Palm attitudes

If only it were simple. That’s just it about Los Angeles -- it’s simply not.

The region distinguishes itself as an idiosyncratic expanse persistently in search of itself. It loudly casts about for some sort of cohesive through-line, or at the very least an alibi.

If we think about it in movie terms, it isn’t as if L.A. is wanting for a close-up. Plenty of those exist, even the literary variety. The region has been chronicled exuberantly in a slew of novels and nonfiction -- sun-kissed to dour; name-dropping to noir, trumpeting Elysium or forecasting apocalypse.

More accurately, Greater Los Angeles might be in need of an establishing shot. One that takes into account its various layers -- not just industry versus non-industry, or Westside as opposed to East -- but the Southside and the hilly northern reaches; the other beaches, that other Valley, and the hodge-podge in between.

Echo Park, perhaps? West Covina? Signal Hill?

Those freeway exits that so many power right past may not be what we talk about when we talk about Los Angeles. But three recent books with those cities as backdrops offer starkly different visions of the area -- “Signal Hill: Stories” by Alan Rifkin, “Joe’s Word: An Echo Park Novel” by Elizabeth Stromme and “Break Any Woman Down” by Dana Johnson.

By virtue of their rich sense of place, their characters’ particular yearnings, they flesh out the picture. They consider corners of the region that usually fall off the big-screen projection of Los Angeles. Each, in its own way, helps to broaden our perceptions about what Los Angeles is and what it is to be an Angeleno.

They map a different sort of territory -- both physical and psychological. Not just Hollywood wives and well-heeled, reckless youth -- but the lives of car dealers, swimming pool contractors, hotel maids, roadies and beauticians. It’s a Los Angeles just as valid, just as tangible because of its stubborn persistence.

That stick-to-itiveness, that balance of faith and fantasy, is the undergirding of Rifkin’s “Signal Hill,” a collection of five stories and a novella that wander through various, off-the-scenic-grid “greater Los Angeles” settings -- the blinkingly bright desert, the Valley, Long Beach and Signal Hill, places like the distant rise of the San Gabriels, that are usually hidden from our thoughts by a scrim of smog or smoke.

Born in Chicago, Rifkin grew up in Encino, “the flat part,” he quickly distinguishes as he cuts into a tri-tip steak at Phil Trani’s, a bustling Long Beach watering hole catering to clusters of chattering guys in sky-blue cardigans and two-tone shoes. For him, the very act of becoming a writer has been twinned with discovering that his place, no matter how seemingly mundane, held import.

For him it was stumbling upon Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep” -- a chronicle of an immigrant Jewish family’s struggle in New York City. It didn’t inspire, Rifkin recalls, “it infected me. I remember reading it as a senior in college and I didn’t want it to end. It was a feeling that I hadn’t had before. It made me realize that my own experience was ... write-able.”

“Signal Hill” is a swirl of weathered snapshots and touchstones: The deserts to which one escapes to try to wring consciousness or memory dry; the shifting currency of status symbols -- the Valley’s swimming pools, its flats and rises; riding the peripheries of the entertainment industries. It all somehow confirms something ... but what?

It presents a Southern California remarkable for its suburban normalness and its tiny worries, which may be confusing to some. “Already I’ve seen it in the ‘Regional’ section with the hiking guides,” Rifkin says of bookstores, a defeatist smile working across his lean face. “Title doesn’t help. Neither does the oil derrick on the cover.”

Indeed, the stories’ immediate backdrops are workaday, car-dealerships, an Encino backyard, the Queen Mary’s fireworks show. That nagging siren of “something bigger,” “something’s missing” throbs just below the surface. That larger-than-life L.A. seems to rush past, out of the corner of one’s eye. It’s that double vision, a sort of existential worry, that bears down on his characters.

They try to “get it right” but find themselves pacing metaphorical circles. A father and son dance around an emotional expanse that opens up like a fault between them; couples find themselves bound up in a chase that never seems to end, even when it does physically. When the protagonist of Rifkin’s novella, Richard Leviton, reflects on his life, it is place that he uses as an instrument of measure: “Signal Hill was the only elevation at all on the Long Beach side of San Pedro and around certain curves it could look like the Hollywood Hills, but only just enough like the Hollywood Hills to break Leviton’s heart.”

It wasn’t that he set out to write about a contrasting Los Angeles. “It was just that the other has been done to death. And since I’m not a high-paid screenwriter, I’ve always been marginal in L.A., working some crap job or another. I’ve always been looking at L.A. from the edges. You become very conscious of what lasts and what doesn’t. You have this time-tripping sense of walking on your own grave.”

Neighborhood watching

If Rifkin is entranced by the dualities, Elizabeth Stromme’s point-of-view is sunk dead-center in the moment: Plain-spoken spot news.

In her noir novel, “Joe’s Word,” Joe, a writer for hire, walks his Echo Park neighborhood, a stretch of Sunset Boulevard where there isn’t a klieg light in sight, except those cast from on high by a police helicopter. Joe lives shoulder to shoulder within the terraced rises of hills alongside the people he socializes with and serves. He walks to the Dodger game, shoots pool at the Short Stop. It is a neighborhood in a true sense of the word, bounded by relationships and common struggle.

His pen is his defense against silence. As a public writer, Joe serves a community not without a voice, but rather without a means to be heard.

“It’s a profession that doesn’t exist here,” Stromme explains, curled up in an easy chair in her Echo Park living room, a perch that allows her to keep watch on the city as it unfurls westward. “In France they have them. People who feel a little unsure about their writing skills, or who are functionally illiterate, can employ them to conduct official business, write personal letters,” to masquerade as them on the page.

Physically close, but psychologically removed from Hollywood’s notion of image-making, Echo Park provided a perfect backdrop. Setting up shop on the easterly stretches of Sunset Boulevard, Joe has cultivated a range of clients: immigrants in need of a “new” history; women never in the job force; out-of-the mold people looking for an out-of-the-lines employ. With a few pen strokes, Joe gifts them with a past, opens the door to a future. Yet all the while, he struggles with his own past and future, so his present -- like the community itself -- hangs in a suspended balance.

Echo Park came ready-fitted with narrative tension, Stromme says. The neighborhood -- in the shadow of its upwardly mobile, hipster sister, Silver Lake -- is beset with complications: battles with malathion spraying, a fraught relationship with the police force, tensions between the “hill dwellers” and those in the flats. When the police came to answer Stromme’s call after a bullet flew through her picture window, the officer asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I did want to humanize the people in Echo Park,” says Stromme, who, like Joe, is a walker, moved by scents, the colors, the languages, the stories that waft up from the street. “When I moved here it reminded me of the Third World. I liked the mix of people. I loved the old buildings. The views. So many people were afraid to come here. And there is this idea, as what happens with Joe in the book -- that if you live here, you’re a loser.”

What people seem to forget is that for many Echo Park might be the first tier of someone else’s dream. “Working-class, regular lives don’t seem to have permeated our vision of L.A.,” she says. Even in some of the book reviews, people haven’t quite grasped what she was after, and have characterized the streets and the people who live in them as “a miserable neighborhood without ambitions.” What they don’t see is that the very opposite is true.

When worlds collide

For Dana Johnson, really being able to see Los Angeles meant pulling back far enough to take it out of pixels. It took time and distance to begin to understand what spreads out along the basin, not just what grows in those separate neighborhoods but what has sprung up in conversation between lives plunked side by side.

Recipient of the 2001 Flannery O’Connor Award, Johnson’s collection, “Break Any Woman Down,” is deeply interested in the intersections of race and class, language and cultural gesture. But what the best of her stories home in on is what happens to identity in the wake of juxtapositions created by migration, immigration, chance and dumb luck.

“I didn’t think about Los Angeles until I was away from it,” says Johnson in her sunny Echo Park dining room, the Doobie Brothers rocking softly on the stereo. Living in Indiana, working on her master of fine arts degree and teaching, the elusiveness of L.A. became clear. “There was something about the climate, the light. I missed hearing Spanish.”

Soon, L.A. began to shimmer up in her work, as if an image on emulsion. But it was L.A. in all the possibilities she knew. West Covina, the Crenshaw district, the scuffed-up ends of Hollywood. There were gossipy Iranian sisters, black punk-rockers, a black lap dancer and a scattering of displaced Southerners.

“There is this view of L.A. from the outside that I began to encounter when I traveled,” reflects Johnson. “And I found myself saying: ‘No. No one’s surfing. There are no BMWs. No one is an actor,’ ” she recalls. “Then I started to really get annoyed. In workshop someone would say: ‘Well, this doesn’t seem very L.A. ...’ Or they wanted more ‘L.A.-ness,’ and they weren’t from L.A. They’d never been to L.A. They’d be from Chicago! I got to the point where I’d think, ‘I’m a native and I feel marginalized.’ ”

What her L.A. stories underscore is that the city offers up many paths and lives to try on -- if only for a moment. Whether you’re a black girl whose family is from Tennessee or a white boy who has migrated from Oklahoma, the struggle with outsiderness is mighty. The only thing harder is the process of constructing identity out of a new set of codes and influences, without sacrificing your soul.

“He grabbed the front of my 94.7 KMET T-shirt that ... I wore in hopes I’d have at least one cool piece of clothing,” says Avery, the new-to-the-suburbs African American teenage protagonist in the story “Melvin in Sixth Grade.” “It was one of the radio stations that played Def Leppard and AC/DC, though in secret I still liked my Chi-Lites 45, ‘Have You Seen Her?’ better.”

Back in Echo Park after a seven-year absence and teaching at UC Riverside, Johnson is stunned by what she sees. Chi-chi boutiques sprung up where there used to be Salvadoran pupuserias, highfalutin boites where once stood shabby coffeehouses.

She worries that the encroaching cliche -- the Westside moving east, the Hollywood sensibility -- might infect the very notion of what it is to be an Angeleno, so broad and un-pinpointable that it wriggles out of definition. And that’s the point: “I live in L.A. and my world is not just a palm tree and a script.” And for as long as she can, she will continue to write it into being.