Review of 'Slow days, fast company: The world, the flesh, and L.A. : tales' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
Babitz prose is like her character's Givenchy perfume - first class. This book is really a collection of semi-fictional essays about the wealthy playgrounds around LA in the sixties: Bakersfield, Palm Springs, Emerald Bay and the Garden of Allah. The Garden of Allah used to belong to silent film star - Alla Nazimova, who left as forest fires threatened to destroy her mansion in 1926-7, looking back on what grew up in it's place Babtiz writes:
"That’s the trouble with Hollywood; the things that don’t exist are likely to kill you if you threaten them...
It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place” – that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved."
Babitz's style …
Babitz prose is like her character's Givenchy perfume - first class. This book is really a collection of semi-fictional essays about the wealthy playgrounds around LA in the sixties: Bakersfield, Palm Springs, Emerald Bay and the Garden of Allah. The Garden of Allah used to belong to silent film star - Alla Nazimova, who left as forest fires threatened to destroy her mansion in 1926-7, looking back on what grew up in it's place Babtiz writes:
"That’s the trouble with Hollywood; the things that don’t exist are likely to kill you if you threaten them...
It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place” – that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved."
Babitz's style is one of well practiced prose coming from someone born into the Hollywood heights and a major party girl. The book has sex, drugs, and rock & roll and models and actors and films and all that is Hollywood. But it doesn’t gush, doesn’t name drop, isn’t impressed or falsely aloof.
The narrator eases her way into the LA trinity of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Almost making the reader wonder after the first few chapters if there will be any. Eventually after were chapter that puns on Herione/herion - “A man that will never pun, will not lay up-pun me” the narrator does confess to doing all the cocaine she can and later to doing everything but smoking cigarettes. The only huge name in the novel is Jim Morrison, but all the other fictional characters are taken to be well known Hollywood names at the time.
Babitz style makes other writers seem vulgar. The way the reader expects to slapped in the face with all the drugs and partying. That’s not what this book is about. Its about a sense of place and time, which no longer exists but is memorialized in this book like Babitz's appearance is memorialized in her chess photos with Marcel Duchamp.
