L.A. novels: a coming-of-age story

*

Our Ecstatic Days

A Novel

Steve Erickson

Simon & Schuster: 318 pp., $24

*

The Manhattan Beach Project

A Novel

Peter Lefcourt

Simon & Schuster:

342 pp., $24

*

The Devil's Wind

A Novel

Richard Rayner

HarperCollins: 340 pp., $24.95

*

Consider this, as Pasadena author Harriet Doerr used to say: Four of L.A.'s best-known writers (by which we mean nationally known) have novels out in February, that Bermuda Triangle in publishing's notoriously predictable calendar.

Consider this: All four novelists -- Yxta Maya Murray, Steve Erickson, Peter Lefcourt and Richard Rayner -- are at the peak of their games, with several novels under their belts. Each has carved out a distinctive cornice upon which to perch. All have chosen to set their new novels in Los Angeles, from the 1950s to the 2030s. Would the reader from Garrison, N.Y., or Billings, Mont., or Seattle recognize Murray's Long Beach or Erickson's Echo Park or Lefcourt's Brentwood or Rayner's Malibu as Los Angeles? Would the sophisticated Parisian, the Berliner, the Shanghai baby or the Copenhagen housewife recognize the characters' particular desperation, what John Rechy calls "the urgency to live," and know they were reading about Angelenos?

Consider this: Fifty years ago, maybe not. Ten years ago, maybe not. Today, no question.

Six years ago in these pages, author D.J. Waldie wrote that the "literature of Anglo unease," which had dominated L.A. lit from Nathanael West to Joan Didion, was dead. In his crystal ball, Waldie, like many others, saw the coming of a "mongrel literature" that would take its place, the literature of a new generation that might, he offered hopefully, "even be redemptive." In the same issue, David Rieff worried that no one could embrace it all. Rayner wondered why no one had ever attempted a "flat-out fictional assault on the whole scale of the city's social reality." Michael Tolkin went so far as to say that "to the degree that Los Angeles has an identifiable literature, that literature is second-rate."

Waldie's "mongrel literature," while promising fresh voices, lush writing and a more diverse point of view, also promised a kind of therapy lit; scattered plotlines, personal narratives -- the kind of writing that Michiko Kakutani, writing for the New York Times on Erickson's novel "The Sea Came in at Midnight," called "self important," "cobbled together" and "defensive pontificating." It promised some haunted, memorable characters, full of what Murray called "ageless anger," what both Susan Straight and Mike Davis referred to as "dislocated" souls. But it was hard to relate to them if you didn't live in the next courtyard apartment.

It's not sunshine or geography or architecture that fixes a place in the world's imagination. It's the feel of the place (which all of those attributes can contribute to). When you recognize a friend walking a block ahead of you, too far to make out details, what is it that you recognize? It takes generations of writers to plant that feeling of recognition in the world's consciousness. L.A. lit, particularly fiction, is not much more than 100 years old. The sense of precariousness, heat (sometimes kind, sometimes cruel), insouciance, risk, hopefulness and whimsy now blend recognizably in most of its scenes and characters, no matter how different the plots.

Mongrel stories don't have this blended quality (and this was certainly true of L.A. lit at one time). They are the raw material of fiction, particularly in American fiction, in which the individual's story still draws the most readers. It is often said that there is only one plot -- the rise and fall from power. But this is simply not true. It would take a thousand stories from dozens of perspectives not just to give an adequate picture but to convey the feeling of the block where I live in Venice. Without these details, perspectives, stories in the reader's subconscious, in the movies, in the culture, there can be no fiction -- national, regional, universal -- just the barest of outlines, the thinnest of plots.

And yet, as these four novels prove, the adolescence of L.A. literature, the gut-spilling, 12-step-sharing, gee- I-just-want-everyone-to-like-me-and-my-palm-trees-too days are over. These are grown-up novels; fully considered and rendered with a world audience in mind. They are written by authors who do care if they sell to more than 10 people. That's very different from the perception that L.A.'s writers are helpless in the shadow of Hollywood, which hovers like a narcissistic father, or worse, that they write for Hollywood in novel form. These writers want to be read by readers.