The Best Books of 2001

Editor’s Note: This year, the Los Angeles Times considered more than 1,200 books. As we revisited those reviews, we concluded that our contributors reserved their highest praise for 82 novels and short story collections, 23 children’s books, 25 mysteries and thrillers, 10 poetry titles, 13 books on the West and 85 works of nonfiction. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed. In addition, we have selected some of the year’s best art books to illustrate the issue.

ANOTHER CITY

Writing From Los Angeles

Edited by David L. Ulin

City Lights Books:

292 pp., $16.95 paper

*

In the literature about Los Angeles--the writing that stretches from Nathanael West to Mike Davis--L.A. stands apart as a city of uniquely toxic landscapes and intoxicated people. The tradition has given Los Angeles a remarkable body of “exceptionalist” writing, an inadequate literature of satire and despair for a city that is presumed to be unlike any other, without a past or a future. David Ulin understands the attractions of the city’s familiar scripts: the brief, fragmented stories of regret and lament that begin with contempt and end in weightlessness. Ulin has chosen to assemble a collection of contemporary writing that bravely limits itself to lesser-known authors and others, better known, who are not often anthologized. One gets the tang of a well-judged serving of unfamiliar writing from the several cities of Los Angeles that overlap here but do not intersect. In “Another City’s” embrace of their disconnection, Ulin’s choice of stories, poems and memoirs becomes a faithful rendering of the inability to find our place here.

D.J. Waldie

*

CALIFORNIA CRAZY & BEYOND

Roadside Vernacular Architecture

By Jim Heimann

Chronicle Books: 180 pp., $18.95

*

One of the most arresting and telling images in “California Crazy & Beyond: Roadside Vernacular Architecture” by Jim Heimann appears on the title page of the book. A grinning carpenter stands in front of a half-finished restaurant under construction on Whittier Boulevard on a sunny day in 1932, and behind him we can see the 2-by-4s and tar paper and chicken wire that will give the structure its fanciful shape--the restaurant is called the Chili Bowl, and that’s exactly what it will look like. “California Crazy & Beyond” is a celebration of architecture that is designed and built to look like something else--ships and planes, trolleys and zeppelins, flowerpots and fireplaces, oranges and lemons, toads and toadstools. With more than 350 evocative examples of what Heimann calls the “anything-goes attitude” in California architecture, the book can be enjoyed as a charming exercise in whimsy and nostalgia. At the same time, however, it offers some intriguing insights into how and why Southern California came to be “the crazy-building capital of the world.”

Jonathan Kirsch

*

CHILDREN OF THE WEST

Family Life on the Frontier

By Cathy Luchetti

W.W. Norton: 254 pp., $39.95

*

“Children of the West” is an evocative and enlightening account of how mothers, fathers and children of all colors and creeds experienced the American frontier. And Cathy Luchetti makes a convincing case that the frontier was the ideal nursery for youngsters growing up in a brave new world. Drawing on an abundance of historical photographs and eyewitness accounts in the form of letters and diaries, Luchetti fills in the blank spaces in our mental picture of the American West. She examines in intimate detail what it was like to bear and rear children, and she allows us to see for ourselves the scenes that are never depicted in mythic western movies, including pregnancy and childbirth, birth control and abortion, family violence and marital discord, abandonment and homelessness. As a result, “Children of the West” is not merely an exercise in nostalgia, it is full of surprising and sometimes shocking revelations about what life was really like.

Jonathan Kirsch

*

FOOL’S PARADISE

A Carey McWilliams Reader

Edited by Dean Stewart and Jeannine Gendar

Heyday Books:

264 pp., $18.95 paper

*

More than a half-century ago, the late Carey McWilliams described the rough going that awaited those who would attempt to interpret his adopted state: “The analyst of California is like a navigator who is trying to chart a course in a storm: The instruments will not work; the landmarks are lost; and the maps make little sense.” Whatever the issue of the moment in California--be it cult lunacy, water politics or the racial divide--it is always helpful to revisit McWilliams’ interpretive histories, “California: The Great Exception” and “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land.” Along with his landmark “Factories in the Field,” these books nailed the essence of California in a way that has never been duplicated. To a remarkable degree, they remain as relevant today as when he wrote them. “Fool’s Paradise” is a sampler of McWilliams’ writings on California.

Peter H. King

*

GREENE & GREENE

By Edward R. Bosley

Phaidon: 240 pp., $75

*

Perhaps the single most arresting image in “Greene & Greene” appears on the endpapers of the book--an extreme close-up of the woodwork in one of the architectural masterpieces by the firm of Greene & Greene. God is in the details, as another architect once quipped, and the intricate joinery in a Greene & Greene house illustrates exactly why the work of these two gifted brothers is not merely celebrated but venerated. Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene brought the Arts and Crafts movement in art and architecture to the West Coast at the turn of the last century. They may have been born in the Midwest, trained in the beaux-arts tradition at MIT and apprenticed in Boston, but they came to California to make a living. And it was here that they found a few wealthy patrons whose homes are today regarded as treasures of a defining moment in American architecture. Today, the Greene & Greene houses scattered around Southern California are objects of adoration that go beyond academic interest or even nostalgia. The Gamble House in Pasadena, for example, is almost a shrine, and the Huntington Library maintains an extensive collection of decorative arts designed by the Greene brothers. Appropriately enough, Edward R. Bosley’s book is a thing of beauty, too. With hundreds of plans and drawings, illustrations and photographs, “Greene & Greene” manages to show us where their architecture originated, how and why it works, and where it fits in architectural history. At the same time, it is a lush, opulent and tantalizing book that may send readers on the road in search of the local houses.

Jonathan Kirsch

*

GREETINGS FROM THE GOLDEN STATE

By Leslie Brenner

Henry Holt: 280 pp., $23

*

The title of Leslie Brenner’s good-natured first novel is well chosen: Each chapter is like a charming little postcard dashed off from different stops along the 30-year journey of a Van Nuys family called the Kelbows. The Kelbows are far too daffy to be truly tragic, and their suffering isn’t quite brawny enough to lug around the weight of social commentary; Brenner’s main goal is simply to remember (the oddball incidents related here seem almost too weird to be invented) and, more important, to entertain, which she does, like an old friend retelling classic stories over a fresh pot of coffee.

Mark Rozzo

*

LIGHTNING FIELD

A Novel

By Dana Spiotta

Scribner: 220 pp., $23

*

Los Angeles is famously, and mythically, the repository of dreams. The ache for happiness is palpable here, all the more so for how close it comes, lured like something wild by the trappings of affluence and warm, cloudless skies. Poolside, we sip exotic drinks. At the clubs, we watch the dancers, and in the morning we wonder what it adds up to. Dana Spiotta is interested in this kind of math; it’s the existential kind, and in “Lightning Field” she has written the hippest, funniest, most urbane and heartfelt accounting of life west of the 101 and north of the 10 to come along in years. Satiric but not cruel, authentic but not maudlin, her story is about the pain of growing up old faster than growing up wise, and she hits all the right notes.

Thomas Curwen

*

THE LITERATURE OF CALIFORNIA, VOLUME 1

Native American

Beginnings to 1945

Edited by Jack Hicks,

James D. Houston,

Maxine Hong Kingston

and Al Young

University of California Press:

870 pp., $24.95 paper

*

“The Literature of California, Volume 1: Native American Beginnings to 1945” reveals California in all its dazzling accomplishments, its dismal shame, its empire builders and dream fabricators, its multitudes of the damned and driven, possessed and dispossessed. A reader will hear, within these pages, a cacophony of voices: Native American totemic animal deities, explorers, men of commerce and men of common means, farmers, hustlers, mothers, pioneering feminists, scoundrels and saints, all miraculously merging into the great opera called California. What has happened in California is the tumultuous eruption of a sociological volcano, lighting the sky with the fire of a new experiment, the impossible dream, the myth of riches, the heroism of common folks and their chance to simply make it. California, reflected in the mirror of its writers, is as diverse and complex as Europe, yet it coheres, held by the glue of the new: Here people are defined not by their past but by their future.

Thomas Sanchez

*

THE OTHER SIDE OF MULHOLLAND

By Stephen Randall

St. Martin’s Press/L.A. Weekly Books: 256 pp., $23.95

*

At its core, “The Other Side of Mulholland” is a satirical take on life in Los Angeles. Indeed, the book is so richly decorated with local references that many of its gibes may be lost on outsiders and newcomers. “Merrill Shindler on KLSX says it’s too good to be called fast food,” says Ann Newman, Tim and Perry’s mother, about Koo Koo Roo, her favorite source of catering for family dinners. “The Valley had an inferiority complex bigger than David Geffen’s expense account,” the author quips. When Tim is reduced to selling CDs to raise cash, he goes to Record Surplus on Pico Boulevard, which is exactly where I go to look for rare Van Morrison albums. Stephen Randall plays his story for laughs, and his sense of humor is always sharp and even cutting. “You’re the first girl I’ve dated since high school I didn’t want to form a production company with,” Perry says to the woman he loves. “I mean that in the best possible way.” But if “The Other Side of Mulholland” is laugh-out-loud funny, the book can also be approached as a kind of updated morality tale.

Jonathan Kirsch

*

RO L.A.

Tales From the Los Angeles River

By Patt Morrison

Photographs by Mark Lamonica

Angel City Press: 128 pp., $30

*

Rivers keep their own pace and their own attitudes, no matter how you look at them--nowhere more than in Los Angeles, a seemingly riverless city, as Patt Morrison reminds us in “Rio L.A.,” to “fresh generations of Angelenos [who] discover they have a river only when they hear that someone has drowned in it.” People and the Los Angeles River are both headstrong and quite satisfied to live without each other, but they are stuck together in their stubbornness, leaving only one option: to imagine their common fates. That is what Morrison has done so nicely, giving us not the city of L.A. and not the Los Angeles River but Rio L.A., a distinct and mercurial beast dressed in graffiti and content to keep flood managers constantly on their toes. “Rio L.A.” allows us to see into the heart of a river famous for its indifference, its sincerity and its peculiarities. Even though natural history (sans people) shows up here and there, Morrison writes mostly about the reckless, strange and heroic deeds of river-haunted Angelenos, capturing both the sublime and the ridiculous. If you want to know about the river, there are plenty of other sources. But if you want a feel that gets under your skin, that in the end leaves you soaked with this rich, quixotic river water, this is the book.

Craig Childs

*

THE ROSE CITY

By David Ebershoff

Viking: 224 pp., $23.95

*

“Pasadena is where California’s real history is,” declares one of the characters in the title story of “The Rose City” by David Ebershoff, “where its real class is.” Both the remark and the title of the book are strictly ironic--Pasadena is hardly a rosy place for the men and boys whose lives are examined in achingly intimate detail in several of the seven short stories collected here. Behind the broad lawns of Pasadena, to borrow a phrase from Hemingway, are some very narrow minds. Ebershoff (author of “The Danish Girl”) is deft at excavating and deciphering the hidden meanings in what appear to be ordinary families and friendships. He conjures up a vision of his hometown that is capable of surprising even a native Angeleno--Mt. Wilson, Old Town and the Arroyo Seco are familiar landmarks, of course, but nothing that we already know about quaint old Pasadena quite prepares us for what happens in the steam room of the Pasadena Athletic Club in the story “Regime.” What links the seven stories in “The Rose City” is not always locale, however, but rather the yearning that drives the characters to seek some form of intimacy with their friends and family, with the objects of their sexual desire and with each other. Only rarely do they connect. Rather, Ebershoff manages to show us--with cool, elegant and graceful prose--the heartbreaking ways in which men and women tantalize, torment and ultimately disappoint each other.

Jonathan Kirsch

*

THE SHEEP QUEEN

By Thomas Savage

Back Bay Books: 256 pp., $13.95

*

Thomas Savage has Wallace Stegner’s kind of dignity: a sense of family, a sense of place and the clarity of priorities. He has a great deal of nostalgia as well. A water pump is never installed in the house the narrator’s grandmother built with her first sizable earnings from raising sheep in Idaho. Why? Because: “To abandon the hand pump out front was a radical break with a past that had been kind.” A son reveres his mother and her memory. His mother was a living, breathing, fallible human being. Only an adult accepts with dignity those things he cannot change.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

WHAT YOU OWE ME

A Novel

By Bebe Moore Campbell

Putnam: 534 pp., $25.95

*

No one writes about Los Angeles as Bebe Moore Campbell does, getting all the details right: what people are eating, how they do their hair or what they see when they drive down the streets. However, it’s not just the landscape that Campbell is interested in. It’s how we get along, or don’t, while we’re driving and eating and looking at one another from our cars or across our desks. “What You Owe Me” takes on Los Angeles again, giving readers a multigenerational saga that begins in a meticulously reinvented landscape of 1940s Los Angeles, where black men and women arrived from the South and remade themselves. But this isn’t a historical novel. Jumping to contemporary L.A., Campbell looks at the lives of the emigrants’ children and grandchildren as they navigate cosmetics companies, barbecue joints, small homes in South-Central and anonymous luxury tracts in the San Fernando Valley. Campbell isn’t out to simply detail the journey for us; she wants us to make the connections between old L.A. and new, to see what we learned from our pasts that we so distrust one another now, to show how we manage to work and live with one another and make reparations for the mistakes of earlier generations, all set against the backdrop of wanting and working, Southern California style. While raising a chorus of voices in minor keys that chant distrust, remorse and anger, Campbell has ultimately written a novel about forgiveness and redemption.

Susan Straight