Novels with California as a setting are commonplace - every Steinbeck novel, as an example - and yet there are certain novels that come to mind in which the group topic is most apparent. If you haven't done so yet, read:
Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. Here, as with John Fante's Ask the Dusk, L.A. plays a featured role.
Steinbeck's East of Eden.
Brett Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero
John O'Brien's Better (You'll know O'Brien better as the author of Leaving Las Vegas).
While any list would like this would be remiss without mentioning Cain and Chandler (Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity; The Big Sleep), my fave Hollywood Noir novel is one of my favorites in general: Nathanial West's Day of the Locust.
Steve's Erickson's Zeroville - a cult fave.
Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They.
I bring up this brief list only to possibly inspire others to post and comment. What's your list?
Here is a portion of Joan Didion's The White Album that to me sums up life in L.A.:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle' a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I remember being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. – Joan Didion
Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. Here, as with John Fante's Ask the Dusk, L.A. plays a featured role.
Steinbeck's East of Eden.
Brett Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero
John O'Brien's Better (You'll know O'Brien better as the author of Leaving Las Vegas).
While any list would like this would be remiss without mentioning Cain and Chandler (Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity; The Big Sleep), my fave Hollywood Noir novel is one of my favorites in general: Nathanial West's Day of the Locust.
Steve's Erickson's Zeroville - a cult fave.
Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They.
I bring up this brief list only to possibly inspire others to post and comment. What's your list?
Here is a portion of Joan Didion's The White Album that to me sums up life in L.A.:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle' a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I remember being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. – Joan Didion