Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Land of hope and dreams

By Mike Prevatt

I came of age as a writer in Los Angeles, specifically as a college student. Though I spent ample amounts of time as an adolescent filling journals, experimenting with poetic structure and devising short stories, it was at UCLA where my instincts were best served, writing term papers, sweating over tight deadlines for the school paper or scribbling delusionally as a means of post-examination relief.

Some of my favorite classes were upper-division English courses I took as electives--I was a history major--and perhaps none more so than my L.A. lit class. It was there that I started to understand the true nature of my native city, through the works of Walter Mosley, Alison Lurie and Nathanael West, among others. For each of their stories had characters that start out on a wave of optimism, gradually hit some low point and emerge in the end--if tragically--a wiser, hardened soul, once they came to terms with their false sense of expectation. This wasn't my particular experience as of yet, but I'd soon learn that reality in Los Angeles changes as quickly as traffic conditions on the 405. And this provincial dynamic informs a good portion of Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, edited by local journalist David L. Ulin.

Los Angeles writers are often seen as idealists trying to make sense of their shortcomings by looking to the city itself for answers. Or adventurers trying to tame a land that seems almost contemptuous of its residents (how else to explain droughts, earthquakes, fires and floods, right?). Or transplants from the East seeking enlightenment under the California sun, only to find, as Carolyn See puts it, "the end of the road for the American Dream...even if you get what you want, then what? It looks good, but that's it." It might seem that adaptation translates to cynicism, but thanks to the breadth and imagination of the stories, novel selections, poems, essays, articles and memoirs showcased by the 75-plus writers in Writing Los Angeles, we see more than just broken dreams. We see survival as the basis for culture, as well as the will to endure rooted in the need for self-expression. These phenomena are entirely L.A.

Even the book's physicality is indicative of L.A.: expansive, intimidating while also inviting, dense (all things being relative; imagine the compression factor of a Writing New York or Writing San Francisco). At 883 pages, Writing Los Angeles seemingly aims to be an authoritative tome of the city, and in many respects it is. Some of its inclusions are extraneous (Charles Bukowski's drunken and banal musings are honored three times, while Raymond Chandler's more inspired view of the L.A. underbelly is represented here just once) and obvious (an excerpt from West's The Day of the Locust), but Ulin's intuitions are never nonsensical.

One might initially take issue with the collection's stunning sense of self-absorption. But perhaps the greatest irony of Los Angeles' artistic legacy is that the city's obsession with itself (second only to New York; insecurity keeps it from the top spot) was most exhibited not in Hollywood, but in literature. Film--the great American export of the 20th century, and, as Ulin points out in the introduction, the new American art form--flourished in L.A. and attracted writers who expected nothing less than fantasy and paradise once they headed westward. But the city's new infusion of authors, poets and journalists rarely confused starry screenwriting with their fiction or essays--another example of how L.A.'s literary tradition was shaped by scribes who anticipated the Promised Land but nearly always found something different.

Hollywood naturally plays a big role in the collection, from Truman Capote's surreal-but-grounded "Hollywood" and screenwriter Robert Towne's literary and geographical inspirations revealed in "Preface and Postscript to Chinatown," to John Rechy's hilariously apocalyptic excerpt from The Sexual Outlaw, which recalls a near-Stonewall moment at the city's 1976 gay pride parade. So does "Beneath Mulholland," by David Thomson, who late last year released The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (the only dictionary, by the way, you will ever be compelled to read cover to cover, in one sitting). He sees not only the famously windy Westside street-of-the-stars, but Marilyn Monroe, "50 miles long, lying on her side."

"Beneath Mulholland" takes on more than just iconography. Like its subject, it's the vantage point of a city, revealing a symbol for guiltless greed, an embodiment of natural and opportunistic transformation, and the cause and effect of jealousy, vanity and egotism. That this remarkably inspired and all-inclusive story concludes Ulin's equally envisioned collection is fitting--an ode to a street, its city and their wondrous complexities.