Stereotypes about Los Angeles I have absorbed from the pop culture

On the eve of a transcontinental jaunt, these notes to self:
The streets are empty and filled with whimsy. Paul Thomas Anderson made me think this, Punch Drunk Love. I remember thinking, this is the way Southern California feels: flimsy, spacious, bruisey pastels. A little like a forgotten backlot.
They have a vastly superior food scene. Many things have cause me to think this. Going for Okonomiyaki (savory Japanese pancakes) with a friend and her father when I was a child. My sister's hole in the wall vegetarian Indian place in a strip mall near her house. Reading Chowhound posts about Taco Trucks. Jonathan Gold's expeditions. Diddy Reese.

If accepting J.C. as my personal savior would bring an In 'n' Out to NYC, sign me up. People, come on. If you'd tried it, you'd know.
Despite NY's superior literary heritage, Angelenos have Miranda July. How does she do what she does without being totally annoying? I don't know. Why can't I be more like her? The jury's still out.
The music scene rules. Again, this started in childhood, Sean and I driving to the Roxy in his Ford Escort, going to see Lush or the Pixies at the Hollywood Palladium. Now I listen to Morning Becomes Eclectic every chance I get. In New York, seeing a show invariably a hassle; in L.A., enchanting singer-songwriters grow on palm trees. They work at Book Soup.

These ideas I have are crazy. I am a native Southern Californian, and I should know better.

Still...I want my trip to be weird, illuminating, delicious. Look for me at sporting a copy of No One Belongs Here More Than You at Father's Office.

Review Thursday: It pains me to say it, but...

It's unfortunate when you are the second book to write about layoffs and office life in the first-person plural. Man, would that suck, but such is the zeitgeist. I'm trying to write about fictionalized office life, so I'm interested in books that do it well. Because working is boring, writing about work is boring. When a writer captures the mundane and stifling in a fresh, even inspiring way, it's a truly remarkable accomplishment. When books about work take off, I think it's through capturing some kind of idiosyncratic singularity (like Ferris's book or the underrated Big If by Marc Costello) or the workplaces is a kind of accessory to the an overall commentary they are making to American culture (Palladio).

Another book I'm looking forward to reading is Among Other Things I've Taken Up Smoking, if for no other reason as it has an amazing title. Also, More Than It Hurts You, by a former teacher, Darin Strauss. It's gotten great notices, and I like the is-it-or-isn't-it premise about Munhausen by Proxy, and the attendant satirical tone.

Review Thursday: Dissolute Cities

“Nothing in this book can be considered reliable or accurate,” reads the jackassy disclaimer of James Frey’s third foray into fiction, Bright Shiny Morning. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on whether or not the writer who’s making self-aggrandizement cool again has mastered a sense of originality, I only remember being in the minority of people who thought A Million Little Pieces was corny and overblown. At the time I received of the phony memoir, I was reviewing books for the Quality Paperback Book Club, and I couldn’t fathom all buzz the book was getting. It’s main claim to fame seemed to be using Capitalization and punctuation incorrectly to Make. A. Point. Man. Also the bloody, no painkillers airplane scene. That was Intense. But it never seemed particularly Real. So Oprah revealed him as a Big Fake. Big Whoop.

This time around, people seem to be responding to Frey’s portrait of LA, or at least Janet Maslin is, pulling a Michiko Kakutani and writing the review of his book in his style. I just want to know why are people so impressed with writing like this, when there are so many similar, better books? It’s the same thing I thought when I picked up Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children. I had read it talked up in Elle (don’t mock me, they actually devote an admirable amount of ink to books), and so reserved a copy at the library. From all the advance notice, the book promised to be a riveting portrait of sketchy types in Las Vegas—you know, criminals! Broken dreams! Strippers! The porn industry! I like my salacious literary reads as much as the next girl, and I was all primed for a seedy vision of Las Vegas to wash over me.

Man, was I let down by this book. It felt as though the writer tried really hard but a book that should have been populated by the richness of intersecting lives had tumbleweeds rolling through it.

More than that, both books seem a pale shadow of an overlooked favorite of mine, a novel that takes a panoramic view of Los Angeles and delivers something funny, powerful, emotional, authentic and edgy. Not just James Frey posturing “edgy,” either. Really edgy. That book is I’m Losing You by Bruce Wagner.
In an overflowing plot too complex to explain, Wagner gets up close to the lives of everyone from a heartbroken studio exec to a crazy masseuse who believe she can steal people’s energy. What continually impresses me about his writing is how well he modulates tone—one minute biting and satiric, the next, emotional and lyrical. I’ve always thought that his deserving novels are not given the praise and attention they deserve because they are about Hollywood, and regular people, for some reason, don’t read Hollywood novels. But in I’m Losing You and the later Still Holding (and you have to get past the groaning phone lingo inspired titles) he draws a bead on the human experience in extremity and comes up with something as invigorating as it is wrenchingly emotional. Wagner’s books always make me want to write, and for a populated panorama of a dissolute city, these more recent contenders just can’t hold a candle.

Review Thursday: Lush Life by Richard Price

I confess: I’m a huge Richard Price fan from way back in the Clockers and Freedomland days. I stuck with him through the slim and somewhat unsatisfying Samaritan, and it was with excitement and trepidation that I discovered that he’d tackled a scene much more familiar to me than the Jersey projects that form the environment of most of his novels: the gentrifying Lower East Side.

“In New York, 30 is the new 50,” I heard Price say in a radio interview, and his novel piles the humiliation onto one of its key protagonists, Eric, who works at a sort of Schiller’s doppelganger in the Lower East Side. Eric has glimmers of talent, but in his mid-thirties is confronting the fact that he may not have enough to make it in the big city. When he’s on hand for the shooting of a fellow employee, his life is turned upside down when the cops suspect him of the crime, which readers know early on was the work of a couple of nervous projects kids.

Pick up Clockers and Freedomland, and you’ll basically find yourself clearing your schedule in order to finish the doorstoppers. Written in highly literate and yet suspenseful prose, the dramatic setup in both books are humdingers: Freedomland goes inside an explosive Susan Smith-like child murder and Clockers takes you inside a crack dealing subculture through a gripping Cain and Abel story that contains an electrifying twist.

Lush Life, on the other hand, has no such fundamentally gripping archetypical struggle at its core. The murder is kind of, for lack of a better word, underwhelming, and what’s more, you know who did it early on. From the point of view of Matty, the lead detective on the case, “Most murderers, when he finally caught up to them, pretty much never met his expectations. For the most part, they were a stupid and fantastically self-centered lot…Survivors, on the other hand…always appeared to him as larger than life.” The passage struck me as odd, because for much of the book, Price seems to sympathize more with the murderers than the defeated Eric.

I admired Price’s quest to depict colliding worlds on the Lower East Side: the worlds of the projects, the hipsters, the cops, and the Chinese, but I thought the panorama was more compelling than the meat of the story. Without a strong story hook, everything’s world got kind of equalized, and in that case, it’s easier to see the hipster interlopers with a kind of contempt. What’s happening with Eric, the survivor, and the victim’s family don’t seems as compelling when there’s no larger dramatic question to solve.

Lush Life has Price’s usual crackling prose, his top-notch dialogue, but in the second half, the book really feels inert. I finished it and enjoyed many parts of it, but can only recommend it with reservations.