HER FIRST BOOK, I believe...published when she was 30 or so. I read this as the next installment in a run of outlaw lit after Cookie Mueller, Gary Indiana, and Kathy Acker, but while Babitz has a bohemian edge--lots of drugs, lots of boyfriends--she is too full of good cheer to come across as much of an outlaw. You need a little Des Esseintes jadedness to strike the outlaw lit pose, but it's hard to sound that world-weary, dying-from-ennui note when you are in ecstasy over finding the perfect taquito.
The good cheer is also a departure from classic literary accounts of Los Angeles--Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One--which tend to play up the spiritual sterility and desperation under the glamorous surface. Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, and James Ellroy are a little more forgiving, but still attracted to the city's more dire side. Not Babitz. The chapters on the Hollywood Branch Library and Watts Towers are downright celebratory.
The prose is always light on its feet, inviting, a bit relaxed about the rules...quite a bit like California, come to think of it.
Is the "James Byrns" described in the chapter "Rosewood Casket" a portrait of Gram Parsons? Sure seems like it.
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