L.A., chapter and verse

Spend a few days reading through novels set in Los Angeles and a truth becomes evident: This is less a defined place than a geographic Rorschach test, a massive inkblot that gives rise to revealing interpretations.

To some writers, it’s a city of noir starkness, peopled by the tough and the desperate. To others this is a place of benevolent light where dreams are lived -- or can be shattered. Thomas Pynchon, a native New Yorker, saw the sprawl in technical terms. In “The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon wrote about Oedipa Maas’ drive south in the mid-1960s to the San Fernando Valley to serve as executor of a former lover’s will, and finding evidence of a society straining to connect beneath a landscape of roofs.

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace the battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”

With the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books scheduled for this weekend at UCLA, it seemed the perfect time to take a drive around the city seeking geographic touchstones as portrayed in great works of fiction. It was, in essence, a search for L.A.’s literary soul -- a surprisingly elusive thing. Chicago, at least in the late Saul Bellow’s hands, is a place of tough self-reliance, a sturdy civilization arisen between the expanses of Lake Michigan and the central plains. New York? The center of the universe.

But Los Angeles is not so easily distilled. Like the city itself, more a series of connected hives than a single swarm, the literature about the place is disparate and scenes vary widely across terrain both physical and internal. Generalities and archetypes -- palm trees, bougainvillea and sunshine -- make us think we know where a story takes place, even when it’s wholly invented. Raymond Chandler was adept at it, leaving the reader with the sense that Philip Marlowe was moving among real addresses and suburbs -- Bay City in “Farewell, My Lovely” -- that existed only in Chandler’s imagination.

What any novelist has to say about a city is highly subjective, and usually driven by the needs of the story. No one view is all that revelatory. But the descriptions from many eyes coalesce into something approaching truth -- a literary intervention that forces us to look at ourselves, from the wealth of Mulholland Drive to the wildness of Griffith Park; from the streets of Hollywood, Boyle Heights and South-Central, to the tourist-magnet Santa Monica Pier.

Hollywood is a constant too, with sex and greed as evergreen topics. And the freeways figure prominently, evidence of a city in motion despite the number of hours a day we spend in gridlock.

Joan Didion touched on the primacy of driving in “Play It as It Lays,” set in the late 1960s. After Maria Wyeth broke up with her husband, Carter, she “dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time” and drove the freeways, a single cell in the city’s arteries. “She had to be on the freeways by 10 a.m. If she was not, she lost the day’s rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum.”

Cranking the radio high, she crisscrossed the L.A. Basin and the Valley.

“She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as the riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking.... Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and slept that night dreamlessly.”

Driven to find it all

Of course, you can’t get anywhere without becoming one of those rivermen yourself. So it was that a little before 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday that the Valley was flying by as I drove the 101 to the Topanga Canyon Boulevard exit, then south up the side of the Santa Monica Mountains before descending into the canyon.

This is where Delaney Mossbacher, the self-conscious “liberal humanist” in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Tortilla Curtain,” rounded a turn in his “freshly waxed Japanese car” filled with the week’s recycling, and hit a homeless illegal immigrant who lived with his wife in the canyon scrub brush. Boyle described the scene, set in the mid-1990s, as near a lumberyard, and there is one near Topanga State Park. But the description fits anywhere in this roller-coaster ride of turns and hills where Mossbacher hit the man and then, shaken, stopped his car and “stepped tentatively onto the parched strip of naked stone and litter that constituted the shoulder of the road.

“Immediately, before he could even catch his breath, he was brushed back by the tailwind of a string of cars racing bumper-to-bumper up the canyon like some snaking malignant train. He clung to the side of his car as the sun caught his head in a hammerlock and the un-air-conditioned heat rose from the pavement like a fist in the face, like a knockout punch. Two more cars shot by. He was dizzy. He was sweating. He couldn’t seem to control his hands. ‘I’ve had an accident,’ he said to himself, repeating it over and over, like a mantra, ‘I’ve had an accident.’ ”

In that instant, the protective detachment of Mossbacher’s life crumbled, testing his beliefs and leading to a crisis of the soul. But it was a different crisis from the youthful -- and self-destructive -- ennui of Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero,” a 1985 road novel of Los Angeles in which narrator Clay, home from college for Christmas break, never really gets anywhere, his road being more of the hamster-wheel variety.

“After leaving Blair I drive down Wilshire and then onto Santa Monica and then I drive onto Sunset and take Beverly Glen to Mulholland, and then Mulholland to Sepulveda and then Sepulveda to Ventura and then I drive through Sherman Oaks to Encino and then into Tarzana and then Woodland Hills. I stop at a Sambo’s that’s open all night and sit alone in a large empty booth and the winds have started and they’re blowing so hard that the windows are shaking, and the sounds of them trembling, about to break, fill the coffee shop.”

My tour path worked in reverse, cutting through Tarzana -- named for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape-raised creation -- to Mulholland Drive then snaking my way past Woodrow Wilson Drive, near Runyon Canyon Park, where Michael Connelly placed the home of his detective, Harry Bosch. From there I meandered east to where James M. Cain in the 1930s turned the gem of Griffith Park into a menace in “Double Indemnity.”

Insurance man Walter Huff enters the park “a couple hundred yards up Riverside from Los Feliz,” an entrance that seems no longer to exist, but the road might be a now-closed one that cuts along Mount Hollywood. He picks the spot where he’ll kill Phyllis Nirdlinger, his co-conspirator in the murder of her husband -- though she shoots him first.

“This park, they call it a park, but it’s really a scenic drive, up high above Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, for people in cars, and a hilly ride for people on horses.” Huff found an overlook -- “a little flat place so people can park and look over the valley” -- that fit the bill: “I got out and looked down. There was a drop of at least 200 feet, straight, and probably another hundred feet after that where the car would roll after it struck.... “

Survivor scenery

Michael Ventura used similarly hilly terrain in his 1994 novel, “The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God,” a story of love, desperation and insanity in which surgeon James Abbey sacrifices his marriage rather than move from “steep Cerro Gordo Street, at the crest of the hill” on the working-class western edge of Elysian Park. It is less a street than a sharp arete, and driving here can feel like rappelling.

“[It’s] not a neighborhood where you’d expect a surgeon to live. Movie stars lived here once, but that was 70 years ago.” His wife described the neighborhood as on “the genteel side of shabby,” and wanted to move to Santa Monica or another upscale area. “How could he explain that to distance himself too far from the realm that she called ‘shabby’ was to leave forever the only people he had ever trusted: the people who insisted on survival for its own sake, without hope of betterment or comfort or any victory at all -- nothing but the defiant fact of their survival.”

That tenacity was reflected again in Luis J. Rodriguez’s 2002 short-story collection, “The Republic of East L.A.,” which opens with a narrator talking about the intrusion of his job as a limo driver on a neighborhood of deep poverty near Prospect Park, a green teardrop in the middle of Echandia Street at Judson in the southwest curl of the I-5 and I-10 interchange.

“The long sleek limousine lays into the curved street as kids of all sizes, of many coughs and giggles, skirmish around it, climbing its blinding chrome and white armor, smearing dirt and fingerprints on its tinted windows. The unshaven men gather around to put words together about this wonder on the roadway, to excavate a new vocabulary for this intrusion that seems to smirk at their poverty, to lay like a diamond on the garbage-strewn lot.”

Jack Kerouac was drawn to the edgier parts of L.A. too. In “On the Road,” based on his road trips in the early 1950s, Kerouac’s narrator, Sal Paradise, and a temporary lover landed “in the loneliest and most brutal of American cities,” finding a downtown hotel room on South Main as they tried to raise the cash to hitchhike back to New York City.

“South Main Street, where Terry and I took strolls with hot dogs, was a fantastic carnival of lights and wildness. Booted cops frisked people on practically every corner. The beatest characters in the country swarmed on the sidewalks -- all of it under those soft Southern California stars that are lost in the brown halo of the huge desert encampment L.A. really is. You could smell tea, weed, I mean marijuana, floating in the air, together with the chili beans and beer. That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night.”

Drive that stretch of South Main today and the buildings are still there, but the energy Kerouac found has shifted a few blocks to Broadway and Los Angeles Street, and the bebop jazz replaced by mariachi and other Mexican musical strains.

Where life unfolds

FARTHER south and a few years earlier, Chester Himes’ Bob Jones lived with the constant racism of World War II L.A., an insidious drip of poison that eventually filled his veins. In “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” Jones struggles against humiliations, eventually deciding to kill a white co-worker who had called him by an epithet, then punched him into unconsciousness over a work-site dice game. Himes wheels Jones through South-Central, stopping home at Wall Street and 51st -- there are still two courtyard apartment blocks there like the one Himes described, looking like motels folded in half -- and then up to 42nd Street and Central Avenue, biding time until his target gets out of work.

“I put the gun in the glove compartment and left the car in the station for Buddy to check over while I strolled down past the Dunbar Hotel. I felt tall, handsome, keen. I was bareheaded and my hair felt good in the sun. A little black girl in a pink draped slack suit with a thick red mouth and kinky curled hair switched by. I smelled her dime-store perfume and got a live-wire edge. Everything was sharper. Even Central Avenue smelled better. I strolled along the loungers in front of Skippy’s, leaned against the wall, and watched the babes go by....”

The Dunbar is still there, though no longer a hotel -- it now houses social service agencies and other offices, with apartments upstairs. But the street is still a place to see life unfold.

Walter Mosley set a number of his books in South-Central too, including his Easy Rawlins series of mysteries that explores the dynamic of black life beginning in postwar L.A.

Mosley and Chandler, writing half a century apart, knew the city from the inside. Los Angeles changes when looked at from a distance -- such as London. In British author William Boyd’s “Any Human Heart,” a novel written as the collected journals of a writer, art dealer and world traveler, Logan Mountstuart spent a few days in 1960 Los Angeles consulting on a script. He finishes his last day alone at a bar near the Santa Monica Pier.

Big Dean’s at the foot of the pier fits the description, an old-style bar serving only beer and wine, the front open to winds that on this Saturday have kicked the bay up into whitecaps. A Creedence Clearwater Revival song blares over the speakers and a baseball game unfurls mutely on the TV sets.

Mountstuart was raised in Birmingham, lived for years in London and then New York though had traveled much more broadly. Yet this city seemed to have him stumped, the wriggling and writhing mass of it.

“My nature is essentially urban and, although Los Angeles is indubitably a city, somehow its mores aren’t,” reads the fictional journal. “Maybe it’s the weather that makes it feel forever suburban and provincial; cities need extremes of weather, so that you long to escape.... There has to be something brutal and careless about a true city -- the denizen must feel vulnerable -- and Los Angeles doesn’t deliver that.”

Yet as Angelenos know, this city can be a brutal and careless place too, behind those archetypes of ease, the sunshine and palm trees. It’s all in how you read the inkblot. And Boyd’s Mountstuart sees insulation.

“I feel too damn comfortable here, too cocooned. These are not experiences of the true city: Its nature seeps in under the door and through the windows -- you can never be free of it. And the genuine urban man or woman is always curious -- curious about the life outside on the streets. That just doesn’t apply here: you live in Bel Air and you don’t ask yourself what’s going on in Pacific Palisades -- or am I missing something?”

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L.A. connections

Los Angeles writers (and those who write about L.A.) will be well represented at this weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Among the highlights:

Saturday

Discovering California: 11:30 a.m., with writers William Deverell, Barbara Isenberg, Malcolm Margolin and Rick Wartzman, and moderated by Jonathan Kirsch, lawyer, author and regular contributor to the Times Book Review.

Not Your Usual Suspects: 1 p.m., with writers Kem Nunn, T. Jefferson Parker, Roger Simon and Marcos McPeek Villatoro, moderated by blogger and screenwriter Tod Goldberg.

Hollywood and the Reds: 1:30 p.m., with writers Larry Ceplair, Victor Navasky, Ronald Radosh and Richard Schickel, moderated by Ronald Brownstein, Times political writer.

To Live and Die in L.A.: 1:30 p.m., with writers Norman Klein, Richard Rayner and D.J. Waldie, moderated by author and journalist David Ulin.

Sue Grafton: 2 p.m., in conversation with mystery writer and former television news anchor Kelly Lange.

Sunday

Hollywood Confidential: 10 a.m., with writers David Freeman, Seth Greenland, Terrill Lee Lankford and Jerry Stahl, moderated by Rachel Resnick.

Rethinking Los Angeles: 10:30 a.m., with writers Steve Erickson, Michelle Huneven, Michael Jaime-Becerra and Peter Lefcourt, moderated by Susan Salter Reynolds.

Walter Mosley: 11 a.m., in conversation with author and Washington Post Book World editor Marie Arana.

T.C. Boyle: 1 p.m., introduced by Los Angeles Times writer and editor Tom Curwen.

Michael Connelly and Miles Corwin: 2:30 p.m., in conversation.

For full schedule information, go online at www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/