A possibly apocryphal
but often repeated urban legend from the late 1960’s had it that the C.I.A.
was smuggling heroin back to the U.S. from Vietnam within the bodies of dead
American soldiers to later be sold in the streets of American ghettos. Robert
Stone’s book Dog Soldiers does not allude to this legend, but could
be taken as a novelization of it.
Dog Soldiers is a document of early 1970’s California and the phantasmagorian culmination of hippie culture from mid-sixties optimism and idealism to early 70’s paranoid hedonism. The story jumps from Vietnam to San Francisco to Oakland and finally to the canyons and boulevards of Los Angeles. One of the novel’s most crucial scenes - a heroin deal between two hustlers and a writer trying to be too hip for his own good - takes place in a dreary Malibu motel with the curtains drawn to keep out the winter cold of the Pacific and the bright sunlight. In spite of his immersion in Eastern philosophy, Hicks, the book’s main character, reveals his true psychopathic self here and it is likely that Stone was commenting on the often disingenuous spiritual posturing of this period. Dog Soldiers is a noir thriller that, while not mentioning anything about dead American soldiers being utilized for drug running, understands the dark connections between Vietnam and California in the early 1970’s that make such a legend plausible. --BA
Ask the Dust
by John Fante
First published in 1939 when Los Angeles was surrounded by the desert, it's
downtown city streets dusted by sand, this is a book about the groaning of your
bones and soul while young in the first city. It takes place in a part of Los
Angeles that flickers its memory if you take a walk there, downtown in Bunker
Hill. It's a love story.
Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers
torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining fast,
Los Angeles being the vase. In it there is a hatred from self-recognition. An
uncontrollable bubbling that, once surfaced, luckily is then diffused by living.
--KM
"It was
a bright September morning. The edges of the sky had a yellowish tinge like
cheap paper darkening in the sunlight", writes Ross Macdonald in the opening
paragraphs of The Underground Man, one of his Lew Archer detective novels
set in 1970 Los Angeles. Macdonald evokes the LA and California landscape with
imagery like this as the search for a six year old boy and a teenage girl takes
Archer from Inland fires to the coast and finally up to San Francisco. The generational
wars in America of this period are very much a subject of the book also and
something Macdonald obviously feels very passionate about (he places the blame
ultimately with the parents whose amoral lives he sees to be the cause of their
children’s rebelliousness). Many consider this Archer’s best book,
most notably Eudora Welty, whose lengthy and laudatory review for the New York
Times book review at the time made the case for treating Macdonald as a "great
writer" instead of just a "great detective writer". - -BA
Richard Power's Operation
Wandering Soul captures the darker side of Los Angeles. The main characters
are children, the ones who've fallen through the cracks, trying to survive in
the alienating landscape of the city of angels. The novel is a retelling of
the Pied Piper fairy tale, but in Powers version the players are an overworked
surgical resident in a pediatric ward at a public hospital, and his charges,
the 'pedes'-- sick and dying kids from impoverished homes. Power's vision of
LA, and those the society has abandoned, is bleak, but still manages a kind
of hope while avoiding sentimentality. This is not an easy task, given that
the images of sick and dying children have been so cynically mediated by the
evening news, and certain charities like The Wish Foundation. Powers has been
compared to Pynchon, but I say he is much better-- he doesn't merely expose
inhuman absurdities, he gives us a glimpse of redemption. --AS
If He Hollers
Let Him Go is an early Chester Himes novel set in 1945 Los Angeles. More
protest novel than his later absurdist books, If He Hollers takes place
in WWII shipyards, a place where Black migrants from the South could find good
work. The novel’s main character, Bob Jones, is more bitter than righteous;
"I wanted to kill him so he’d know he didn’t have a chance",
Jones thinks to himself as he searches for a white coworker who has humiliated
him. "I wanted him to feel as scared and powerless and unprotected as I
felt every goddamn morning". But amidst the brutal realities of racial
injustice, Himes also vividly captures the landscape and the bright Southern
California sun that, "lay in the road like a white, frozen brilliance,
hot and unshimmering, cutting the vision of my eyes into unwavering curves and
stark broken angles". --BA