Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction (Western Literature Series) Review

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Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction (Western Literature Series) ReviewI finished reading David Fine's excellent book Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction at just before 2 am this morning. I was reading in bed in my 1923 bungalow in Whittier, California. It was a quiet night. No winds blowing; even the neighborhood dogs were asleep. It was too humid and Fine's wonderful analysis of Los Angeles fiction had my mind going a mile a minute. I thought about going for a drive; maybe listen to a little late-night radio, but I knew my wife would worry if she woke up and found me gone. I finally got to sleep, knowing I'd have to type up this report as soon as I got out of bed this morning.
Fine's book is not encyclopedic; if you are looking for a complete listing of SoCal fiction, you'll need to look elsewhere. Imagining Los Angeles is an overview - an introduction, a history with examples - of fiction set in the Los Angeles metro area. The first chapter gives you a little background on the area. Then Fine takes the reader on a literary journey from booster fiction, through fiction in the 20's, hard-boiled fiction, tough-guy detectives, the Hollywood novel and finishes with more ethnically oriented fiction and Los Angeles as a setting for disaster. The book is serious - probably not a summer beach read - but it also kept me in rapt attention and didn't read like the textbook Professor Fine could have turned it into. In my opinion, this book should appeal to a wide audience - from the serious literary student to the pop culture buff looking for a little backstory.
A lady just walked into my office (actually, my three legged female mutt just hopped into the 1980 guesthouse behind the bungalow) looking for my attention, so I better end this report now.
Sincerely Submitted,agnostictrickster13 August 2001Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction (Western Literature Series) OverviewThe history of a major city is examined through the work of the authors who defined it in our imaginations.The literary image of Los Angeles has evolved since the 1880s from promotional literature that hyped the region as a New Eden to contemporary visions of the city as a perplexing, sometimes corrupt, even apocalyptic place that foreshadows and reflects all that is wrong with America. In Imagining Los Angeles, the first literary history of the city in more than fifty years, critic David Fine traces the history and mood of the place through the work of writers as diverse as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, and many others. His lively and engaging text focuses on the way these writers saw Los Angeles and used the image of the city as an element in their work, and on how that image has changed as the city itself became ever larger, more complex, and more socially and ethnically diverse.Fine begins with the mythifiers Helen Hunt Jackson, author of the quintessentially romantic Ramona (1884) and Mary Austin, whose 1917 novel The Ford was the first fictionalization of the theft of water from the Owens Valley that became famous sixty years later in the movie Chinatown. He devotes chapters to both early and later Hollywood novels, to crime and detective novels, and to immigrant, ethnic, and apocalyptic fiction, paying detailed attention to the fiction of Upton Sinclair, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John Fante, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, Budd Schulberg, Christopher Isherwood, Alison Lurie, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Kate Braverman, and Carolyn See. The city's history, its architecture, even its disasters are all part of the story.First published in 2000, Imagining Los Angeles is available now for the first time in paperback. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literature and changing image of Southern California.

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