‘Outsiders’ at Heart of L.A. Literature

Some writers see Southern California as a place of hope and redemption, and others see it as a place of despair and doom: “Utopia or Dystopia,” as David Fine puts it in “Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction” (University of New Mexico Press, $29.95, 284 pages). “The site of its national Heaven and Hell, the best and worst place the country has to offer,” between these two poles, argues Fine, lies the vast literary terrain of Los Angeles, something extraordinarily rich and strange.

Los Angeles is “the place resting dangerously on the edge of the continent,” Fine points out, and that’s exactly why it is “the place that forces one to look back to sources and origins.” Fine himself surveys the “sources and origins” of California fiction in a bold effort to map the Western literary landscape, ranging from Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona” (1884) to Carolyn See’s “Making History” (1991), and much else in between. Although Fine apologizes for the omissions that are inevitable in such an ambitious undertaking, the book amounts to a short course in the essential literature of Los Angeles.

Fine points out, for example, some surprising and illuminating linkages: Don Ryan’s “Angel’s Flight” (1927) “may be Los Angeles’ first hard-boiled novel,” the first in a dynasty that includes not only such masters of the genre as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Horace McCoy but also contemporary practitioners like Walter Mosley, James Ellroy and Michael Connelly, who also wrote a novel called “Angels Flight” (1999). And he speculates that Nathanael West’s classic Hollywood apocalypse, “The Day of the Locust” (1939), may have been inspired by a couple of obscure but significant novels, Carroll and Garrett Graham’s “Queer People” (1930) and Carl Van Vechten’s “Spider Boy” (1927).

Almost by definition, Fine asserts, Los Angeles has inspired what he calls “a migrant fiction,” a body of work created by writers who first came to Los Angeles in search of studio work or something even more elusive. Some of them stayed and flourished, others stayed and burned out, and a great many left in bitter disappointment, but all of them contributed to the literary tradition that defines Los Angeles for the rest of the world.

“The distanced perspective of the outsider, marked by a sense of dislocation and estrangement,” explains Fine, “is the central and essential feature of the fiction of Los Angeles.”

Yet even some native-born California writers suffer from the same sense of discomfort and even doom, as Fine reminds us. For Joan Didion in “Play It as It Lays” (1970), for example, “the California desert has gone from a potent symbol of regeneration to one of utter ruin.” And for Kate Braverman, writing about three Mexican American women in Los Angeles in “Palm Latitudes” (1998), “disaster is not rendered as sudden destruction but is woven into the fabric of everyday living as their characters strive to endure poverty, prejudice and marginalization.”

Ultimately, Fine insists, the literature of Los Angeles offers “affirmations of the strength of the human spirit in the face of millennial doom-saying and ecological and man-made disaster.” Perhaps the single best example cited by Fine is Carolyn See’s “Golden Days” (1987), a novel that manages to extract a nugget of redemption from the chaos and despair of an imagined nuclear holocaust that spares only Topanga Canyon: “There will be those who say the end came,” writes See. “But I say there was a race of hardy laughers, mystics, crazies, who knew their real homes, or who had been drawn to this gold coast for years, and they lived through the destroying light, and on, into light ages.”

Fine, too, seems to favor the utopian rather than the dystopian view of Los Angeles: “Twentieth-century fiction about Los Angeles is less a collection of hate mail to a beleaguered city than an expression of anxiety about the modern condition,” Fine sums up. “The culturally diverse voices of such writers as Walter Mosley, Luis Valdez, John Rechy, Cynthia Kadohata, Kate Braverman and Carolyn See suggest that there may be heretofore unseen streets that lead into the city, to neighborhoods that survive because they are sustained by a sense of community and connection.”

Fine, a professor of English at Cal State Long Beach, is a discerning critic but also an appreciative and even enthusiastic reader of the books about which he is writing. Perhaps that’s why “Imagining Los Angeles” is so full of punch and energy, so mercifully free of the impenetrable jargon that afflicts much scholarly and critical writing. Best of all, Fine sent me back to some of my old favorites with a fresh perspective, and he added a dozen new titles to my own reading list.

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A recent visit to the Autry Museum of Western Heritage to see “On Gold Mountain” inspired me to pick up “Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1843: A Trans-Pacific Community,” by Yong Chen (Stanford University Press, $45, 392 pages). The exhibit at the Autry, based on Lisa See’s memoir of the same title, shows us the Chinese American experience through the eyes of one biracial family with intimate ties to L.A.’s Chinatown. “Chinese San Francisco,” by contrast, is a scholarly monograph about San Francisco’s Chinatown by a history professor at UC Irvine, but it shares the same focus on the unique function of Chinatown in creating a “China in America” while, at the same time, preserving a crucial link with the Chinese homeland.

“Such ties became precious resources that helped to reinforce the immigrants’ cultural identity, gave meaning to their American existence, and served as a source of hope and strength for enduring life’s daily harshness,” explains Chen in “Chinese San Francisco.” “In Chinatown, Chinese Americans found a fertile environment in which to nourish collective memories of their shared past and to maintain their trans-Pacific ties.”

Most of us will continue to experience the Chinatowns of Los Angeles and San Francisco as welcoming ethnic communities, places to shop and dine and sight-see, but both “On Gold Mountain” and “Chinese San Francisco” reveal that they were--and are--much more than tourist attractions.

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For anyone who delights at the olives displayed in such abundance and variety in the souk-like storefront markets on Fairfax Avenue, “The Olive in California: History of an Immigrant Tree” by Judith Taylor (Ten Speed Press, $24.95, 400 pages), will come as something of a revelation. Olives may seem like a traditional ingredient in our regional cuisines, but the olive tree is a relative newcomer to California.

Not until the Spanish conquest in the 16th century did the olive tree arrive in the New World, and another two centuries passed before the olive was established in California. Between 1874 and 1955, some 300 varieties were imported into the state, and hundreds of thousands of trees were under cultivation across the state. By the end of the 20th century, consolidation of the olive industry reduced the number of olive-processing companies to only three.

“The Olive in California” is a work of impressive and even inspired scholarship, but Taylor cannot resist the rhapsodic impulse that the olive has always inspired: “No other food of equal or greater antiquity--with the possible exception of the grape--is surrounded by the same aura of myth and romance,” enthuses Taylor. “The story of the olive in California thus reflects the cycles of growth, decline and renewal that are a part of life as a whole.”

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.