Strangers in Paradise

San Francisco has Frank Norris’ “McTeague.” Boston has John P. Marquand’s “The Late George Apley.” Chicago has James Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan” and Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March.” New York has Dos Passos’ “Manhattan Transfer” and Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Big, defining novels like these clarify the social terrain of a place and serve as a way of saying, “This is who and what we are.”

And Los Angeles has ... well, nothing that David L. Ulin, editor of “Another City: Writing From Los Angeles,” finds comparable. We have a literature about Los Angeles in which a city we recognize is often monstrously and sometimes beautifully imagined, but we have no literature yet of Los Angeles, not even the shared grid of stories that would make such a literature possible: my story appropriating some of yours, yours taking from the Korean woman who handles your dry cleaning, hers from the Oaxacan who sells her fresh fruit and his acquired in part from the Alabaman who sits with him on the overcrowded Metro bus.

You see the texture of this conversation beginning to emerge among the 37 writers anthologized in “Another City,” until their habit of alienation gets in the way. L.A. writers suffer this city’s isolating divides--its fractures along racial, sexual, religious and social lines--as if always for the first time, as if they never heard that the fear of contagion is the founding story of Anglo Los Angeles, a city in which we have never rubbed shoulders with strangers. It’s a story that will be repeated until we become fully implicated in it by standing with its victims and sympathetically among its inheritors.

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.

Reyner Banham celebrated that city in “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.” “[T]he splendors and miseries of Los Angeles,” he said, “the graces of [its] grotesqueries, appear to me as unrepeatable as they are unprecedented.” By accepting Los Angeles as this great exception--a city without a narrative--L.A. writers maroon themselves off the continent of American literature.

Ulin is an expatriate in this L.A. too, a former New Yorker and former book editor of the L.A. Weekly who 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.

“The most representative Southern California writing,” Ulin says, “is small, particular, like snapshots of a moment in time.” Ulin pins L.A.’s literature-of-the-tiny on the multi-polarity of the place--its centerlessness--and its consequent lack of the homogenizing aesthetic from which defining narratives rose in New York, Chicago and Boston.

The problem of L.A. literature is, Ulin suggests, that no big novel of Los Angeles is possible, given the city’s maximal heterogeneity and minimal shared interests. Only in anthologies like his, he says, are the “smaller, individual voices” he believes uniquely characteristic of L.A. “raised above the din” caused by L.A.’s triumphant mode of storytelling, in CinemaScope and Technicolor, at the movies.

The problem of Los Angeles literature--and the problem isn’t the diminished size of our stories, however--doesn’t yield to a collection as ambivalent as “Another City.” I respect that 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. And I get the real tang of a well-judged serving of unfamiliar writing from the several cities of Los Angeles that overlap here but do not intersect.

As good as his choices are, however, Ulin must call the result “something of a reader’s autobiography, a catalog of my concerns and interests.” As if defeated by the city’s many fractures, Ulin re-scripts his experience of L.A. as a reading of writers who are among the city’s “hidden, disregarded, and overlooked” interpreters. 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.

As uncertain a map as it is, “Another City” has thoroughfares and destination--some real and many imaginary--that we’ve come to accept as characteristic of Los Angeles.

There’s the harsh grid of remorse that extends from the lovers’ bed in Diane Lefer’s “Naked Chinese People” to the desert trailer where a black man is gunned down because of L.A.’s habits of madness and racism. And there’s the treacherous grid of gang turf in Jervey Tervalon’s “Trouble Man,” in which a teen’s hangdog wish to find a girlfriend outside the neighborhood sets up a comic beating that could well have been a drive-by shooting.

There’s the temple of memory that Ulin assembles in his brief memoir, “This Year in Los Angeles,” from the debris of his Jewish family’s secularization. “[I]t was a matter of transformation through negation,” Ulin notes of an experience shared by many immigrants to L.A., “but in the process we were stranded, part of neither the world we wished for nor the one we left behind.” Having surprised himself by taking on the ritual of the Seder since coming to L.A., Ulin finds pleasure in what is missing from the Passover meal: “no rabbi to negotiate the ceremony, or tell me what it means.” No one interprets the wounds of memory in Sesshu Foster’s “The Mutilated Man,” one of the more arresting pieces of memoir in “Another City,” which ties personal bitterness and the experience of racism inside and outside a Nisei family to the loping rhythms of L.A. street talk.

There’s also the downtown of Marjorie Gellhorn Sa’adah’s prose poem “Only Heaven,” in which luck is what L.A. fails to bestow even as it offers up the consolations of Broadway’s mercado of cheap dreams--the free advice of a verduras vendor, the one-man-band who plays on tin cans tacked to his belt and “a hundred girls, on their way to try on a hundred shiny wedding dresses.” “Down here,” Gellhorn Sa’adah writes, “it is hope on parade.”

And there’s the apartment that the agoraphobic narrator of Tara Ison’s story “Cactus” cannot leave because a life in public in L.A. makes one absurdly vulnerable. As tame as we try to make the city, Ison suggests, it thrives cruelly, like the transplanted cactus of the story’s title, while some of us wither and some become hosts to L.A.’s parasitic part--what the hilariously nostalgic Jerry Stahl (in “Inside Miss Los Angeles”) calls the “slick, subterranean pool of self-loathing and toxic desire from which springs L.A.’s true inspiration.” There is nothing quite so mixed as an ex-junkie’s desire to shock you with the drugs-plus-sex-plus-more-drugs cocktail that Stahl assumes stands for all of L.A. He, like so many, is another Angeleno who cannot bear to stay here but will not go.

Fortunately, other addicts’ acts of faith--to cartoon vulgarity, to Hollywood, to private fury and to the act of writing--don’t overburden “Another City.” There’s a counterpoint of sweetness in Bia Lowe’s “Lost” (about making another home as far from L.A. as could be imagined) and L.A. Times staff writer Lynell George’s “Native to the Place” (about becoming the custodian of other people’s stories of why they came here). Even more, in story after story, the commonplace of L.A. resiliently intrudes into our self-absorption, fittingly symbolized as shafts of immigrant green poking up from the cement floor of the dry Los Angeles River in Jacqueline De Angelis’ long poem “Atwater.”

*

The freeway follows the river like a snake. No, that’s not it. The freeway

hems the river. That’s not it

*

The wild grasses break through the concrete channel and grow

promiscuous. They regreen her in clumps.

*

The foreign reeds grow straight down her spine.

*

“Sit on slanted concrete,” De Angelis urges a few stanzas later. “Watch water. Look, eddies .... Sit, sit by the river and want.”

To be desired is the appeal L.A. made to the American imagination in the 20th century--for the flimsiest of reasons--and when the experience proves disappointing and the city we wanted is missing, our continued longing has tried to make Los Angeles into many other cities that will be more adequate to the demands of our desire. This doubling and redoubling of our vision of L.A. incites one of two reactions: either a rigorous editing out of the city’s confusing superimpositions or a wild splicing of the many inadequate L.A.s into a self-referential montage. The first renders a city of isolated dots connected by the wiry line of the freeway, best described by Joan Didion; the second is a home movie, sent back to where you came from, that shows how much you have reinvented yourself here.

So much wanting can be a form of violence in L.A., as Richard Rayner makes clear in “Los Angeles,” his account of traversing of the zones of unrest in a burning Los Angeles in 1992. Wanting security, the city gives itself the violent LAPD. Wanting respect, the city’s unparented young men of color give themselves the violent embrace of the city’s gangs. Wanting a microwave, a dozen pair of shoes or Madonna’s conical bustier from the Frederick’s of Hollywood museum of lingerie, joyous rioters give themselves a violent new city.

The rioting had begun as a matter of black rage, Rayner concludes, morphed into “property redistribution” by the rebellious poor of all colors and ended as a public entertainment in which at least 53 people were killed. The totalizing brutality of rage, poverty and vulgar entertainment admits no counter-narrative, no story that will escape its own isolation, a despairing conclusion that leaks out of Rayner’s memoir to pool in other stories in “Another City.”

“We want to be read,” Ulin says of L.A.’s writers, “to be regarded, to be noticed--and, if possible, to be understood.” Writers in L.A. ought to learn the lesson that Hollywood teaches about the dangers of desire. There, desire, specifically for fame, has become so huge and consuming, so impenetrably surrounded by a bodyguard of liars, that no one--and not even the famous--can live in its center.

Hollywood teaches that we live best at the periphery of the regard we want. The problem of the literature of Los Angeles is that this centerless city is not yet our common home. Until it is, until we recognize the limits of our exceptionalism, we’ll continue to produce a body of regional literature that is too often stranded by contempt for our shared ruined paradise.

The literature of L.A. that will be more than regional will play on the city’s once toxic brownfields of the spirit, like the teams of Salvadoran, Yemeni and Filipino youngsters already playing soccer in the parks reclaimed from the industrial wastes of Maywood. They call this flawed place home, as will its coming generation of thoroughly mestizo/Creole/mixed-race writers, who will not be defined by their ZIP Code or skin tone.

These writers will want more of L.A. than its stories of isolation and exclusion; for them, this city will be ordinary, not exceptional. They will look in the mirror of the self and see a crowd, not a singularity, and that reflection will show us who and what we are.

These writers will find their place by negotiating a terrain unique to our time, where the voyage from the barrio or the village will have taken an afternoon’s plane flight, not a lifetime, and where the past, its grievances and its beliefs are only a phone call or a mouse click away. That L.A. is at the intersection of the global and the marginal, which makes Los Angeles no longer an exception at the edge but the provisional center of everywhere.

The literature of L.A.--when it finally weaves together Manila, Lagos, Bakersfield, Ho Chi Minh City, New York, Tenochtitlan and everywhere else--will be the literature of mongrels and minorities, in an unforgettable language not seen before, for a city no longer missing, and that will make it America’s literature.