Secrets that live in the Sunset

That, in turn, captured the unsettled moment the country was in, the limbo between inaction and action -- the pause between two wars, the moment before the ice melts. Pearlie's world is still one of seltzer, ice, bread and rag men. "Nothing has really started yet," he said, "and so Pearlie doesn't know change is coming. It feels like everything is sort of stalled."

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'That suburban impulse'

When the Sunset was filled by returning soldiers after World War II, Greer said, "I think it was because people wanted to live in a white part of town -- but that was totally unspoken. A lot of soldiers came back from that war and -- it was kind of that suburban impulse -- they had had enough of 'other,' " he said. "And . . . they were willing to live in a part of the city that San Franciscans thought was absurd."

The neighborhood was a blank slate onto which a young family could write its life -- a place, as Pearlie describes it, that was "nothing like the rest of the city, no hills or views or bohemians, nothing Italian or Victorian to make you take a photograph."

Maybe not tourists, but lucky for Greer there were photographs. Many. The Sunset Library had for years been collecting photos drawn from residents' family photo albums. It played a tremendous part in helping him to conjure place -- sight, sound, mood.

Greer also began reading the San Francisco Chronicle, focusing on 1951 to '53, even making a binder of clippings and advertisements to refer to if he got stuck. "The '50s are full of cliches, and I was just nervous about it. I wanted to get a sense of what people thought of it at the time. And there wasn't a clear sense of what was going on or what the decade was. It was all about the war and all about the Japanese, and it was surprisingly little about racial unrest in the U.S.," he said. "The paper was full of anxiety."

We ended up in Polly Ann's, a small ice cream parlor that figures in the novel -- renamed Hussey's and reimagined as a full-service soda fountain. Like so much nowadays, it has been redone, its personality buffed away. Greer was heartened to find that the spinner-wheel is still there, one remnant of '50s kitsch -- you take a chance on what flavor the pointer lands on ("Black Walnut," "Star Wars," "Pomegranate," "Freeway"). But he was even more excited to find that the shop offers a fountain drink also featured in the book: "And, I think we need a Suicide! A small Suicide."