Revoyr spins out several parallel narratives in "Southland," deftly skipping back and forth among scenes set in the mid-'90s, the World War II era and the mid-'60s, when the memories of racial harmony in the Crenshaw District were shattered by the ugly reality of racial violence in the streets of Watts. The plot line of "Southland" is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel, but it is elaborately intertwined with strands of urban history, family memoir and personal confession, all of it recounted with a certain sentimentality that one does not expect in hard-boiled fiction.

-- Jonathan Kirsch

*Still Holding

A Novel of Hollywood

Bruce Wagner

Simon & Schuster: 354 pp., $25

Hollywood has attracted novelists -- like moths to the projector? -- since its first flickering images scared theatergoers into thinking a train was coming straight at them. Writers like William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and, especially, Nathanael West couldn't resist the place, whether they envied or loathed it. Despite (or entirely because of) its unique combination of shabbiness and grandeur, Hollywood enticed them with glorious gushers of greenbacks as well as with the stuff that any author's dreams are made of: a Great Subject.

Yet in recent years most Hollywood fiction has been like most Hollywood movies: a gross spectacle of fancy cars and broken glass. One of the few authors who has managed to convey Hollywood's inanity, vulgarity and venality without partaking of those qualities is Bruce Wagner. Undoubtedly the foremost chronicler of the place since West, whose work his echoes in both vitriol and eloquence, he has pursued this vision from his first novel, "Force Majeure," through the initial two segments of a "Cellular Trilogy," to that sequence's culmination in this season's acidic new offering, "Still Holding." As always, Wagner evinces a fine ghoulish relish for those aspects of human nature that are Hollywood's stock in trade: avarice, covetousness, vainglorious self-promotion, self-delusion and the infinite gradations of degradation and despair.

What keeps a reader holding on till the last page is Wagner's prose, which combines high oratory with low vernacular. The rapture of decay, physical and emotional, is Wagner's ultimate subject, and he's lucky to have a place that feeds his imagination so well. For a writer, a territory to be mined is a precious thing. Imagine Dickens without London, Dostoevsky without St. Petersburg. It's like that for Bruce Wagner and Hollywood. He owns this fetid, steaming lump of a town.