers mysteries, went to Hollywood 10 years ago as a scriptwriter “like a lamb to slaughter.” Some of the people she met became characters for her Hollywood novels. (“I ended up killing everybody.”)

A character dreamed up by Dennis Hensley, author of “Confessions of a Boy Toy Wannabe,” sells his first screenplay and proclaims: “I feel like my life is starting now.” His landlord tells him that “life isn’t something that starts when Hollywood starts paying attention to you.”

Or maybe it is. “Hollywood sells,” proclaimed new novelist Diane Leslie, who is the daughter of a screenwriter mother and entertainment lawyer father.

But if some of the literati feel overshadowed by glitterati, many Los Angeles poets at the “L.A: A Poetic Sense of Place” panel feel absolutely stranded in the dark.

While San Franciscans revere poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, many Los Angeles poets at the fete seemed to think that Angelenos are more likely to attend a supermarket opening than jump on the San Diego Freeway to catch their next reading.

Poetry panelist Wanda Coleman said poets are relegated to “dark little venues on the edge.”

“You’re not going to see us on Oprah,” she said. “We’re not taken seriously.”

Santa Monica-based poet Steve Abee compared his muse to the Los Angeles River--no set course “and the less it makes sense the better it is.”

Marisela Norte, an East Los Angeles poet, produced a spoken word CD of her work and got a review--in London.

“Nobody in L.A. has written two licks about it,” she said.

The quintessential Los Angeles humorist, Sandra Tsing Loh, also a festival participant, has said that the city’s patchwork geography of separate neighborhoods, each with its own heartbeat, gives many Angelenos a chronically left-out feeling. Yet the city continues to inspire.

Norte described a poetic epiphany she had in an immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles with murals of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez--and a sign on a nearby tacqueria that read: “One cause, one people, one taco.”

“I thought, this is it,” Norte said.

“That’s poetry,” said Abee.