Noteworthy

Normally I focus on literature outside of the United States, but I found a great opportunity to share some insights of American literature and how it is viewed beyond our borders.  Transfuge, a French cultural magazine, is asking the question, "Is the Golden Age of American literature over?"  Some of you might not have realized that we were in a Golden Age (especially with the recent comments of a particular Nobel committee), but not only does France like Jerry Lewis, they are also huge fans of our literature.  I managed to snag a copy of a great piece about Los Angeles written by a great guy and an equally great writer, Larry Fondation.  I am fan of Larry's work which includes Fish, Soap and Bonds, Common Criminals, and his latest short story collection, Unintended Consequences.  Also, I like the Los Angeles angle because it is a breed of it's own and Larry presents the United States "city" in a unique way.  Los Angeles and it's place in American literature will be covered extensively at this year's Guadalajara International Book Fair.  As an attendee this year, I am excited about Los Angeles being a focus of the international fiction spotlight.  I thought Larry's piece would be a good intro to what  I am sure I will be posting more about during the Book Fair.

The article appears in French in the magazine, but here is the transcript in English:

Los Angeles Literature: Apocalypse, Redemption and Reality

 

            Drought, fire, flood and earthquake.  The four seasons of Los Angeles. 

            Sunshine and noir.  Paradise and Armageddon. 

            Riots and flames in 1965, and again in 1992.  All cinder and ash.

            The apocryphal tale of Lana Turner sipping soda at Schwab’s – discovered by Hollywood and going on to the bright lights of stardom.

            There has always been the sense that opportunity looms large here; there has always been the sense that the world will end here. 

            Los Angeles is the ultimate city of duality.

            Disaster films and fairy tales, fifty-room mansions and bungalows burning to dust in the Angeles National Forest.

            It is ingrained deep in our imaginations – past and present, here and elsewhere.  The world sees us like this; we show ourselves to the world like this.

            Los Angeles is the most uncertain of cities.

            Literature has helped form the image of the City.  If it continues to do its job, it will also paint it new.

**

            Over the years and decades, Los Angeles fiction has tried to keep up with the myths of the City.  Along the way, much of that fiction – aided and abetted by film – has itself become mythical:  Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Ask the Dust, The Day of the Locust, to name just a few.

            James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Nathanael West all wrote about a Los Angeles they knew well – the hard-scrabbled LA of the Depression-addled 1930s.  They wrote about the times they lived in and they wrote so well as to cast a spell on their successors and to create a vision and indelible image of LA for the world at large:  LA as noir.

            Since the Thirties, much good work has come out of Los Angeles, depicting Los Angeles -- but very little of it so iconic.  Chester Himes, Pynchon (in his two LA books), Bukowski, Christopher Isherwood and, of course, Joan Didion have all portrayed Los Angeles skillfully, insightfully, even brilliantly.  But the only emerging images able to compete with noir have come from music (and later film) – the golden surf and sand of the Beach Boys and the marijuana romanticism of the hippies of Laurel Canyon. 

            Contemporary Los Angeles fiction has four roads to take.  Thus far, it has taken only three.  In my view, the road not taken will produce the new iconography.

            The three avenues LA fiction has recently explored are:

            1.  Dreamy LA – The dreamscapes of the Laurel Canyon sound now can be found in hallucinatory words by writers like Aimee Bender, Joy Nicholson and Francesca Lia Block, whose “Weetzie Bat” books defined a kind of 1990s punked-out, teenage Los Angeles.  This avenue, however, leaves out 90% of the very interesting city that LA has become.

            2.  Fabulist LA – In a piece for the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 2005, writer Alan Rifkin made a case for LA “Fabu-Lit,” a “fantastical literature peculiar to Los Angeles.”  The exemplars here are writers like Steve Erickson and Carolyn See, who present often post-apocalyptic visions of a Los Angeles ravaged by flood and nuclear attack, respectively.  Erickson, in particular, is a terrific writer.  His work deserves to be widely read.  Yet these fictions leave the obvious and glaring gap of a “now” that links past and future.

            3.  The Los Angeles Past – Current writers such as James Ellroy and Walter Mosley have chosen to write now about what LA was like “back then.”  Both these writers, among a number of others, have successfully dredged up the horrors and pains of Post-World War II Los Angeles and painted searing pictures of those times.

            But the extant issue becomes this: there is nowhere to go from here.  We eventually get to the present.  And here lays the road not taken.  A new gritty realism that confronts Los Angeles as it is now, not as it once was or might someday be.  This is the current challenge. And, the first pillar of that challenge is a recognition that – as it was in the Thirties heyday of LA Literature – Los Angeles is a poor city, a city with a smattering still of poor Southern whites, the homeless, ghetto-bound Blacks, and back-broken immigrants, largely from Mexico. Poorer still amidst the current global recession.  While acknowledging both the past and the myths of the City, the next great Los Angeles novel will depict and embrace the city’s poverty, and transcend it.

           

**

            The best LA novel of the past 20 years happens to be a record album – NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, a switchblade sharp documentary picture of the Los Angeles inner city.

            Like nothing else, “Compton” confronts – by biting your face off – what LA is now to increasing numbers of its denizens – in Chandler’s words, “something more than night;” in mine – something beyond noir.

            Indeed though, there are good, even great, books about the Los Angeles “now.”  James Frey may deserve ambition points for Bright Shiny Morning, though the novel reads as if it were written by someone who has read about LA but has never been here (though Frey indeed has lived here).   Dennis Cooper, perhaps America’s greatest prose stylist, effectively depicts the ennui of LA and elsewhere, particularly in his “George Miles Cycle” of novels.  Recent work by Richard Lange, Dan Fante, Sesshu Foster, Hector Tovar, Jim Krusoe, Gary Phillips (in The Perpetrators.) and Salvador Plascencia all have notable merit.  Yet none of these works define the “LA Now.”

            The next great Los Angeles novel will be post-realist.  American Post Realists already exist.  Post Realism is defined by the use of the tropes and devices of post-modernism for a different effect.  Brautigan, Barthelme and Barth et al. largely played with language for its own sake – to create linguistic effect.  Exceptions existed – notably Barthelme’s “Indian Uprising” -- a surprisingly political story for the playful 60s and 70s crowd.  It is not my purpose here to examine Sixties era American fiction.  Suffice it to say that it delved into more private than public realms.  Whereas the future of American fiction – especially that rooted in Los Angeles – lies in its ability to reclaim it public function.  Fiction about the world must replace fiction about the living room.  Post Realists reposition plot, narrative attack, character development and non-linearity to covert political effect – not for didactic or polemical purposes, but rather to depict life as it is lived now.  We live in an age of too much information, not a lack of information. Too little interpretation and elucidation, and too many random and unconnected factoids.   We live in a time that witnesses the growth of poverty, not its reduction.  The rise of violence at the expense of peace. An age of dissonance, not harmony.  Official terrorism by the powerful and unofficial terrorism by the powerless. In the prescient words of Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld. The challenge to all fiction is to witness and represent our times. Nowhere is this more needed or more true than in Los Angeles, one truly 21^st century city.

            I can think of five amazing Post Realist American books – none thus far set in LA: Eric Miles Williamson’s Welcome to Oakland , Chris Offutt’s Kentucky Straight, future Nobel laureate William T. Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria,  Kim Addonizio’s novel-in-poems Jimmy and Rita, and Barry Graham’s (as yet unpublished) When It All Comes Down to Dust . These books tell it like it is about Oakland, Kentucky hillbillies, the San Francisco Tenderloin (two), and Phoenix, Arizona.  All these books fuck with your head, on the page and in your brain, the way great literature should.

            Los Angeles is ground zero for so much dichotomous and diversionary cacophony.  In our literature, the closest we’ve come is likely Plascencia’s “The People of Paper,” a book about immigrants and illusions and much more. I say this with a wink, not a nod, to the fabulist school that claims him because this novel is all too real.

            Outside a select and celebrated few – Cain, Chandler and West among them -- most 1930s authors have been neglected, forgotten, ignored or downplayed in the United States. Writers such as James T. Farrell, Ellen Glasgow, Jack Conroy and Henry Roth rarely get their due. Even John Dos Passos’ masterpiece, The USA Trilogy, remains vastly underappreciated.

            Instead, many critics trumpet the Post-World War II era of American fiction as a kind of Golden Age.  I take the opposite view. Much of the literature of the past several decades has been overly introspective and self-indulgent. University writing programs turn out scores of harmless craftspeople, superficially skilled stylists who have nothing to say. Chain bookstore shelves are redolent with works of glittering shit, finely wrought bits of nothing, the fool’s gold of the written word.

            For decades now, there has been no Fante, no Nelson Algren, no Jack London or Stephen Crane. Yet the new realities of our age, a time of limits, will force our literature once again to address the margins – as it did in the 1930s.  This will reinvigorate American literature, and great public fiction will again emerge from Los Angeles.  I am naturally suspicious of the glamour of gold.  But our times will almost forcibly birth a new era in American writing: the Literature of Iron -- a fresh body of enduring, meaningful and deeply moving work, work that matters.

            At this point, though we know what it may look like, the next great Post Realist novel of Los Angeles is as yet unwritten, by someone who may be as yet unborn.