The Secrets of Los Angeles

Happiness, we all know by now, is something of an illusion. How could it be otherwise? What gives pleasure is nothing more than a vice, and vices are nothing more than palliatives to life. Sex, drugs, credit cards--these sweeten the pot but fade away in the end. What remain are our unadorned selves and dreams longing to be real.

Los Angeles is famously, and mythically, the repository of these 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.

It begins on the road, as Mina and Lorene, thirtysomething refugees from Hollywood, try to escape their world of bartenders, screenwriters, video artists, hot sidewalks, mediocre sex, rented movies and disconnected conver-sations. “Leave everything,” Lorene advises Mina; “the one thing you can’t leave behind is the thing you absolutely must.” It’s something like a koan, and it resonates louder and louder as they head through the deserts toward New Orleans and New York.

In their flight, Spiotta skillfully creates a montage of the jumble they’ve left behind. There’s David, who’s married to Mina and is sleeping with Gwyn, while Mina juggles her own affairs with Scott and Max, who happens to be David’s best friend. There’s Michael, Mina’s brother, who seems to have gotten off the mental ward and is on some sort of road trip of his own. There’s Lisa, who’s married (unhappily) to Mark and dotes on her twins while cleaning other people’s homes. And there’s of course Lorene’s empire of the chic-ly disdainful, manipulative and oh-so popular restaurants and bars: Vanity and Vexation (successor to Dead Animals and Single Malts), Food Baroque (formerly EAT/NOT EAT) and the Gentleman’s Club.

Sure, Spiotta’s Los Angeles is an exaggerated world, but that’s OK. This mock paradise wears its cliches on its sleeve. Nothing here, as Mina realizes, is “so shopworn and spent that it couldn’t be revived with the right recasting, the right lighting, and the right framing.”

Ironic detachment: It’s the key to success for Spiotta’s most adept denizens, and she is smart enough to know that although it brings them great power, it comes at a terrible price. Catch Mina and David alone one night and you’d think you were staring at an updated Hopper painting. A cool ennui, like the cigarette smoke rising everywhere, wafts around their hearts, filling them with a longing for the way they think things used to be.

The present is thick with disappointment, and the past, as William Faulkner once wrote, is not even past. Which creates something of a chimerical world, all the more so for being told in flashback, so that as the girls fly down the road, you might think you’re hearing Ray Davies singing in the background. Turn down the volume and some problems become instantly clear. For one, Mina walks everywhere. Forget Point A, Point B or even the car itself; she lives in between, having found that she can spend her life without feeling any loss “in segues, commercial breaks, cigarette pauses, walks from, hallways to ... sideways, solitary moments when she could catch the world from the margins or at a glance.” It’s nothing she wouldn’t like to fix (especially when Max turns on the camcorder in the bedroom), but she isn’t entirely certain how.

Lorene, however, has a solution for her own trouble or so she thinks. Neither in love nor out (another issue altogether), she lets her world be ruled by St. John’s Solutions, a Southland spiritual franchise dispensing a strange brew of Scientology and Mary Kay, Esalen and Tony Robbins. Her latest treatment is to be touched, and as Beryl whisks his fingers across her naked back, she regresses to a past life, all an hour ago, when she passed a group of guys on the street, not one of whom turned to stare.

She can’t believe it: “I am so scared my whole life is built on something so inevitably doomed and so, well, so silly,” she confides. “I have spent the first third of my life fending off mostly unwanted attention from strangers, and I would spend the last two-thirds pining desperately for that attention when it is gone.”

“Alabyrinth of solipsism”: That’s how Mina’s brother describes his own psychosis, and it’s a phrase that might apply to all of them. “If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so,” he tells Mina one day when she visits him in the hospital, and he’s the most anchored of them all, having abandoned the search for meaning (it’s all relative anyway), while everyone else is still hot on its trail, meaning of course being synonymous with happiness.

And who’s to blame them when happiness seems so promising and sanctioned? Take shopping: “a way to recast your life ... a desperate optimism about the meaning of style and detail. Such a fleeting feeling, but impossible to resist.” Or sex, which is of course far more complicated--”the way it took the rule of two and made a mess of it, destroying and exhausting”--but worth the effort.

Even at its most unspectacular, sex is different from anything else Mina knows, allowing her to experience “the secret heart of all people, to be loved like this, perpetually strange, the bravery of it, the complications.” It is “the only thing the world had to match the loss of her family, the loss of innocence, the only compensation for having to grow up and grow old.”

But that’s the upside; the reality is a little less rosy. Late in the story, Spiotta cuts through the dross, letting Mina tell how as a teenager she felt so discarded by her father that when a friend of his, one night, knocked on her bedroom door during a family party--she was 15 at the time--a drink and a joint in hand, it was no big deal to go all the way with him. But it left her more shattered than she knows. Welcome to the world of adults, he told her post-coitus: It’s a world of secrets; now you have yours.

“He was right,” Mina knows. “The world, the grown-up world, was full of not-so-secret secrets. And real secret secrets. I thought of my uncles and aunts at family gatherings.... They were maybe thinking really of a secret life somewhere. Maybe even a grand passion. And it made them all seem more complicated and sad in ways they hadn’t before. They were wives and husbands, human and full of desire, and no one knows, or maybe everyone does. And sometimes it is that way forever, and sometimes things break down and dissolve.”

The key is to learn how to tolerate that dissolution in a world as dangerous as ours without counting on anything as transitory as happiness. Which might not be easy in Los Angeles, where everyone--in Spiotta’s frame--longs to be cured of a ravaged childhood and to live forever in the exultation of a single moment.

“Lightning Field,” Spiotta’s promising debut, takes its title from the Walter De Maria art installation in New Mexico where 400 stainless steel rods are set in a grid on an open plain to draw lightning strikes from the summer storms. It’s an invitation to the gods, she seems to imply, as if life and nature, inspiration and interdiction, are so easy to control. Then again, as she shows, sometimes they are, and sometimes we are foolish enough to think they are.