Slow days, fast company

Description

Across ten sketches, Eve Babitz maps a Southern California of movie stars, soap-opera actors, drug-binging socialites, suburban families, and women whose glamour carries its own dangers. Her pursuit of an elusive man provides a loose romantic thread, but the book’s deeper subject is Los Angeles social life during the 1960s and 1970s: its parties, ambitions, erotic freedoms, and cultivated indifference to consequences. Babitz moves beyond the city into Orange County suburbia, the Central Valley’s grape fields, and Palm Springs, registering how landscape and weather shape each encounter. Blending autobiographical essay, fiction, and cultural portraiture, the collection replaces a single plot with a sensuous, ironic record of people moving between boredom and excess in a region continually inventing its own mythology.

Themes