Novel Excerpts

Every major city has a peculiar flavor that can be found nowhere else and which qualifies all experiences and shapes its citizens, their appetites for life, and their sensibilities. But then we come to California, the homogenous zone, where life’s wrinkles don’t exist, except for occasional squawks of desperation voiced by the strange, after which things go back to normal.

Characterizing LA was a challenge because the normal exists but is never encountered and what is aberrant is always on full display. If you top that dish with a blended coulis of rage and impatience, you are getting closer to the experience of the city.

LA’s car culture is in part the reason that what old Warren Harding historically referred to as normalcy is conspicuously absent. It cannot be accessed. What can be partaken of is the media impression, for example, a matron, living in a huge mansion, is alone and dressed to the nines when she receives her professional shoppers whose armloads of clothes she accepts or rejects. The glimpse into the life of the elite is made more poignant by the hollow and lonely reality of the indulgence.

But that is only a fraction of what Los Angeles can provide. The length and breadth of the city is a sea of stink and grit, languishing under a brutal sun. To its limits, north, east, south and west, is an armada of brutish and pocked neighborhoods, encroaching on the tiny enclaves of affluence, such affluence exemplified by the extremely modest residences of Santa Monica, which fetch enormous amounts of money in the real estate market, but which would cause the average easterner’s nostrils to quiver as he or she moved on thinking there must be something better at two million.

The realities of housing, the sensitive nature of the inhabitants, and the deforming definition of what is considered normal behavior and common courtesy found in Los Angeles have no counterpart in any other city. If you examine the population you find a confluence of the most talented and heavily credentialed artists, craftsmen, and careerists in the country. These folks are trying to be patient, but they are troubled. Where they would give one hundred per cent, they are restricted by power, money, and limited opportunity to realize only a tiny sliver of their potential, and that is if they are extremely fortunate and successful.

The rest of the horde is out on the boulevard slugging through somnambulant traffic, and often pressed by the need for self-expression, they roll down the window in order to holler expletives into the void while their faces flush with rage and spit curls at the corners of their mouths. The people you don’t see are hiding in the dark corners, at times speechless as they attempt to reconcile their lives over and over again.

This is the Los Angeles that I saw. I injected a plot into its veins, one that allowed the disparate characters of the city to breath and stew, and most of all to act out. It is a plot overtly fraught with unbelievable and powerful coincidences, which seem at once pointed and pointless-- and which correctly reveal the shadow soul of LA, and particularly of Hollywood, a soul pummeled and helpless against the tide. My characters rest their weary heads against the bosom of this soul and watch their lives change and their dreams bear strange fruits.