Adrift in LA

Thomas More’s original ideal society, the island of Utopia, is really ‘nowhere’ or ‘no place’, though a ‘nowhere’ quite specifically somewhere in the New World. I only learned this a couple of years ago when I read More’s classic work while researching a book about the sale of London Bridge to America. The bridge now stands in Lake Havasu City. En route to see it I spent a week in Los Angeles, and it was there, at a drinks party in a geodesic dome in the Hollywood hills, that someone suggested I read Alison Lurie’s novel The Nowhere City (1965). Initially it was the title that grabbed me. But from the opening page, with its clipping from a real newspaper report about a class of schoolchildren trying to recreate the first Thanksgiving feast on a Californian surfing beach, I was entranced.

The Nowhere City is set in Los Angeles and each of its four sections is named after a different area of the city. The novel’s lead characters are a young married couple, Paul and Katherine Cattleman. Paul is a Harvard historian ‘with a readiness for small adventures’, who decides to take a financially lucrative year-long contract with a dubious military electronics firm in Los Angeles. He aims to ‘observe the future’ in California, store up a little cash and finish his thesis. But Paul is every bit as priapic a history man as Malcolm Bradbury’s Howard Kirk. Once out west, he is instantly distracted from further study by the shapely figure of Ceci O’Connor, a free-spirited shoplifting waitress who reads Samuel Beckett, paints abstract expressionist canvases, smokes pot and lives in a beatnik colony out in Venice Beach. While Paul embraces all the sun-kissed pleasures his new environment has to offer, Katherine hates Los Angeles. Her revulsion expresses itself immediately, and physically, through painful sinus attacks that begin the moment she steps off the plane. Employed as a secretary at a local university, she works for the conceited, if charismatic, Beverly Hills psychoanalyst Dr Isidore Einsam. And in due course, she finds herself answering fan mail for his wife, Glory Green, a Hollywood sex bomb who is trying to cope with the unwelcome attentions of a stalker and the indignity of playing second female lead in a science-fiction musical – a part that requires her to appear dolled up ‘with antennae and green hands’. Like Katherine, Lurie herself had moved to Los Angeles from New England. Her then husband, the Harvard-educated academic Jonathan Bishop, secured a post at UCLA in the late 1950s and the couple and their children lived in the city for four years. As with Katherine and Glory Green, Lurie also served as a factotum to a movie actor – in her case, Sheree North, the blonde star promoted as a likely successor to Marilyn Monroe in films such as The Lieutenant Wore Skirts and married to a prominent Hollywood shrink, Gerhardt Sommer. Whatever other autobiographical overlaps there may or may not be shouldn’t concern us here. What matters is Lurie’s brilliance at conveying the discombobulating otherliness of Los Angeles. For instance, it takes the Sunday New York Times more than three days to arrive from Manhattan. The homesick Katherine clings to its wilted pages each week as a link with the civilized east. For her, the surrealism of receiving a Sunday paper on a Wednesday is simply indicative of the city as a whole – a place which seems to lack the dimension of time since neither the seasons nor the weather ever change. (A good decade before Woody Allen used much the same image to similar effect in Annie Hall, Lurie has Katherine reeling at the sight of Christmas decorations twinkling under a blazing sun.) Even the traditional distinctions between work and leisure – and night and day – seem blurred beyond recognition to her, with shops, offices and people keeping hours and habits unimaginable in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But change, or perhaps, more accurately, transformation, is really the novel’s main theme, with both the city and its inhabitants – including, eventually, Katherine herself – engaged in reinvention of one kind or another. Tellingly, the property the Cattlemans rent in Mar Vista, a doll’s-house creation in white and pink stucco that can scarcely contain Katherine’s antique furniture, is set to be demolished to make way for a new freeway. This being Los Angeles, cars and affairs predominate. In keeping with the complex sexual mores it anatomizes with such dry wit, one subplot sees Paul attempting to purchase a hot rod from Ceci’s husband. And while a teenage would-be Hollywood starlet later refuses a lift in Katherine’s car, preferring to scramble back down a rockstrewn ravine in high heels rather than be seen in a dowdy Ford in Beverly Hills, Katherine’s own romantic entanglement with Dr Einsam is preceded by a hair-raising ride in his Jaguar. The city itself is at the mercy of its vehicles: a perpetual blanket of smog lies above it, and its basic layout and concrete residences resemble nothing so much as gas stations. ‘In Los Angeles’, writes Lurie,

automobiles were a race apart, almost alive. The city was full of their hotels and beauty shops, their restaurants and nursing homes – immense, expensive structures where they could be parked or polished, fed or cured of their injuries. They spoke, and had pets – stuffed dogs and monkeys looked out of their rear windows, toys and good-luck charms hung above their dashboards, and fur tails waved from their aerials. Their horns sang in varied voices.

It is, however, human beings, and their capacity for duplicity and moral blindness that provide the richest comedy and pathos through-out the novel. LA is the petri dish in which Lurie grows her specimens for inspection. She examines the results with worldly wise bemusement and a keen heart. Elements of the Los Angeles Lurie depicts may have disappeared. Today bodybuilders and geeks from the nearby offices of Google far outnumber jazz-loving beatniks on the newly gentrified Venice Beach. But marijuana, at last count sold legally through medical dispensaries all along the beach front, remains as popular as ever, and the parallels between Paul Cattleman’s secretive defence industry employers, the Nutting Research Corporation, and the tech companies that now abound in the city are striking. What makes the novel timeless is Lurie’s biting humour and the acuteness of her observations. She writes of broken marriages and capri pants as acidly as Austen did of weddings and bonnets. All of Lurie’s novels deserve to be more widely read but The Nowhere City especially so. As a study of people and how and where they live and love, it is funnier and wiser than many a supposedly ‘Great American’ novel by her better-known male contemporaries.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Travis Elborough 2015