L.A. novels: a coming-of-age story

The Queen Jade

A Novel

Yxta Maya Murray

Rayo: 352 pp., $23.95

*

Our Ecstatic Days

A Novel

Steve Erickson

Simon & Schuster: 318 pp., $24

*

The Manhattan Beach Project

A Novel

Peter Lefcourt

Simon & Schuster:

342 pp., $24

*

The Devil’s Wind

A Novel

Richard Rayner

HarperCollins: 340 pp., $24.95

*

Consider this, as Pasadena author Harriet Doerr used to say: Four of L.A.’s best-known writers (by which we mean nationally known) have novels out in February, that Bermuda Triangle in publishing’s notoriously predictable calendar.

Consider this: All four novelists -- Yxta Maya Murray, Steve Erickson, Peter Lefcourt and Richard Rayner -- are at the peak of their games, with several novels under their belts. Each has carved out a distinctive cornice upon which to perch. All have chosen to set their new novels in Los Angeles, from the 1950s to the 2030s. Would the reader from Garrison, N.Y., or Billings, Mont., or Seattle recognize Murray’s Long Beach or Erickson’s Echo Park or Lefcourt’s Brentwood or Rayner’s Malibu as Los Angeles? Would the sophisticated Parisian, the Berliner, the Shanghai baby or the Copenhagen housewife recognize the characters’ particular desperation, what John Rechy calls “the urgency to live,” and know they were reading about Angelenos?

Consider this: Fifty years ago, maybe not. Ten years ago, maybe not. Today, no question.

Six years ago in these pages, author D.J. Waldie wrote that the “literature of Anglo unease,” which had dominated L.A. lit from Nathanael West to Joan Didion, was dead. In his crystal ball, Waldie, like many others, saw the coming of a “mongrel literature” that would take its place, the literature of a new generation that might, he offered hopefully, “even be redemptive.” In the same issue, David Rieff worried that no one could embrace it all. Rayner wondered why no one had ever attempted a “flat-out fictional assault on the whole scale of the city’s social reality.” Michael Tolkin went so far as to say that “to the degree that Los Angeles has an identifiable literature, that literature is second-rate.”

Waldie’s “mongrel literature,” while promising fresh voices, lush writing and a more diverse point of view, also promised a kind of therapy lit; scattered plotlines, personal narratives -- the kind of writing that Michiko Kakutani, writing for the New York Times on Erickson’s novel “The Sea Came in at Midnight,” called “self important,” “cobbled together” and “defensive pontificating.” It promised some haunted, memorable characters, full of what Murray called “ageless anger,” what both Susan Straight and Mike Davis referred to as “dislocated” souls. But it was hard to relate to them if you didn’t live in the next courtyard apartment.

It’s not sunshine or geography or architecture that fixes a place in the world’s imagination. It’s the feel of the place (which all of those attributes can contribute to). When you recognize a friend walking a block ahead of you, too far to make out details, what is it that you recognize? It takes generations of writers to plant that feeling of recognition in the world’s consciousness. L.A. lit, particularly fiction, is not much more than 100 years old. The sense of precariousness, heat (sometimes kind, sometimes cruel), insouciance, risk, hopefulness and whimsy now blend recognizably in most of its scenes and characters, no matter how different the plots.

Mongrel stories don’t have this blended quality (and this was certainly true of L.A. lit at one time). They are the raw material of fiction, particularly in American fiction, in which the individual’s story still draws the most readers. It is often said that there is only one plot -- the rise and fall from power. But this is simply not true. It would take a thousand stories from dozens of perspectives not just to give an adequate picture but to convey the feeling of the block where I live in Venice. Without these details, perspectives, stories in the reader’s subconscious, in the movies, in the culture, there can be no fiction -- national, regional, universal -- just the barest of outlines, the thinnest of plots.

And yet, as these four novels prove, the adolescence of L.A. literature, the gut-spilling, 12-step-sharing, gee- I-just-want-everyone-to-like-me-and-my-palm-trees-too days are over. These are grown-up novels; fully considered and rendered with a world audience in mind. They are written by authors who do care if they sell to more than 10 people. That’s very different from the perception that L.A.’s writers are helpless in the shadow of Hollywood, which hovers like a narcissistic father, or worse, that they write for Hollywood in novel form. These writers want to be read by readers.

The heroine of Murray’s “The Queen Jade” is Lola Sanchez, the 31-year-old owner of a bookstore in Long Beach that specializes in adventure and fantasy. Her mother, Juana, a force of nature who teaches archeology at UCLA, goes off to the jungles of Guatemala to search for the legendary Queen Jade, a dazzling piece of blue jade that either grants absolute power or destroys its possessor (it was cursed by a witch and hidden in a maze), and gets caught in a hurricane. Lola, with the help of her mother’s academic nemesis, is left to piece together the literary-historical clues that will lead her small band of unlikely fellow travelers to her mother’s rescue. Murray is a straightforward writer; in a pinch, she chooses character depth over plot, which means that “The Queen Jade” will not have “The Da Vinci Code’s” appeal. She would rather spend a few paragraphs describing why Von Humboldt’s journals speak so vividly to her characters than keep them moving across the pages. For this, she has sometimes been accused of writing what a Kirkus reviewer called “patchy” novels, but she has always been roundly praised for her characters.

Erickson’s “Our Ecstatic Days,” held together by pure, ecstatic pain, is almost impossible to navigate using any of the intellectual skills a reader has at his or her disposal. We know how much respect Erickson has for chronology; characters move in and out of time and space and through each other. (So don’t get all attached to them, either.) He writes in shapes on the page and threads a line of text horizontally throughout the novel, so if you’re used to reading left to right or top to bottom, best let go of that as well.

The year is 2004. A lake is rising and flooding Los Angeles from a hole at the intersection of Hollywood and Laurel Canyon boulevards. Kristin Blumenthal, a young mother, rows her 3-year-old son, Kirk, out to the middle of the lake so that she can dive down to find its source. When she comes up, her son is gone. In her pain, she reinvents herself as Lulu Blue, dominatrix. The line of text moving horizontally throughout the novel is Lulu’s story. The rest of the novel charts the coming of the Age of Chaos.

The novel’s main melody is the universal pain of losing a child, which reverberates from the day that Kristin rowed out on Lake Z with Kirk, her own pure beam of light. Every behavior, every gesture in the book is conditioned by apocalypse; every cell in your body screams, “Don’t let any of this happen!”

“The Manhattan Beach Project” by Lefcourt is the only funny novel in the bunch, and it is a howler. Charlie Berns is a down-on-his-luck producer who spends his days attending Debtors Anonymous meetings and watching TV in his nephew’s pool house. That’s where he lives after having been kicked out of his Brentwood mansion, his Brentwood marriage and his Brentwood car. When he is approached by a CIA agent with an idea for a reality show that follows the life of an Uzbek warlord, it seems like his last chance. He pitches the show, “Warlord,” to a secret branch of ABC specializing in reality shows that push the limits of taste. With ratings sufficiently low, a producer bites and our hero is off to Uzbekistan with his CIA agent, who introduces Charlie to lzbul and his winsome family. Lefcourt uses every bit player to poke fun at L.A.’s most humorous stereotypes, such as the producer’s annoying secretary, Native American Tom Soaring Hawk, as well as a Vietnamese debt consolidator and the hypochondriacal producer Norman Hudris. The only even slightly serious note in the novel is this precarious life in Los Angeles: rich one day, poor the next; famous in the morning, desperate in the afternoon. Lefcourt lingers a bit on Charlie’s credit card skating to buy gas -- but other than that, it’s pure lark.

Rayner (who in these pages called for a “fictional assault on the whole scale of the city’s social reality”) is an octopus author, capable of weaving together world events, cultural icons, fashion, landscape, political markers, family relations and characters who seem blissfully unaware that they are history’s pawns to re-create a specific period and place. In “The Devil’s Wind,” the period is the 1950s and the place is Nevada, though the main character comes from Los Angeles and dreams in that focused, beyond ambitious way (a personal rather than social competitiveness, hence the screenplay-dreamers and get-rich-quick schemes).

Maurice Valentine is a cynical, sophisticated, determined architect married (not quite for love) to a senator’s daughter. After designing a hotel for a godfather-type crime king in Las Vegas, he is asked back to design an entire city for the new Atomic Age, a city to house and entertain all the scientists, government officials and workers who are making and testing bombs. He’s all toughspeak, immaculate white suits and composure until he meets a young woman who will do anything to get what she wants. She’s too much for him -- black dress, pale skin, blond hair, the works. Silver Lake, Van Nuys, Malibu and Santa Monica all make brief appearances, but the real heroic landscape in the novel is Palm Springs, playground for architects and actors. The novel is driven by Valentine’s slow unraveling, from cocky to desperate. His pivotal moment of doubt occurs when he realizes that he is just a “cog in a machine” run by men who are richer and more ruthless than he is.

While the housewife in Copenhagen may now get a whiff of the spirit of Los Angeles in these books, the Los Angeles novel is hardly a cottage industry. Murray’s story is rich in character, Erickson’s in fantasy, Lefcourt’s in humor and Rayner’s in scale. Not only are they not strange bedfellows, they are not bedfellows at all. In a fictional story in which they met, say, at a cocktail party, could we imagine them comparing notes on Los Angeles? (Steve: “Hey Richard, you know that great tamale place on Cesar Chavez Avenue?” Richard: “Yeah, but they’re not as good as Tamara’s on Washington Boulevard.” Maybe, but I think not.) Does any writer want to be known as a West Coast writer, a New York writer, a woman’s writer or a gay writer? Again, usually not.

Can these novels compete (the unfortunate image of a football game comes to mind) with the New York Navel Gazers or the Montana Wild Cats or the Iowa Method Writers? Absolutely. If you want to get ugly about it, “The Devil’s Wind” makes Tom Wolfe’s latest effort, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” look like a reporter’s notebook. And there’s no one in the world writing like Steve Erickson, whose work is difficult and experimental, but then many readers today find Shakespeare or Chaucer difficult.

Consider this: It may be true that it takes a few decades of living (say, four) and a few novels to hit the sort of universal note that assures book sales across the country and around the world. For years, Publishers Weekly would publish profiles of writers only after their third novels. Similarly, it may take a body of literature generations to resonate with the particular vibrations of its homeland. I think that this is happening now. The wistful traveler in the airport bookstore, wishing he could just spend a week in L.A., can reach for any one of these four novels, as different as they are, and feel like he’s been here. *