Sex, Death and God in L.A. ed. by David Reid (review)

Reviews 377 INGTON, CALIFORNIA, and NEWYORK Perhaps it isbetter to saybyepicen­ ter, since all of the essays concern shocks and damage reports within the American narrative. Several essays tend to expose national elections as consen­ sus rituals orchestrated bythose “inside the process.”See “Insider Baseball”and “Shooters Inc.”These essays, like “In the Realm of the Fisher King” (about the Reagan White House), are trenchant analyses of national fantasies on the largest scale. Sentence by sentence and essay by essay, Didion attempts to jar readers out ofcertain kinds ofpolitical illusions, such aswhen she writes, in her description of the 1988 Democratic National Convention, “It was into this sedative fantasy of a fixable imperial American that Jesse Jackson rode, on a Trailways bus.” Several essays in After Henry give detailed accounts of how American insiders shape the public narrative in ways that camouflage race and class conflict in this country. Under CALIFORNIAwe find essays about Hawaiian real estate, California apocalypses, Patricia Hearst, and the social geography of Los Angeles. These essays, especially her treatment of the “Cotton Club Trial”entitled “L. A. Noir,” sensitize us to the forces governing public narrative. That is to say, she explores the way interested private parties control the legal decisions and the media coverage that defines the people ofa given city, state, or nation. In “L. A. Noir’ Didion offers instances of detectives, producers, and prosecutors working out the public narrative of the Cotton Club Murder (as it came to be called, almost perversely since the film’s producer Robert Evens was never charged with a crime) on cellular phones. Her comment speaks to the Orwellian aspects of everyday news coverage to which we tend to become accustomed: “the convic­ tion that something can be made ofnothing maybe one ofthe fewnarratives in which everyone participates.” Didion is perhaps the most astute political ob­ server in the country, and she continues to offer incisive interpretations of the American West. PleaseJoan, write back soon. JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE University oftheRyukyus Sex, Death and God in L. A. Edited by David Reid. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. 356 pages, $23.00.) This collection of eleven disparate essays and a cogent introduction by editor David Reid fills a need in western American studies by attempting to explore Los Angeles as a unique physical, spiritual, and sensual place; as the locus of the movie and television industries, authors collected here also investi­ gate Los Angeles as a dream place, alluring and illusory. 378 Western American Literature Not all eleven essays, however, are of equal value. “Chinatown Revisited?” and ‘The Empty Quarter” by Mike Davis, and “Machines in the Garden” by Thomas Hines analyze Los Angeles architecture and urban development in a thorough scholarly fashion. In the “Sex”subsection, essays by Carolyn See and Eve Babitz, while cynically witty in the tradition of EricaJong and “women’s magazine” fiction, don’t move far beyond establishing atmosphere. Jeremy Larner’shumorous lookat movie studio moguls’lustfor money, power, and sex reminds one ofRobertAltman’sfilm ThePlayer, but breaks no new ground. It is no coincidence that these collected essays often refer to, and indeed orient the reader’sjourneyvia street and highway names and numbers, as their authors try to navigate the many levels of meaning found in Los Angeles life. Unfortunately, the book neverjourneys to Watts, riot-torn south central L. A., the myriad suburbs from Compton to Cucamonga, and, excepting Ruben Martinez’sfine essay, East LosAngeles. Among the strongest offerings in this collection are “The Possessed” by editor David Reid, a study ofspirituality and evangelism, “La Placita”by Ruben Martinez, a moving personal piece that adds a much-needed Mexican-American voice to any study of Los Angeles culture, and “Uneasy Street” by David Thomson. Some of the prose in this book is very good, but its dark, film noir style inclusions shed less light than Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, and Joan Didion, who have already done this better. A disconcerting lack of continuity makes one eager for a cohesive study of L. A.’s diverse history and culture; Kevin Starr took on this task in Inventing the Dreamand MaterialDreams. Nevertheless readers will find this a useful sampler, and may perhaps move on to...