The Fake Angeleno

Fake Book Review: The Long Embrace By Judith Freeman

If you follow Harold Bloom's logic that Shakespeare invented the human personality, then you could make an equally sweeping claim that Raymond Chandler invented the city of Los Angeles.  In the Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and down many other sinister alleyways in his noirish writing, Chandler took the proverbial "seventy-two of suburbs in search of a city" and imbued them with a dark, highly original cohesion.

At such an outrageous suggestion as his novels calling L.A. into existence, Chandler would no doubt have pitched a serious chuckle -- probably over afternoon highballs at some magnificent, sun-drenched gin joint, now long abandoned. 

He was a wretched alcoholic, Chandler, who produced his best work over the 10-year period when he swore off the sauce and labored over creating his style.  Then, Hollywood came calling.  Things went downhill from there.  Big surprise. 

Freeman spins a great biographical yarn about Chandler, and she manages to illuminate some interesting corners of L.A.'s past and present while she's at it. 

She approaches at Chandler's life story by way of two defining themes:

• Chandler had a 37 year marriage to a woman 18 years his senior. 
• Chandler lived in something like 50 apartments and houses during his life in Southern California.

Much of The Long Embrace's narrative involves Freeman tracking Chandler and his aging wife as they move from downtown, to the Westside, back eastward, out to the desert, down to La Jolla, back near downtown, etc, etc...  It was a great way for a writer to get know his material, and it's a great way for a reader to get a feel for the rich, mysterious history of modern Los Angeles.

Fake Book Review: Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn

I'd been meaning to read Mother's Milk ever since Elizabeth Spiers gave it her enthusiastic endorsement back in late 2005.  Three years and $.94 plus shipping on Amazon later, I finally got around to checking out this worthy entry into the canon of English comic novels.

Turns out St. Aubyn is a master of the literary form known as "playful interor monologue of the over-educated white male with a bit of a drinking problem."

Spiers said her initial impressions of St. Aubyn's prose were Waugh-tinged, but mine ran more to the Amis (both pere and fils) side of the English comic master scale.  Some of the set pieces in Mothers Milk are straight from the John Self playbook. 

Summed up in a rambling two sentences, the theme of Mother's Milk is: "The arrival of children completely alters the marital relationship, marooning the man's sex drive on the barren shoals of the woman's re-directed affections towards the ceaselessly clamoring offspring. And what's a poor fella who's now getting on in years supposed to do?"

The book is not all middle-aged male angst though.  St. Aubyn cleverly narrates several chapters through the eyes of the protagonist's kid and wife.  The guy's clearly done his psychology and philosphy homework too. 

I endorse Mother's Milk as enthusiastically as Spiers once did.

Fake Book Review: L.A. City Limits By Josh Sides

This full title of this book is actually L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles From the Great Depression to the Present. 

The theme: L.A. was seen as a place of great promise and opportunity for African Americans suffering under outright tyranny in the South and massive discrimination in the rust belt.  In many ways, L.A. lived up to its billing as a freer, more tolerant place.  In many more ways, it didn't.  Housing covenants (Welcome to the neighborhood! If you should later decide to sell your home to a black family, we'll kill your dog and put a bomb in your car!)  were viciously enforced here.  Employment discrimination was rampant, and black workers had few allies in government, industry, or the unions. 

The war: Changed the whole economic and political climate in Southern California, creating an opportunity to sweep aside entrenched and rampant racism.  Results, of course, are mixed to this day.

The scope: Sides introduces us to the editors of local black newspapers, gives a great history of Compton, looks into the prevailing economic and social conditions at the time of the Watts riots, follows the career of Tom Bradley, breaks down black employment opportunities along gender lines, and really delves into African Americans' experience with the Union movement.  That's just off the top of my head...

The tone: Well-researched and heavily reliant on primary sources as opposed to  runaway theorizing. 

Shya Scanlon's FORECAST: Chapter 26

Forecast is a novel by Shya Scanlon being serialized semiweekly across 42 different web sites. The Fake Angeleno is proud to host chapter 26 this month.

For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast. Thanks to Joe Sullivan for connecting us with this great project.

--> Chapter 25 can be found at Coyote Breath. 

--> Chapter 27 is available at Bound Off.

“How is she?” asked the Professor, startling me. He’d snuck into my Surveillance Port without making a peep, and I vaguely felt as though I’d been caught “red handed,” though with what I can’t imagine.

“Helen’s holding up just fine,” I said. I looked up over my shoulder. “She’s actually developed an unlikely friendship with Busy, and between him and his partner Blain, it looks like she’s found something of an escort for the next leg of her, of her…”

The Professor chuckled. “That’s our Zara alright,” he said, nodding. The Professor refused to honor the name Helen, maintaining that it was a phase she’d outgrow. Myself, I felt it wasn’t my place to speculate, so I stuck to the facts.

I took a deep breath. “I’ve run into an issue, unfortunately,” I said, avoiding the Professor’s eyes. I was sure he’d notice but I couldn’t help it.

“An issue, eh?” he seemed amused.

“It appears there’s a warrant out for Helen’s arrest.”

“A warrant? But that’s absurd.”

The Professor leaned in over my shoulder, looking more closely at Helen while she made final preparations for leaving the accounting firm’s grand entryway. Rocket sat beside the revolving door, tail wagging. Blain stood, stolid. “Who wants to bring her in?”

“Well that’s the thing.”

“The thing.”

“I can’t determine who is behind it.”

“You mean—” “It’s just there.”

“I see.”

I finally brought myself to meet his eyes, and was strangely relieved to find them betraying a deep level of concern. I looked at the lines in his old skin, they too deepened by a thoughtful expression. “Well,” he pulled a chair close and sat down beside me – a rare thing. “I have some interesting news about AS-Masks, though I don’t know the full story quite yet.”

Fake Book Review: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

I've been a fan of NYT superstar Timothy Egan for quite awhile now.  Long before his recent rise to Frank Rich- style weekend opinion columns, Egan was the Times' man in the Pacific Northwest. 

I first discovered Egan after picking up his book The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest on the recommendation of a staffer at Powell's bookshop in Portland. If you're at all curious about the history, geography, and politics of that area of the country, I can't praise The Good Rain's merits highly enough.

Being a longtime fan of Egan's I'd somehow missed the publication of The Worst Hard Time until just last month.  What a pleasure to breeze through this piece of vintage Egan during these highly subject-appropriate times.  Egan follows half a dozen or so families in the high plains (think the section of the Oklahoma panhandle known as 'No Man's Land') as the 1930s proceed from uncertain, to bad, to worse, to wretched, to unbearable, to the book of Job, to Dr. Evil's slow motion execution of 'Mustafa' in the first Austin Powers... 

Egan brings to life dust clouds that put the special effects in 'Twister' to shame. He recounts dust storms generated in Kansas that dumped dirt all over the Whitehouse.  He describes babies dying from "dust poisoning." Entire cities vanishing under economic collapse. 

Most poignantly of all, he describes the massive environmental misjudgement that caused the dust bowl: namely the plowing and cultivation of arid grasslands never meant to support agriculture as we know it.  In aggregate, the people of the high plains reaped what they sowed -- to disastrous effect.  By the prime of the dust bowl, the high plains had become a humanitarian disaster -- almost entirely dependent upon the national government for subsistence and a way forward.  Much of the land and many of the towns and cities have not recovered to this day. 

I chose to read this book as a metaphor for the global warming debate, but it works as straight-and-compelling history as too. 

Fake Book Review: The Soloist By Steve Lopez

If you're looking around for a literary stocking stuffer this holiday season, you could do much worse than this.  Steve Lopez's The Soloist manages to combine newspaper-column-style-reading-ease with a feel-good-redemption-narrative with a fairly nuanced portrayal of schizophrenia and life on L.A.'s skid row.  In his depiction of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the former Julliard student turned skid row resident, Lopez produces a deeply affecting sketch of a tragedy ameliorated, but not overcome.

Lopez does an excellent job of driving home the heartbreaking frustration and anguish caused by mental illness, while offering an endorsement of the "recovery model" of mental illness treatment as advocated by doctors like 
Mark Ragins, of The Village in Long Beach.

The adapted film, starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr., will be out soon as well. 

The Fake Book Review: Shining City by Seth Greenland

When I read the review for Seth Greenland's Shining City in LA Magazine, I flagged the book squarely under the "Danielle Steele for middle-aged hipsters with a literary bent" genre.  Which is to say I reserved it immediately at the LA Public Library site and was not entirely surprised to find myself 87th in the cue for one of the library's three copies.  

What's not to love about the story of a floundering product manager, living in quiet desperation with his frigid wife and tweenage son in Van Nuys, who inherits (from his recently-deceased brother) a West Hollywood-based dry cleaning business ... that turns out to be an escort service! 

Hijinx ensue and everyone learns a little something about themselves, as Greenland turns some nice phrases and musters some above-average set-pieces.  

It took me about five hours of reading time to consume the entire romp through the intersection of middle-class-striver Los Angeles County and cartoonish, seedy La La Land.

I'd recommend the book to any Angeleno looking for some light fictional fun that fuses the best of the time-honored "stait-laced-loser-redeemed-by-vice" narrative with a pinch of Updike, Chandler, Sinclair Lewis, and the Vivid Video scriptwriting staff.  

As a bonus, here's Seth Greenland's (hilarious) "viral promotional video" for Shining City.  Enjoy!

Did you like that one? There's another video called "Hooker Book Club" that's funny too.

Fake Book Review: Holy Land By D.J. Waldie

Holy Land is a real masterpiece.  Waldie's thought, care, and attention to detail surface on every page. 

The subject: Lakewood.  Platonic ideal of suburb.

The tone: humane resignation entirely lacking in bitterness.  Unsparing but affectionate without lapsing into derision at one pole or sentimentality at the other.

The narrator: As far as I can tell some unique combination of T.S. Elliot at the bank, J.L. Borges wandering his father's library, and James Lileks on qualudes. 

The Southern California history and sociology lessons: Abundant

Fake Book Review: John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle

My Los Angeles history reading binge continues, with one of the latest additions being the neglected Steinbeck novel In Dubious Battle.

Written years before The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle follows the progress of an agricultural workers' strike in California through the eyes of a young(ish) communist organizer.

I was surpised how well-rendered most of the interior monolgoues were. Group dynamics and psychological undercurrents were well-served too. Steinbeck gets a bum rap as a bad writer!

As the title might indicate, Steinbeck was no romantic about the ability of Communism to cure American societal ills. Yet, those ills are painfully catalogued in this book: from wrenching police and vigilante violence against workers and sympathizers to completely false newspaper accounts of the plot-driving strike, to the pathetic wages and ill-treatment causing the strike in the first place.

That's about all I have to say on this one. In closing I'll offer this quote from Wikipedia:

"In 1943, with Steinbeck now famous, Carlos Baker "revalued" the novel. He opened by saying "Among Steinbeck's best novels, the least known is probably In Dubious Battle." Steinbeck, he said, "is supremely interested in what happens to men's minds and hearts when they function, not as responsible, self-governing individuals, but as members of a group....

Biologists have a word for this very important problem; the call it bionomics, or ecology." He said that "Steinbeck's bionomic interest is visible in all that he has done, from Tortilla Flat, in the middle Thirties, though his semi-biological Sea of Cortez, to his latest communiques as a war correspondent in England." He characterized In Dubious Battle as "an attempt to study a typical mid-depression strike in bionomic terms."

Fake Book Review: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

It only took three hours of my reading time, but it packed a mean wallop.  At first I couldn't decide whether to picture Marlowe as Elliot Gould or Humphrey Bogart.  Gould won out in the end -- maybe because the anachronistic language and usage didn't prevent Chandler's writing from feeling relevant to these times.  This is a great L.A. novel -- with more local references than I could keep up with. 

This being L.A., I'm sure most of the locations and neighborhoods mentioned are probably either vanished or mangled beyond recognition since Chandler's day. 

The writing is consistently hilarious in just the way Chandler intended.  As a longtime observer of the terminus city of the American dream, Chandler no doubt boozed it up with all strata of local society; and it's his English public school education and identity that lends the novel its detached-outsider-looking-in-on-a-morbidly-entertaining -cesspool-of-human-folly tone.

If you want to pick The Big Sleep up from Amazon and give it a read, it's alright with me.